I don't necessarily disagree - it just makes me chuckle to see the naive believe what we have now as some kind of uncensored utopia, both on and offline. If you think you're not censored every day both by big business who have slowly taken over the internet feeding the vast majority of people with the" truth", new and approved by whichever multi billion dollar company it is which serves it up and in every day "real life" then I have a bridge here I'd like to sell you.
How many of the anti censorship posters stomping off to the moral high ground here are prepared to demand protection for the rights of pedophiles, racists and terrorists to be able to promote their activities freely and recruit to their causes, or is it only oppressive censorship if it happens to impinge on your particular set of moral imperatives?
And that goes right back to my point about why terms like terrorists, paedophiles and racists are used so much by the government and those invested in this. It's difficult to argue against it's use when someone can just say you must be a terrorist sympathizer/paedophile if you don't agree with greater censorship and/or government control of the internet.
They are emotive terms used time and time again to push through draconian legislation that most people would rather not see pass. Legislation that is often left so open ended that the government can subsequently insert clauses and fairly major changes without having to go back to the legislature for approval.
That leaves us all in a situation where seemingly puritanical views are shaping what we can and cannot view, even though the acts themselves are perfectly legal.
To quote another poster here there is a spectrum with no black and white definitions and all we can do is make out best judgement at any given time. Should that be prescribed by the government, no. Should it be left in the hands of big business, no. Should we consider a mechanism for the online world to reflect the rules and consequences of the offline world? I don't know but I think there's a debate to be had there.
The problem is with legislation like IPA we are at a point now where mechanisms for the online world are way further ahead and draconian than the offline world. As I used in a previous example. The government have now legislated that ISPs should store all internet connections for a whole year, for every internet connection. The real world equivalent is something millions would be up in arms about.
You almost certainly need a warrant to put a tracking device in someones car, but for online movements not only are you not required to have one, you can view all of the data from the past year, not just from the moment you decide you want to track them.
You can see this as well in the governments insistance in the removal of encryption. In the real world there would be uproar if the government insisted it had the right to listen to every bodies conversations, but many seem quite happy with the same occurring online.
The internet and online world is becoming more and more integrated into people's daily routine and becoming almost as important to the real world for many people. We need regulation and enforcement sure. We need to be able to catch criminals using it sure, but we all need to respect the rights of people using it, just as we respect the rights of people in the real world. We don't track every movement people make, we don't monitor everyone's communications, we don't log every interaction between people just incase they may be useful in the future. It would be considered a massive invasion of privacy and akin to the Stasi.
We currently have a system where governments are doing things online that would never be allowed in the real world - everything from bulk data collection and logging to creation exploitation of backdoors into software. It's increasingly being shown to be dangerous yet governments (especially the UK and Turkish governments it seems) are ignoring it and insisting they are only trying to do things that are already done in the real world. It's ******** and they know it - hence the constant use of emotive terms like "terrorist" and "paedophile" to smother complaints.
As I said earlier the internet is basically an ocean in international waters. You can't control it without international agreement and no government should be able to control it, yet so many governments seem to believe they should. You can prosecute crimes when they occur on your shores sure, but currently certain countries are doing what is akin to the privateering in the 18th century.
Mays solution seems to be to ban everyone from leaving the UKs shores except with express permission of the government. The online equivelant of North Korea. And you wonder why people are up in arms against it?
