In a country where their Big Brother would be a Cinemax After Dark show here in the U.S., a new battle against internet pornography has emerged. David Cameron, the U.K. prime minister has announced some strict, new regulations for internet providers:
Most households in the UK will have pornography blocked by their internet provider unless they choose to receive it, David Cameron has announced.
In addition, the prime minister said possessing online pornography depicting rape would become illegal in England and Wales – in line with Scotland.
Mr Cameron warned in a speech that access to online pornography was “corroding childhood”.
There is good and bad in this. On the plus side, it would add certainty to people getting arrested for things like child porn. A perfect example of that lack of certainty here in the U.S. can be seen in stories like this:
The long-standing, heavily documented militarization of even small-town American police forces was always going to create problems when it met anonymous Internet threats. And so it has, again—this time in Evansville, Indiana, where officers acted on some Topix postings threatening violence against local police. They then sent an entire SWAT unit to execute a search warrant on a local house, one in which the front door was open and an 18-year old woman sat inside watching TV.
The cops brought along TV cameras, inviting a local reporter to film the glorious operation. In the resulting video, you can watch the SWAT team, decked out in black bulletproof vests and helmets and carrying window and door smashers, creep slowly up to the house. At some point, they apparently “knock” and announce their presence—though not with the goal of getting anyone to come to the door. As the local police chief admitted later to the Evansville Courier & Press, the process is really just “designed to distract.” (SWAT does not need to wait for a response.)
Officers break the screen door and a window, tossing a flashbang into the house—which you can see explode in the video. A second flashbang gets tossed in for good measure a moment later. SWAT enters the house.
On the news that night, the reporter ends his piece by talking about how this is “an investigation that hits home for many of these brave officers.”
But the family in the home was released without any charges as police realized their mistake. Turns out the home had an open WiFi router, and the threats had been made by someone outside the house. Whoops.
And this isn’t the only instance of such a mistake. As matter of fact, it appears to becoming more and more common.
On the downside of this law, there’s the fact that your internet provider now knows you are interested in looking at porn. There is also an issue of what constitutes porn and what doesn’t, though I think the UK won’t be as strict as the U,S, where a black woman’s nipple can cause crisis.
But there is something else in this new initiative that really has me worried:
A secure database of banned child porn images gathered by police across the country will be used to trace illegal content and the paedophiles viewing it
AHHH! One stop shopping for child porn! I’m sure no one with access would look at these for pure enjoyment, nor would the images somehow get out or even become a source of extra revenue for an officer.
The problem is that this “watchers” type program has been tried before. Years ago, back in the hay-days of MSN chat rooms, Microsoft decided to combat child sex rooms by hiring human’s to actually monitor the rooms. That sounded great and all, until it turned out the monitors were using the rooms for their own sexual perversions.
While I applaud Cameron for taking a strong stance against child pornography, it sadly is something we won’t be able to combat effectively. The internet is to vast, with too many hidden corners, to rid us of it. There’s also too much incentive to the people who produce this illegal material, to simply “go away”. That incentive includes financial and sexual. And the biggest problem is that these laws always end up catching the people who are actually innocent, maybe stumbling upon an image accidentally. They never capture the ones who are the real criminals, those that exploit children for their own gain.