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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty shocking.

We're talking about an EU wide filtering and logging capability that will require deep packet inspection at the provider level.

Of course nobody can be against it because we're fighting child pornography and terrorism here.

Never mind the detail that once such a filter is in place it can be used for other purposes.

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While in Europe recently I met many Chinese tourists who all said that their internet filtering was originally put in place to protect children.

What bugs me about all this is that when the iron curtain was still in place everybody and their brother here was taking pot-shots at the perceived weakness in the people on 'the other side' for not standing up while their rights were trodden on, and how evil those governments were.

And here we are, our rights are trodden on in ways that the former sovblock regimes could probably only dream of (inspect every letter ? trace every data request citizen makes ? trace the whereabouts of every citizen 24x7 ?) and it just happens.

It's almost as if having a bad example right next door helped us to find our moral compass.

The disturbing thing is we do have a bad example right next door - people will point and criticise China and Iran and in the next breath point out how we know better and would never let the power be misused.

Good point. I think that the fact that to most Europeans and Americans 'Russia' (the collective view of the former sovblock started at the east German border and ended halfway between Japan and the former USSR) was the enemy, and China is not yet.

There is some noise now with respect to the google China situation, but on the whole people think of China as relatively benign, and as an ally and trading partner rather than as an enemy. The cold war was definitely different in that respect, and everything 'the Russians' did (and by extension the other sovblock regimes) was perceived as bad.

I remember that in the mid 80's, when I visited Poland that on my return people were literally shocked that there were CCTV systems operated by the government on the streets.

The KGB keeping files on all foreigners and so on. We've come full circle and we're doing all that and more.

I have an easy counter-argument: filtering anything, including child pornography, costs civil liberties. So it better have some positive effect. Fortunately for the sake of the argument, the filtering of child pornography is already in place in some countries. So we can just ask: did such filtering affected the number (or condition) of molested children? That's what it is supposed to be about, after all.

My uneducated guess is "no, it didn't". Anyway, a direct answer may be difficult, so we may want to ask related questions: Did such filtering affected the number of paedophiles? Did it affect the paedophilia market?

Again, my uneducated guess is "no" to both answers.

So, unless we can answer "yes" with an appropriate level of certainty to any of these questions, filtering child pornography probably isn't worth the resulting loss of civil liberties.

I hate to tell you this but they're already logging and storing stuff at a shallower level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retenti...

Of course, if they want to try cracking my SSL connection to my US VPN, let them at it.

I'm well aware of it. This goes one step further though, and from my reading of the document it would require a hash of every document you retrieved to be compared against a table of 'illegal' files.

> from my reading of the document it would require a hash of every document you retrieved to be compared against a table of 'illegal' files.

The problem is you can trivially change a files hash in about 2 minutes using paint.

So filtering like that is basically pointless.

However.

I don't see any of this in that report linked to (it's early :P). Where am I reading about filtering? (page?)

Page 5, second paragraph.

It's late, not early. Need to get some sleep...

That talks about CIRCAMP? (which isn't the same thing - CIRCAMP is a domain blocking initiative that has been going for a while)

EDIT: actually, somewhat ironically, CIRCAMP is one of the few EU organisations that "gets" the child porn problem properly.... I hear they actually have had success going after distributors. More on them here: http://circamp.eu/index.php?option=com_content&view=arti... (I think the use of the word filter in the report was just a poor choice of words - it refers to CSAADF, the blocklist)

They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

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