Europe council unanimously decide to "block websites", enabling web censorship | Hacker News Reader

Europe council unanimously decide to "block websites", enabling web censorship

consilium.europa.eu

15 pointslloeki8 comments

As long as a court order is required, then this seems to me to be more of a freedom-protecting measure than a freedom-destroying one. Freedom is not about the absence of enforcement, it is about having reasonably just laws, and processes that ensure the law will be enforced reasonably justly.

Actively blocking websites requires some infrastructure to be in place, and the underlying fear is that this infrastructure gets abused at some point, whether by introduction of new laws or unintentionally through bribery or incompetence. The previous french President Sarkozy was actively looking at putting much more than child pornography in such blocking systems, in very vague and worrisome wordings of which a translation could be "along with any illegal or order-troubling website".

Also, the worry is that the risk and cost of such an infrastructure is too high, especially considering the target has already moved and such blocks are completely inefficient.

Ironically, just at the time when European MPs decided that any form of censorship is bad and net neutrality matters, council turns around.

PS: When submitting the link I tried to be as neutral as possible within the 80 chars limit, precisely to spur constructive discussion.

when submitting this link you tried to be as sensational as possible. good job.. web censorship infrastructures are already in place everywhere, the fact that you need court order to make use of it is what really matters.

This doc doesn't say that.

    2. Reducing as much as possible the availability of child pornography online, inter alia by 
    facilitating measures to remove or, where appropriate, _block websites containing child 
    pornography_, and reducing as much as possible the re-victimization of children whose 
    sexual abuse is depicted in child pornography

Whether you are in favor or against it, and whether the content is moral or not, actively preventing content to be accessible is censorship. If anything, it requires a blocking infrastructure to be put in place.

Any sane person does NOT see anything wrong with that paragraph, that is probably a paragraph that will convince anyone that putting such rules is for the best.

Well maybe not everyone, I guess pedophiles will be very disappointed and will play the card of freedom to convince otherwise.

> that is probably a paragraph that will convince anyone that putting such rules is for the best

Of course every sane person is against child pornography, just like every sane person is against terrorism. That does not make any measure having for goal to reduce those atrocious activities good measures to take. And that does not make someone asking himself questions about the relevancy of a solution one of those wicked people, nor one defending them.

It's all too easy to see it black or white. I'm not that concerned about freedom issues (although they do exist), but also about efficiency. After all, preventing terrorists to fly by wanting to scan every single person going through airports looks like a nice idea on paper, but the result is a security theater which costs a lot for weak results.

Given the time needed for a judge (and the overwhelming a mount of work they have otherwise) to examine proofs and order a block, I'm not sure this would be efficient. And even considering that would be, it's trivial for them to move and/or use proxies. That is, if they don't use alternate DNS systems and overlay networks (which they are reportedly using, according to a paper published a few years ago).

Police forces and network managers are generally agreeing that blocking is not efficient and that actively hunting them down is much more effective.

Also this does not make it any more helpful to stop it overseas, where most of the matter occurs. Blocking is like putting a blindfold and pretending it doesn't exist because we're "safe" here.

To sum it up, I'm worried it would be both a money- and time-sink with non-measurable results, cutting of resources that would be better spent chasing those bastards down and destroying their networks.

(anyway, thanks for indirectly calling me both insane and a pedophile, that really makes the discussion more constructive)

But they haven't decided to block, quoted bit is just a proposed agenda item for some "global alliance" thing.

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