Cameron ‘Porn’ Advisor’s website ‘hacked’ – Threatens/Libels Blogger
ministryoftruth.me.uk
ministryoftruth.me.uk
Porn filters will be of no concern whatsoever to anyone under 40 with the most rudimentary technical chops (and appetite for porn). What else will be banned? It is getting to the point where fearmongering and shameless populism and shilling for votes by politicians result in useless laws being enacted only to incriminate anyone at all, when the opportunity presents itself to make an example of somebody.
I suspect this technological gap is going to get much worse before it gets better, if it does get better at all. The types of people who participate in the game of politics have very little in common with the types of people who have an understanding of the technical world. But can that last forever? Kids now live online with few exceptions, and a technical understanding of the world will hopefully become second nature to most people, eventually.
I'm sure he knows the measures are going to be ineffective, if he doesn't he needs to sack a few advisers, but it is important for him to be seen to be "thinking of the children" on this issue.
It was however leaked in 2008 with a date of February 2008: https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Denmark:_3863_sites_on_censorship...
And as you can tell, it contains many more sites than the official document, including a Dutch bus rental service.
This will happen.
In 2008, The Finnish police have added Finnish hacker Matti Nikki's website criticizing Internet censorship to Finland’s new national child porn filter.The scan also found that the top three results of a Google search for "gay porn" are blacklisted. http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Finnish_internet_censorship_crit...
In Sweden in 2007, the child porn filter also blocked the Korean Bonsai Association. Far worse than Bonsai trees, the porn filter was also used to block a political web site over a Mohammad cartoon that enraged muslims. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4700414.stm
What political web sites are blocked the child porn filter today? We have no way to tell.
Slippery slope, indeed.
The official response? We will consider adding wikileaks to the list of banned sites, for some reason this was never accepted.
They're building all the tools of a police state. With the best of intentions, mind you. But it's not them we're afraid of (we might dislike having to opt in/out of porn, but that's merely a nuisance) - with some luck they'll get voted out in a few years time.
What at least some of us are afraid of is that some day down the line someone else gets into power who decides to take full advantage of all the nice tools their predecessors have given them. Put all the tools in place, and that someone might even be more inclined to seek power, knowing the power can extended all that much easier.
This whole issue is not about porn.
Why is making legal hardcore pornography opt-in a big deal? So many reasons. First, because there's nothing wrong with it and it's something a good many of ordinary people enjoy. Second, despite the previous, in many societies it's still not considered a socially acceptable think to admit to liking even though almost everyone does, so people are far less likely to speak up in a manner that identifies them in order to protest it. Third, some of the actually banned (and not just filtered) content is rape fantasy, which is a hugely popular fantasy among women, and many object to its being banned. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, making it opt-in is a big deal because it takes a freedom and weakens it. If we have to ask the government for permission to do something, it's not a freedom, it's something being allowed by government for now, and they can change it whenever they want. This is the same reason people advocate open source tools and non-proprietary protocols—so we have our own freedom of choice and can avoid being locked into the whims of whoever holds the power. Porn is an easy place for them to start, because large subsets of society won't speak out in defense of porn, but I guarantee if this sort of filter remains in place long-term, it will be used to block more than porn. That may not even be their intent right now, but when you have a massive internet filtration system in place, it makes it extremely easy to justify adding in a few more filters blocking sites troublesome to the government in a few years.
Such unfortunate phrasing...I think making any kind of porn is currently opt-in.
Children in the UK see softcore porn in corner stores every day - eye-level newspapers display models wearing thongs with the camera zoomed in to their ass crack on their covers, and there's a bare breasted woman inside.
1. I'm just stating what the common definition is. 2. I personally don't even believe in this distinction at all, however my views are not common. 3. Conservative muslims would probably share the same distinction, but argue that all pornography, 'hardcore' or 'softcore', is immoral.
Working as a high school teacher, I can tell you that it is far less common among kids to have those chops than you imagine...
I feel there might have been a gap since the introduction of Social Media which may have robbed a generation of its ability to work out the "Web" or the "Internet" for that matter. I mean, I grew up in the 90's in the days of Geocities (even before Wikipedia) and library computer access was most interesting when I couldn't reach a site.
So how do I get around that? "Proxies" says an even geekier friend and now I'm scouring forums for info on configuring Netscape to use a proxy with the included IPs. At home, I got to use IRC and that turned out to be a fountain of knowledge (still before Wikipedia).
I feel sorry for kids who never got to experience driving stick shift.
