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GPG/PGP pubkeys

Deeply pissed off

author: www-data

I'm deeply pissed off. Ursula von der Leyen, German's minster of family, is in the process of enforcing an infrastructure of web content filtering onto providers. The officially stated reason is the fight against child pornography.

Once again, people did not learn from history. I will not pull a Godwin's Law argument here, because that's lame and too specific (Instead, our minister pulls a Vietnam here). In hundreds and thousands of years of human history, most dictatorships began by creating laws that undermine the individual's rights and trade freedom with security.
The lesson learned should not be that bad people make bad laws, but that some people make laws, not grasping their consequences. The lesson learned should be that dictatorships can start off anywhere, even if the original intentions where liberal, democratic etc.: The intentions are not important, the consequences are important.

Our friendly minister does not know what she is doing, what precedence she is setting: It is the filtering of content.
There is no difference between filtering newspapers and filtering the Web.
There is no difference between filtering newspapers and filtering the Web!
It is censorship, even if the sites affect right now are "child pornography". What's next? Hacker websites next year? Pirate Bay in two years? Nazi websites in three years? You know, these are bad for people! Leftist web pages in five years? People whose opinion is damaging the nation's image in six years?

Finally, in ten years, the Internet will be clean. You will be able to access lousy tittytainment, bank websites, your public radio and well-filtered news. Welcome to fascism.

And the sick part is: It all started out with some well-intending member of the conservative party with the motto Won't somebody please think of the children!

(Sidenote: I will not talk about Mrs. von der Leyen being utterly stupid and of low intelligence, neither do I want to talk about the technical impossibility of filtering, the fast-moving nature of the Internet or any other connected issue. I've thought about these points and all I can say is that Web filtering is even more stupid than Suicide Machines and girlfriends made out of plastic.)

2009-01-18 15:36 | www-datarootshell.ro | [/digest/freespeech] | permanent link