Canadian Net expert professor Michael Geist believes the plan to block child pornography is a risk worth taking.
"My last post on this issue [Toronto Star, Geist homepage] generated considerable discussion with many valid criticisms of the ISP plans to block access to child pornography," he says.
"In developing this column, I posed many of the criticisms to Cybertip.ca and found that there were good answers to many concerns along with a willingness to address other issues. In particular, Cybertip.ca:
- is amenable to incorporating judicial review of the block list - will issue regular public reports that identify the number of sites on the block list along with the number of participating ISPs - will only block images of pre-pubescent child pornography, thereby limiting the prospect of overblocking legal content - is developing an appellate process that includes review from the National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre - is subject to several internal accountability mechanisms including an independent board of directors and pressure from funders (60 percent of its funding comes from the federal government) to avoid potential liability by overblocking
"I should also note that Cybertip.ca was open to further changes in response to suggestions from the Internet community," he says.
Here are two views from p2pnet readers:
From my point of view, Michael Geist has lost a lot of credibility with his supporting Cleanfeed. He just doesn't get it - this is going to be the thin edge of the wedge. He states, correctly, that child pornography is already illegal - so is hate literature - are hate literature sites going to be blocked next?
On Michael's site, Cory Doctorow and others have all eloquently outlined their objections and fears with respect to this scheme; I will not reiterate those here, except to say that I fully agree with them.
I suspect that within the next 5-10 years, we are going to see a 'perfect storm' of sorts with respect to censorship; we'll have Cleanfeed and the MITA (Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act).
In essence, everything one does on the Net will be scrutinized, for fear that someone, somewhere might be breaking the law.
Sophisticated users will find ways to circumvent these restrictions (crypto); the flow of visible child porn may slow, but it will never come to a complete stop. All that will happen is that it will move further underground, where the authorities will be unable to detect and/or suppress it.
Prohibition doesn't work! It didn't work with alcohol, it doesn't work with drugs. If it doesn't (and hasn't) worked with tangible goods like drugs and alcohol, how do they expect to be able to control the flow of bits down a wire or through the air?
Mark my words... it may /start/ with child porngraphy, but it most certainly won't end there. We'll end up no better off than the users in China or Saudi Arabia.
Baal
"Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?" -- "Who will watch the Watchmen?" - Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347. circa 128 AD
Who would have thought that lessening of national [sovereignty] would be more a threat to the rights of the individual. IMHO it shows that the bigger the tent of a government (World, National, provincial, county, local) the more the monied interests and the police can control the process and the less responsive it must be to voters.
Whatever rights we give up in the name of security will only allow our government to do more, not do better. We will invariably get more of the same, and while our feeling of increased safety will be illusory and fading, our loss of rights will be real and permanent. - Facekhan, Ars Technica
Child protectionism is the key to the undoing of any modern society. It worked on the German people and it's working on us now. It takes a "real man" to think about the bigger picture and realize that EVERY SINGLE CHILD PROTECTION MEASURE IS ENDANGERING CHILDREN MORE.
Sex offender registration and restrictions prevent offenders from re-integration into society, and offenders being able to make their life right is how they get past their offense and become productive members of society. What happens when offenders can't get housing, jobs, or even food and clothing legally? They're going to commit more crime. Adopt a "why the hell not?" attitude. They might even rape AND MURDER YOUR CHILD, just because they see no future and figure they might as well end it with a bang.
(I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but there actually IS NOT a sex offender behind every tree, waiting to brutally rape, beat, kidnap, and dismember your kid. Just something notable.)
Forcing the Internet to be open to anti-child-porn or anti-terrorist monitoring, from E-mail to IRC to FTP, will put "unspoken limits" on freedom of speech, which means less peer review of ideas and less sharing of information for fear of being mis-identified as a terrorist or child pornography distributor, among other things. Blocklists have time and time again proven ineffective as far as prevention of this stuff from getting to a computer in the first place. If you cannot be an informed citizen, how can you keep your children safe in the first place? Mass media will get away with saying all kinds of things, but bloggers will be silenced by the fear of being "investigated" and slapped with a "gag order."
Mandatory Internet filtration software in libraries and schools? False sense of security. When I was 16, I was bypassing the Cyber Patrol Proxy at my school easily, all by using a "bouncer" that takes a URL in a URL and proxy-loads it. That's it! Didn't take anything more and I had insta-porn at school, yayyyyy. A false sense of security is far worse than a true sense of insecurity. If anything, your child will want to bypass it to reach the forbidden fruit, and that pretty much negates what you were trying to do in the first place.
30 years ago, you rarely would see high schoolers arrested for a fight. Now, if you get in a fight at school, you're pretty much guaranteed to get CRIMINALLY CHARGED. Same if you steal ten packs of candy from someone and they find out. I know--they almost charged me for stealing candy when someone else did it. They threatened, but they ultimately left me alone. Children do stupid ass things and make big mistakes, but now we scar them for a long, long time for being kids.
Oh yeah, in some places, teachers are told what they are allowed to explain to children about sex in sex ed. Someone in my class asked about anal sex. The teacher said "I'm not allowed to talk about that." The child WILL find out about it one way or another...you see what I'm getting at. Couldn't even tell the child the dangers and give precautions in case they decided to do it, and anal sex can be extremely dangerous if done very badly (think perforating your intestines).
The next time you hear the word "children" in any sentence about law, politics, policies, and so on, think about the big picture.
Don't let the loaded gun that is the word "children" blind you to common sense, logic, and facts.
Also See: this issue - Canada kiddie porn blocks, December 4, 2006
