UK Censors Internet to Prevent Sympathy With Terrorists

In the so-called fight against terrorism, the UK Government just took another step backwards into ‘1984’ and Orwell is kicking back saying, “I told ya so”.

Last week, in a Financial Times piece, GCHQ spy chief Robert Hannigan, writes,

GCHQ and its sister agencies, MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service, cannot tackle these challenges at scale without greater support from the private sector, including the largest US technology companies which dominate the web. I understand why they have an uneasy relationship with governments. They aspire to be neutral conduits of data and to sit outside or above politics. But increasingly their services not only host the material of violent extremism or child exploitation, but are the routes for the facilitation of crime and terrorism.

Working hand in hand with Govt. officials, UK internet providers will begin censoring web content in order to keep citizens from seeing anything that would make them sympathize with alleged terrorist groups like IS and Al Qaida. The Govt. and ISP’s will also be asking it’s citizens to tattle on each other’s content via a snitch-button whose reports would go through to the Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU).

The U.K.’s big internet service providers, including BT, Talk Talk, Virgin Media and Sky, have agreed to filter out terrorist and extremist material at the government’s behest, in order to stop people seeing things that may make them sympathetic towards terrorists.

The move will also see providers host a public reporting button for terrorist material. This is likely to be similar to what is already done with websites that may host child pornography – people can report content to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), an organization that maintains a blacklist, to which that site could then be added.

Australia has also taken a similar measure and social media giants like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Twitter have agreed to, “raise their standards”, as well.

*If you are unfamiliar with George Orwell’s novel ’1984′ you can read the eBook for free HERE, listen to the audio book free HERE or watch the full movie adaptation in the video below. ’1984′ is “the definitive dystopian novel, set in a world beyond our imagining.”