ubernoir wrote:
since I'm not opposed to censorship in principle I don't have a problem with the blocking of child porn sites since I regard freedom of speech as fundamental yet not an absolute.

I certainly agree that child porn is not protected speech. I'm not arguing that they shouldn't regulate child porn. However, there are different ways that they can choose to go about regulating it. This particular approach is dangerous.

In general, speech is speech. In my view the government has no business censoring any kind of speech. However, there are places where speech extends to action, such as when something is both speech and an act of trafficing in stolen credit cards, and those are places where government regulation can be warranted.

I think child porn is one of those cases. I tend to think about it in terms of privacy - the people depicted did not consent to being depicted and even possession of the images constitutes continued violation of their privacy. This view of the issue is somewhat inconsistent with how governments view the issue. Many people cast this in the terms you did - that freedom of speech is not absolute - so some kinds of speech can be regulated as long as we find them offensive. This is an unbounded (and in my view somewhat unprincipled) way of looking at the issue that opens the door to censorship of a great deal of speech. Viewing regulation of child porn through the prism of privacy creates a clear distinction with speech that is purely expressive, and it also raises questions about other kinds of privacy issues that I think ought to be raised, such as the case of the "starwars kid," but this is a huge digression.

No matter how you slice it, child porn is a small exception to the general rule that speech is speech and the government has no business regulating it. The government has choices in how they go about regulating speech and I believe that they need to be careful in this domain that they are not posing a threat to legitimate speech. There are various ways that the UK government could go about dealing with 100 or so URLs that contain content they believe to be illegal. Clearly, one approach would be to work with other countries to get that content pulled down.

Filtering creates four problems.

First, it requires building an infrastructure that can be used for the censorship of any content. A different government elected to power could quickly react to a "crisis" situation by blocking access to international news sources. They could literally move from decision to implementation in hours. So the infrastructure represents a significant threat to liberty regardless of how it is being used today.

Second, it is usually overbroad in practice. The system in the UK seems very carefully maintained and so it is the exception to the rule. But even they ran into a problem where they literally blocked anonymous editing of Wikipedia for the entire country. Typically these lists are not well maintained and sites end up being listed that should not be listed. In most cases these lists end up containing sites that are blocked for politically motivated reasons.

Third, there is a lot of different kinds of content that western governments deem illegal. Gambling, information about narcotics, "hacking tools," torrent lists, etc. Once the system exists there will be political demands to expand its application and there is no clear limit to what might be filtered. Once the list begins to expand the risk of accidental or politically motivated blocks increases.

Fourth, to filter is to surveil. You can't block peoples web traffic without inspecting it. When it comes to something like child porn you'd be remiss if you didn't investigate hits on your filters. So these filtering systems constitute a defacto surveillance system. At least in America you'd have to square that with the principal that you don't spy on people without probable cause, and other countries claim to uphold similar values. I think in the US they'd argue out of this corner using the rationale applied in Illinois v. Caballes - that you've no expectation of privacy in regard to evidence of your guilt, but I don't personally agree with the conclusions of that case - I think it opens pandora's box for surveillance technology.

Child porn is bad, the police ought to go after it, but that doesn't mean that and any and all approaches are equally reasonable. A total internet censorship infrastructure is a step too far in my view. I think the threat that it represents to liberty outweighs its usefulness as a law enforcement tool.

Having said all of that, I wish countries that are looking the UK as a success story for internet filtering and planning to implement their own system would get the reason why the UK has been successful so far - they've kept the list minimal and they've managed it very carefully. They haven't embraced the desire to expand what they are doing, and so they've mostly avoided controversy. If you are going to follow their lead you should do so completely.

RE: ‘Anonymous’ Declares War on Australia Over Internet Filtering | Threat Level | Wired.com