The UK want to censor WikiLeaks and the net, too

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...And they're using porn, along with the old "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" crap, as an excuse to get it done.

Oi, my government started that trend!
Still haven't heard anymore about it since they were re-elected though.

It's to protect children and definitely not to stifle freedom of speech

A lot of people in this country are either for or against Wiki Leaks, so if I was my PM I'd take advantage of this situation.

I also vow to make a site far worse than Wiki Leaks if the censorship ever happens.

Yeah, we are all about protecting the children...except when it comes to free school lunches and things like that. There was a filter in high school, and kids still found a way around it to look at porn. If you want to protect children, how about de-sensitizing them to sex, instead of taking the Tom Sawyer approach to everything that offends adults?

If you want to defend children give them a sustainable environment that enables their children to survive. You can't eat money

Ahh! Ms. Suit at the end hit all the porn buttons at once:

Slippery slope.

While I'm generally an advocate of free speech, I have to draw the line at the idea of child porn being available on the internet, which is totally repellent.

But I am concerned about the idea of "mission creep" and once the precedent is set, they'll just take down sites as and when they see fit, with no proper scrutiny or accountability.

It's happened in the US recently with the torrent-filter listing website, which now has an Orwellian type official seal of some US government department saying it's been taken down due to IP infringement activity, but it wasn't actually a torrent site, it was simply a website that provided information in one place about other actual torrent sites.

And the most recent example in the UK was the taking down of Fitwatch. Fitwatch, for those who don't know, was a site that posted photographs and information about police officers known as Forward Intelligence Teams - they're the ones who go to protests and film and photograph protesters in order to help compile the police databases and identify activists and protesters.

Fitwatch shares information about known "FIT" officers. The webasite shared some information following the recent sstudent protests in the UK, recommending ways people could avoid identification and so on. Apparently, a cop got the site taken down on his say so, without any warrant or legal proceedings, he just contacted the host and had them take it down. Of course, it backfired, because other people then posted the contentious information, teh website was swiftly resurrected and hosted elsewhere and then it was mirrored on lots of other sites.

But it's happening already. We take it for granted that it's only repressive regimes like China that censors the internet, but it's not, it happens in the US and it happens in the UK.

Yes, that's worrying if it's one organisation that controls most of it. I didn't know that about BT, because I have a different type of internet connection. Useful to know, because I was thinking of getting a BT connection at some point.

It's something that not many people are aware of. The finger is so often pointed at countries like China and Iran and elsewhere, it's like the authorities are distracting our attention and saying Hey, look over there! What they're doing is really bad! They're censoring all those pro-democracy sites and dissidents, boo hiss! They're really bad, very authoritarian regimes, isn't that terrible!

And while we're all busy looking over there and condemning those countries, behind our backs, they're quietly doing similar things, and they tend to get away with it, because those are the bad guys, the antidemocratic guys, we're the good guys!

I have the suspicion that Child Porn is a strawman and it is in reality a power grab just like what the FCC is doing in the states. Though I wouldn't be surprised if the FCC gets defunded by the new congress.

Told you I would agree with you sooner or later. This is clearly an attempt to sneak in generic censorship and control legislation. If nothing else, there is nothing particularly illegal about porngraphy, and if parents looked a little harder at what their kids were surfing, it wouldn't be an issue at all. But under a Mary Poppins Bill, they'll start with this, then start adding other "undesirable" sites. Its got very little to do with "protecting children", unless you subscribe to the belief that a lot of Government members are starting to act like mardy children these days. Its a Dave New World, and you aren't allowed to choose what you look at any more.

I vaguely recall certain net nanny applications blocking access to things like the Vatican Website because it uses the word sex.

If (and I doubt it is) this IS just nannying by the state, its incredibly misguided given how much grief labour got for trying to get right into peoples lives and homes. As an excuse to camouflage an attempt to crack down on the last real bastion of free speech, it fails simply because so many people DID fall out with the last Government for trying to be an overzealous babysitter, and the ConDems (or Conservative-led government, as Labour spin insists it should be named.) have so far earned their best marks for undoing some of the ludicrous rubbish Labour tried to foist off on us.

Besides, its not as if most pornography is actually illegal, and when you start limiting peoples access to perfectly legal material, that's when you're REALLY getting a bit Chinese about things.

Revolution is in the air.