I am around kids at work and their technical knowledge is amazingly limited. Who needs to know stuff when 'there's an app for that...'?
(Though to be honest, no-one has ever explained how this is all supposed to work. My UK 3G connection randomly stopped showing me some web sites, that were entirely non-porny, and I had to confirm my age via a credit card or something to remove this block. If you have to do the same thing on home internet then everyone will opt out eventually as the uselessness of it is pretty quickly apparent.)
The funny thing is, mobile porn is a killer app for 3G/4G operators, having the potential to consume so much billable data.
Just like most of the anti-terror security theater, it's not about being effective in any way, it's about slowly getting the general population to accept increasingly repressive measures and a tighter grip of the "ruling class" on society in general.
Once filtering has been generally accepted, they can gradually start figuring out how to censor the things they really don't want us to see (and guess what, it isn't porn) without having to worry about further social or legislative hurdles.
There is no technological gap between "us" and "them". There's a gap in political savvy between "them" and "us", and we're on the wrong side of that gap.
I am not saying that's true for every one of them, nor that it's everywhere like that. But I feel that this happens frequently enough to cripple the system.
This is just attempting to gain the control they had before and have now over every other media. They can prevent hard porn on TV or in the window displays of high street video rental shops. Why not the internet?
From their perspective the internet is a loophole they are trying to shut down.
Internet freedom happened incidentally as a side effect of how the technology worked. It wasn't brought around by ideology like traditional "free press" was.
I agree, but I think that you might be looking at it a little bit too much as of a conspiracy as well.
IMO it's not even about closing loopholes and stuff; it's about increasing their popularity to make sure they get reelected / get more money. That's it. I think short-sightedness of politicians explains pretty much all of it.
Current democracy as a system optimizes strongly for popularity, and optimizes people with any kind of long-term agenda out of the system.
This is what democracy has always done.
It's not one or another. It's a group of people with diverse agendas. When their interests align enough then a change is introduced in the system. There might be a predominant reason but unless you're in politic groups I think we can only make guesses. I believe that we are as disconnect to them as they are to us.
Remember there have been court cases about whether contraceptives, pornography or abortion was legal. There are people who want to go back to the "good old days" when condoms, porn and sex outside marriage was illegal.
Your sexuality is the most personal, most intimate part of your life. By enforcing "morality" - the state exerts control over your sexuality; it exerts control over the most intimate part of your life; for those in authority, it is the most potent symbol of their power possible - and the most intoxicating validation of their status.
Those in power are there because they are pathologically inclined to seek it. They cannot help but expand that power, to intrude and control others to the maximum extent possible.
Gosh, can't understand how an MP and member of his community could possibly be in favor of that.
No. I've been enough debates with peers my age (17-18) who practically live online but their world consists of Facebook and YouTube. They assume content can be taken offline simply by hitting "delete". Their ignorance will shock you.
What we need is better education of how the internet works, but of course, you only learn if your interested.
All the skills you need is to be able to mindlessly follow a guide
Just like with the blocking of the pirate bay, most people will know someone who can help them circumvent it
Nothing is banned.
The filters are voluntary for the end user.
The filters are stupid, but please argue against what they actually are.
I know it seems insignificant, but it makes a big difference.
Also, I am right in thinking, this hasn't been proposed as a bill yet to the house of commons/lords? I feel as Cameron has a long history of broken promises.
The filters already exist for many people using mobile technology - mobile phones with data plans or mobile broadband dongles have exactly what's being proposed.
I agree that it is a big difference that the filters are opt-out. And I have no idea what websites will be caught up. Wikipedia? (See photographs on articles like Anal Bleaching or etc etc.)
> Also, I am right in thinking, this hasn't been proposed as a bill yet to the house of commons/lords? I feel as Cameron has a long history of broken promises.
It could be pushed through as a voluntary agreement with industry. "Self regulate or we'll regulate it for you".
See the history of UK legislation around computers is scary. Reading some of the documents they clearly have clueful people giving them advice, but then you read what the politicians say and they're idiots.
What good will come from this?
> Compare a filter where the user has to opportunity to opt out and thus get access to everything they have access to today, with something like the Australian filter (no opt out) or the Chinese filter (no opt out).
Oh hey, at least our filter wont be as bad as theirs right? Same stupid argument used with the NSA scandal.
But there is a very big difference between an optional filter where people can opt-out and "the government is banning things!" - the government isn't banning anything, it's just forcing filters to be opt-out.
