Mass Internet Censorship May Be Coming

Internet Censorship, US, Australia, Draconian, Orwellian, Block, Filter, Infowars

In the UK, US, Australia and some other countries, there are some Draconian pieces of legislation that are working their way into Congress and Parliament. The bills basically want to give power to governments to be able to filter or censor any website that it wants to. Infowars gives a chilling article about the subject:

In the UK, legislation slated as the “Digital Economy Bill“, currently being debated in the House of Lords, would allow the Home Secretary to place “a technical obligation on internet service providers” to block whichever sites it wishes.

Under clause 11 of the proposed legislation “technical obligation” is defined as follows:

A “technical obligation”, in relation to an internet service provider, is an obligation for the provider to take a technical measure against particular subscribers to its service.

A “technical measure” is a measure that — (a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber; (b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use; (c) suspends the service provided to a subscriber; or (d) limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way.

In other words, the government will have the power to force ISPs to downgrade and even block your internet access to certain websites or altogether if it wishes.

The legislation comes in the wake of amplified UK government efforts to seize more power over the internet and those who use it.

For months now unelected “Secretary of State” Lord Mandelson has overseen government efforts tochallenge the independence of the of UK’s internet infrastructure.

Australia appears to be the first one to go down this path, according to reports. The Sydney Morning Herald says: 

Separately, a report into the scope of content that will be caught up in the net filters concluded that the Government’s policy might lead to a wide range of innocuous material disappearing from Australians’ computer screens.

Commentators in Australia and overseas have interpreted Senator Conroy’s policy as pushing the country towards being like repressive regimes such as China and Iran.

University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt said the Government had still failed to address serious issues such as whether the internet filtering scheme would result in any meaningful reduction in harmful content and whether it was worth the effort, given the risk that the scope of blocked content could widen significantly.

“There’s no clear definition of refused classification that can be debated in society … [and] once you put a label such as refused classification in place, that doesn’t mean that the meaning cannot be changed,” he said in a phone interview.

However, according to the Electronic Frontier Australia spokesperson, this will probably be easy for Australians to bypass, says Online-Casinos article:

Colin Jacobs, spokesperson for Electronic Frontiers Australia, said, “Any motivated user will be able to get around it, it will be quite easy, so who is this being targeted at?” Calling into question the effectiveness of the censorship filter. Jacobs added when discussing the plan, “Although it may address some technical issues, what it leaves out is far more important, exactly what will be blocked, who will decide, and why is it being attempted in the first place?”

Conroy said that the next step would be for the government to start a public consultation process with the release of a discussion paper on additional measures to improve the accountability and transparency of processes that lead to sites being placed on the blacklist.