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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Extremely controversial.

Stopping prisoners from harassing their victims/witnesses against them/enemies or organising others to do their dirty work externally is already a massive problem. Prisons have the ability to listen to calls and read mail to try and curtail it.

Giving them access to the internet makes all of this far easier, and monitoring it far more expensive. Not to mention that now they can use the internet to commit new crimes, and they have nothing better to do for the years or tens of years that they're sitting in a cell.

I think giving them access to email is do-able, since that is no different in practice to physical letters. But giving them unrestricted access is a monitoring nightmare.

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It's a lot easier to curtail things like this on the internet. It would be dirt easy to set it up to only allow certain content (let's call it "constructive" content, like Wikipedia, various news sources, etc.), while blocking content with specific keywords. Prisons have a finite amount of traffic, it's not like we're setting up the GFC. It's dirt simple and dirt cheap to set iptables up to handle this with the limited traffic coming out of a single prison. I could probably do it for less than $400 on some budget hardware, and have it be pretty solid/reliable. We should be allowing these people access to the information and knowledge so they can better themselves and broaden their horizons. We can do that while simultaneously blocking their ability to "contribute" to the global discussion if we need/want to.

So I assume you mean allow Wikipedia but not makign edits to it (since those can be used to communicate to people on the outside, and preventing that is part of the stated goal)?

And news sites but not the comments sections on those news sites?

It sucks that this is even an issue, I agree. The proposal in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10434720 would be interesting, if workable.

Read-only access, then: allow limited access without the ability to send messages, such as with software that disables the keyboard (but not the mouse) everywhere except the address bar, combined with monitoring.

"Read-only" access to the internet is impossible.

Theoretically, a GET request is only supposed to retrieve data, but it can be (and sometimes is) also used to write data. There's no way for a screening algorithm to know the difference.

And that's without getting creative -- think Morse code via the refresh button, or specific-time-of-day page loads to specific links.

Most prisoners are allowed phone calls. If it's reasonable to let them do that, then it's unreasonable to worry about refresh-button-morse-code messages.

They're allowed phone calls, but not unmonitored ones. As in, there is someone listening to what they say on the phone.

That's part of the argument for why those phone calls are so expensive...

Monitoring what someone does on the web would be possible too, of course. At least if you only let them do it for a few minutes at a time like a phone call. Monitoring someone for an hour or more of web browsing is likely to be deathly boring for the one doing the monitoring.

Pretty easy for wikipedia. Just route through tor...

You misunderstand. I don't mean an HTTP proxy, I mean a computer with no keyboard (technically, a keyboard usable only in a small whitelist of places). There are a small number of loopholes left (assembling messages with copy-paste from the right-click menu, and finding a website somewhere with an on-screen keyboard) but they're pretty easy to either close or to enforce with a small amount of human monitoring.

Giving them access to the internet, while monitored live, is definitely possible.

Even giving most prisoners full, unrestricted access is possible.

Look at prisons in Europe (I’m thinking about Germany here) and you’ll see that it works.

Just give access to those that have committed crimes which imply a low risk of such behavior, and take away the access in case of misbehavior.

The vast majority of people aren't going to cause any issues.

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