Campaigns against the filters will be more effective if they concentrate on what the filters actually are, rather than the not-real scenarios being presented.
It's not about banning, it's about authority thinking it can provide a moral compass as to what it deems "abhorrent".
It's about records being kept as to what exactly individual households wish to see on the net and what happens when such lists get hacked and leaked.
It's about declaring to an authority what you wish to view in a supposed free society.
It's about opposing an infrastructure of filtering and censorship which has the potential to be misused.
Never "calm down".
Pretty sure it's been there from the start. Read up on the EFF's founding.
http://order-order.com/2013/07/24/poll-result-86-of-readers-...
Guido Fawkes is talking to his lawyers about Libel. (Which under English law -- the reforms haven't gone through yet -- places the burden of proving that she didn't damage his reputation squarely on Claire Petty's shoulders.)
I'm just astonished that an MP appears to have been so ignorant of the law of her own land (and how it applies to twitter) that she left herself wide open to this.
You don't know our MPs very well do you ...? I'd say this is pretty much par for the course. The only laws they know anything about are loopholes.
I still think the libel laws need gutting, but it'll be interesting to see them used to spectacular effect against someone who should know exactly how much trouble they'll get in.
We can only hope that by actions like these people can scare the lawmakers into actually doing something about our stupid laws....
Or if not, at least we can watch and laugh as they're on the receiving end.
I still enjoy watching politicians squirm :)
Why should journalists abstain from defending themselves from libel in the UK just because others abuse those laws to attack journalists? Suggesting that journalists should not defend themselves from libel just because others abuse libel laws to shut down journalists is damn near concern trolling.
Personally I don't see this going anywhere near court. Guido may have some fun here but he's a political journalist with a Conservative leaning, he isn't going to start seriously threatening an Conservative MP. He'll milk the publicity, wring a minor apology out of her and it'll go no further than that.
Her tweet to that effect appears to be true [a partial defence], and as he is happy to have promoted it based on his blog I'd warrant it to be impossible to prove that it defamed him to say that he promoted the crack. Indeed he revelled in the promotion of said defacement.
Case dismissed.
Porn and other "offensive content" has been restricted or banned in pretty much every time and place by various means. Even if an outright ban does not exist in blanket legislation, there are restrictions, codes of practice, industry bodies, laws applying narrowly to certain media channels or something like that.
Basically, porn gets regulated/restricted/banned always by whatever authority has the means to do so. Always. And some authority always has jurisdiction in some way over every mainstream media source. The difference on the internet is that no one could regulate it. There was no authority or industry body. No power that could be appealed to. Now the internet can be regulated, seemingly.
That is the story here. Not "Cameron is a prude" or "Cameron is pro-censorship."
The internet is regulatable now. That's the story. This probably means that the same restrictions that apply elsewhere (TV, radio, print) will apply online.
Sex and nudity as "offensive content" is mostly an US-centric concept. Maybe they learned it from the UK, or UK from the US, but many European countries during the 1950-2000 did not share it. Sweden as an example, showed many movies on national paid TV that was deemed too sexual for movie theaters in the US. They had a teen age show called "bullen", broadcasting during family prime time, which included everything from nudity to instructions around masturbation. The movie Showgirls was shown not once but twice and both times the uncensored version. Nudity and sex was not discussed in censorship discussions as it was just not an issue in peoples mind.
However, in contrast to US culture, Sweden had a heavy ban on violence. The cartoon show Darkwing Duck was deemed as "video nasty", and banned mid season. The move theaters had a state censure policy which got only as recent as 2001 got abolished.
Legislation has historically successfully targeted only publishers, and you can do this when the number is fairly small, but not when that target is "everyone" because of the work required in monitoring (which is still not amenable to automation, despite what politicians may believe - it's still just too hard for the software technology we have).
I agree with your point. Being a mass publishing medium is what has kept the internet in anarchy thus far. In some cases, I think it will be possible to regulate publishers with some success. If you can get 10-20 companies to comply, you're covering most of the web.
For porn, that's not going to work. But, a filter probably will.
Censorship and contend restrictions don't need to be airtight. They never are. It's enough to just move things from mainstream to marginal. Seeing breasts, arses & fleeting (preferably comical) glimpses of balls is normal and OK, but unadvisable for young children. Genitalia in non sexual contexts is new, but now OK too (thank you embarrassing bodies). You can watch that with your friends or teenage kids. Genitalia in a sexual context is not OK. You look at that alone with a laptop in shame. You have to buy it from licensed sex shops with darkened windows.
