Current mood:

angry

Fascists.
I am alerted by Ian that the green and pleasant land I so recently left has become a fascist state.

As Ian notes, this is absurd, pointless and utterly ineffective against any actual concerns regarding child pornography. The most outrageous element of this farce to my mind, is the duplicitous 404 messages generated by most ISPs - presumably the idea is if people are unaware the Internet is being filtered for them, they're less likely to complain...

This is apparently the doing of the Internet Watch Foundation, of whom I have never previously heard. I find it profoundly disturbing that the IWF was able to look at the image, decide it was illegal, and on that basis censor the Internet. Note the total lack of any judicial oversight whatsoever. Since this process is essentially invisible, due to the generation of 404s as opposed to actual notification, what's to stop the IWF pushing its own agenda, or indeed, doing whatever it likes?

As the BBC News article quotes from it's interview with David Gerard -

"When we asked the Internet Watch Foundation why they blocked Wikipedia and not Amazon, apparently the decision was 'pragmatic', which we think means that Amazon had money and would sue them, whereas we're an educational charity."

Quite.