For many activists in net-politics it is apparent that the fight against child pornography is just an excuse for establishing a EU-wide content filtering infrastructure. This infrastructure for content filtering can be used to filter other content than child pornography as well. For example politicians in Germany already requested blocking gambling sites, Nazi sites, left extremistic political sites and others, when we had that kind of discussion last year over here. The proposal of a law putting up stop pages in front of child pronography sites by former minister for family Ursula “Zensursula” von der Leyen passed the parliament, but shortly after last years parliament elecetion *all* political parties didn’t want that law anymore.
EU commissioner Cecilia “Censilia” Malmström introduced a similar proposal for a EU-wide blocking iinitiative a short while ago, as you might now. Christian Engström, member of the EU parliament of the swedish Pirate Party, wrote today on his blog that content right industry welcomes child pornography as a way to introduce content filter and blocking infrastructure:
”Child pornography is great,” the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. ”It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites”.
The venue was a seminar organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Stockholm on May 27, 2007, under the title ”Sweden — A Safe Haven for Pirates?”. The speaker was Johan Schlüter from the Danish Anti-Piracy Group, a lobby organization for the music and film industry associations, like IFPI and others.
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Start with child porn, which everybody agrees is revolting, and find some politicians who want to appear like they are doing something. Never mind that the blocking as such is ridiculously easy to circumvent in less than 10 seconds. The purpose at this stage is only to get the politicians and the general public to accept the principle that censorship in the form of ”filters” is okay. Once that principle has been established, it is easy to extend it to other areas, such as illegal file sharing. And once censorship of the Internet has been accepted in principle, they can start looking at ways to make it more technically difficult to circumvent.
If you already have not, then please act now and contact your local EU representive and kindly ask to refuse this directive of Malmström and enlighten them by supplying arguments such those MOGIS (MissbrauchsOpfer Gegen InternetSperren, abuse survivors against internet blocking) put up on their webpage (English and other languages).
The abuse of childs and the documentation of such abuse (child pornography is a bad term anyway) needs to be stopped! But access blocking is the wrong direction. Better take care of a more effective criminal prosecution. Documentation of child abuse needs to get removed from the web and the producers needs to get arrested.
So, please act now!
P.S.: there’s a nice video on http://cleanternet.org/