Regulations & mainstream public opinion cross influence each other but actual line is more or less defined by TV standards and practices.
All internet porn (or political opinion or any subject of cencorship) filtering has to do is reclaim the control of that line. If you have to call up and ask for porn access or use tor to get it, it might let them do that.
Did you really just go and claim that seeing breasts is unadvisable for young children?
You complete and utter fuckwit. Do you think breasts are just there for you to leer over in your lonely cave of shame?
And it wasn't rage, it was accuracy.
Just sayin.
Are you not aware of what a troll is? Because you are plainly one.
(1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturism (also contains pictures of naked people, Sherlock)
edit: Reading on in the German article.. it states that the market for nudist holidays in Germany is estimated to be around 10 million people, 1/8th of the population. Also, Germany seems to be the most relaxed of the Western countries in this issue. The history is quite interesting.
fuckwit?
I thought about a more polite way of phrasing it, but nothing else seemed quite as succinct and to the point.
Have a look at what I wrote in context. I didn't make any normative statement. Nothing in that tells you anything about how I approach sex. I was talking about television standards & practices, classification systems, the public perception of what is normal and the interplay between those.
Oh and.. you're a poophead.
Which is why we always cover our baby's eyes before breastfeeding.
Change happens. It is for good.
Ok. Got a handle on the books. What do you do about pirate radio?
The law is the law. The restrictions, codes-of-practice, whatever - they are medium specific. What's invalid is the idea that you can regulate the Internet like you can a "curtained off" section of your local VHS video library.
The protestant reformation put that technology to use to disseminate laymen readable translations 80 years later. The new technology (presses), the new theology (Martin Luther) and social change (literacy) cross-pollinated and together changed the world. Most of the positive changes seemed pretty incidental. I'm not sure Lutheranism in itself was much of an improvement, but that's besides the point.
Not sure if the analogy here holds, but I think what we have is the technology. It has changed culture. I'm pretty sure public attitudes towards sex are different now because of the internet. We don't have the ideology though.
IMO, the american right hog the "freedom" banner and give it all sorts of connotations that most of us want to keep at arms length. It would be good if they'd put it down and let someone new have a go at it.
Gutenberg's technology enabled faaaar more than just Gutenberg's bible.
The printing press enabled the distribution of the Tyndale Bible, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Douay-Rheims Bible, the Bishops' Bible and, of course, the King James Bible.
All English bibles, all possible thanks to the printing press. The Tyndale Bible in particular is notable here, since it was heavily criticized and burned when possible. The printing press was crucial to achieving. the distribution that it did. Without the press then the creation of several thousand copies of it would have never been possible.
At the same time we have PRISM awareness, so it seems the internet is 1) "monitorable" and 2) "regulatable", if those terms can be used.
You would think that if PRISM is effective, it would be a much better way of catching child pornographers than implementing any sort of filter, and then perhaps people might calm down about the legal pornography.
IMO, there will be attempts to regulate the media-ish parts of the internet like they do other media and the 1-1 communication-ish part of the internet as they do communication mediums (eg phone).
They can't regulate it. The cost of setting up a HTTP proxy for personal use is the cost of a tiny VPS - I can get one for a month for about the cost of one of those pirated DVD's, and for a quarter for the cost of a takeaway. Heck, if I was a teenager today, and had parents that signed up for even the optional filter, I'd spring for a VPN/VPS - it's a fraction of what most kids around here pay for smartphones already anyway.
If this filtering stops peoples access, it'll create a market for VPN accounts targeted for that type of use, or "just" encrypted http proxying.
They can try to stop the VPNs - good luck; IP hopping by spinning up cloud instances all over the place as needed and providing a browser extension to keep the list of proxies up to date will be trivial. They can try to stop people paying for these VPN's, but even if they manage to stop card payments, that'll only drive up the demand for things like Bitcoins.
In other words: The same restrictions will not apply. The restrictions will apply for those who do not care enough to sign up to (trivially simple, once more people decides to try to make money off it) ways to circumvent them. But the barrier is so much lower. And it will keep lowering, rather than rising, as each new attempt at blocking gives more of us incentives to prepare countermeasures.
The scary thing is the incompetence. Politicians think that paedophiles use Google Search to find images of child sexual abuse, and that all Google hasn't got "filter explicit images" working for these images.
It's idiotic - I don't know what Google do, but I'm pretty sure they aggressively detect, remove, and report to law enforcement such images.
I cannot imagine how much torture it must have been to try and explain the concepts to someone who just does not care. It's wilful stupidity.
The cookie legislation, with all its pompous righteous "debates" in EU & UK parliament is the perfect example. They basically legislated a nag screen that you need to 'X' on every site you visit.
It gives shoddy "web consultants" a hook to bait clients with (you are required by law to have a cookie compliant website.). It creates extra nonsense work for developers. Stupid bikeshed meeting all around the country. And a very tiny annoyance occurring 10000 time per second to someone user somewhere. Lots of website owners that know they are breaking some law someplace and decide not to bother about it which is corrosive to rule of law.
Naturally, it does absolutely nothing to achieve the goals it set out to achieve (tracking?). Nothing. It's pure incompetence.
This is democracy......
That said, I dont see how any one can be sure an adviser is advising and not setting policy. And if they don't have influence, there is no point having them, but then people would argue that ministers should have advice from advisers, especially as most of them have no grounding what so ever in the department they are supposed to be running.
Sorry, I used to live in the UK but now live in Belgium, so my knowledge of UK politics is somewhat outdated.
In Belgium we had a new minister of finance appointed in March, who as far as I know has never even been up for election for anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koen_Geens
Amateurs :) Italy has had a wholly-unelected Prime Minister for two years: he was nominated Life Senator by the President and sworn in as PM a day later. In every other parliamentary democracy, this would have been called a coup d'état, but Italy works more like South-American banana republics.
And the best thing is, he was drafted exactly on the basis of domain knowledge (he was a banker and euro-bureaucrat) for a country still in the grip of wide-scale economic crisis, and all his ministers were appointed on the same basis: lots of academics, high-profile intellectuals, bankers and industrialists. Results were underwhelming to say the least, and last Spring voters basically disposed of this group in a general election. But the President all but re-elected himself (to another 7-year term, which is unprecedented) and again hand-picked a PM who's basically forced to follow the same political platform of his "golpist" predecessor.
So yeah, domain knowledge won't save your ass. Political problems are always political, not technical, and require political solutions, i.e. people shouting that this will not do, do that instead.
Also, Peter Mandelson committed fraud on his mortgage application and had to resign from cabinet at least twice.
Aside from when media folk kept inviting him to swanky dinners. But aside from that I agree, advisers advise on policy which leads to actual policy decisions, but advisers should have at least some background otherwise it's just dangerous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqkU1y0AYc
The thing is, politicians are able to reasonably regulate almost anything with zero knowledge. The example given is you can reasonably ban the use of mobile phones inside cars without causing cars to become less useful.
"Make me an internet that doesn't run BitTorrent".
Well, that's not possible. But, it should be, right? Politicians don't understand general purpose computers and general purpose networks (the Internet) are so flexible they can do anything and trying to limit a particular activity does more harm than good.
"That well known responsible campaigner @guidofawkes has been hosting a link that distributed porn via my website"[1]
[1] https://twitter.com/claire4devizes/status/359718721138343936
There have been multiple instances displaying how bad situation is. A movie company was able to get court orders to stop piracy of their movie and this ended in ban over 70+ sites. Not specific pages, blanket ban on whole sites. [1]
Then we have had a girl arrested over liking a Facebook post criticizing a leader[2]
I had high hopes with our generation but looks like most of the people in early twenties are not much better.
[1]: http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/singham-effect-file-sharin... [2]: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/19/indian-woman-arrested-ov...
I know a 12 years old who can't watch photos on a usb stick or a cd-rom if the windows dialog "what do you want to do ?" doesn't show up when inserting the disc or the stick on the computer. But he has mean fingers to send a gazillion sms per minute.
I know adults who seem unable to grasp the concept of resolution as they keep adding 4000x4000 pixels images in their powerpoint. And they seem to forget as soon as I tell them where the "shrink images" function is.
My outlook on this is that things haven't changed since the 90's (when I was a teen): some people want to know how computers work or make them work "better" and some just want stuff done. The first are more technologically literate (more like jack-of-all-trades) than the second but I am not convinced they are automatically better set for life as a result or that what they do with the computer is more appreciated.
I work at a large library and the smart, non-tech people are genuinely interested in improving their and their peers' effectiveness and are willing to learn. I frequently chat with a friend who can make shoes, design and construct electrical devices, build small buildings, survive in nature and anonymously watch things he's interested in on the Internet. He frequently asks about relevant things and gives advice from his fields of knowledge.
Some people just are better than the rest.
Unfortunately, this particularly clueless politician is the UK's Secretary of State for Defence. She has nuclear submarines....
We can't even claim that this is the initial battle. That fight has already been fought. We had the discussion around common carrier principles when peoples talked about net neutrality. We had the discussion when people discussed piracy. We had them also when wikileaks and SOPA was in the news. Even some of our allies has turned. ICANN is now days dictating under what purpose people are to be privileged to do the simply act of buying a name.
Allowing government to censure, control, and surveillance the Internet produce news article as this one. Expect to see more. Its that, or invent around it in such a way that the censure, control, and surveillance can't be used by the government from an technical standpoint.
Surely it has to be up to the tech savvy to educate the wider population, so that we end up with politicians who understand. Forget the politicians and focus on the general public.
We should have solutions to this problem, at the router level, where we can be in charge of the blacklist, and the times various items on it are ok or not ok.
Politicians cannot be blamed for trying to do what is popular, and because we as a community have failed to solve the problem for less technical parents than I, an imperfect solution has been proposed. We should not be surprised.
We are the ones best suited to find the optimal solutions to such problems, and carping on about politicians doing something when we have done far too little is pointless.
A simple Google search will show you that this is a well explored space, with many different options.
https://www.opendns.com/home-solutions/parental-controls#fam...
But I don't have an easy way to say "No - that site is fine" - I am not in control.
But actually it's easy only because I know what DNS is and can imagine how to setup my router to use their dns servers.
We do have blacklists available at the router level. Blacklists at the router level compiled by parents don't work though, for the obvious reason that there are well over 4 billion pages to check. Is a bit like trying to guard what books your children read when they work out about the inter-library lending agreement. I used to cause havoc with that.
The best thing to do is to go on the internet with your kids until you think they have reached a reasonable level of understanding about the world, rather than putting a machine in their bedroom and trusting a filter to work.
I could trust a filter based on a whitelist
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/ or nothing.
I am conflicted. I never really liked Paul Staines' style but I am somewhat afraid of the impact of Claire Perry on the UK Internet regulations. I have to admit I would love to see him publicise the lack of understanding she has in the Internet that she is working so hard to regulate..
http://order-order.com/2013/07/24/poll-result-86-of-readers-...
"We need to take control,” says Claire Perry, speaking as a parent. Far too many mums and dads are “ignoramuses” about technology, baffled by the smart phones and computers their children use, she says.
“Parents say they want to be involved, but the children have overtaken them,” she says. “That’s awful. We must be like the first generation whose children learnt to read and write, and we’re all blundering about like illiterate ignoramuses.”
(...)
“I am not a minister. I have no portfolio. I am simply a thorn in the side of everybody,” she says. “This debate crosses so many departments that it is quite helpful to have one person who goes around making a nuisance of themselves.”
Mrs Perry is chasing the internet service providers, search engine and social media companies to do more to keep children safe online, and says they are beginning to look “culpable” for allowing the likes of Mark Bridger and Stuart Hazell to view illegal child porn.
(...)
She praises the mobile phone companies for imposing filters blocking adult content on the internet, but they don’t apply when the images are being created by children themselves.
“There will be technology that comes along to solve this, but I don’t want to wait. Who is paying for the phone of a 12-year‑old? It will be the parent. We somehow have to get parents, carers and those involved in children’s lives to say that this is not acceptable,” she says. “Who is keeping our children safe?”
(...)
“Frankly, if we need to, we will regulate,” she says. “We have made child porn illegal and it still gets in. That means we have to tighten up, as we do with drugs. We spend a lot of time in this country trying to track down the supply of illegal drugs. It’s similar with the internet.”
(...)
“Well, my children hate being discussed in anything to do with my job. My 16‑year-old says: 'I can get married and I could join the Army if I wanted to, so why do you think you can read my texts?’ I say: 'Because there might be a situation in which you are unsafe.’ ”
This is not even funny.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/cole-moreton/10107771...
I think this is a fascinating quote, because the analogy seems extremely apt to me. Yet she somehow thinks this is a bad thing, as if the invention of literacy was some kind of terrible event, rather than a blossoming of the human intellect.
The younger generations are doing amazing things that the older generations couldn't have even imagined, but her only reaction to this incredible transformation is to say "That's awful."
She clearly describes the [applying the metaphor] technologically illiterate as akin to ignoramuses.
It's clearly not the benefits of technological literacy that is the motivator to preventing young children from being exposed to hardcore pornography.
If some people were saying we shouldn't allow hardcore porn magazines to be sold to children; your argument would be like saying those people are advocating destroying all forms of printed media.