Can you not see how the tighter restriction of pornography might be a good thing? DISCUSS

Simple answer NO. 

Why? Only 0.04% of the internet is above ground….That’s what search engines like Google have indexed or 'can see'. The rest is underground.

Question: What is “ illicit and illegal material”? A definition please MR Cameron?

Child porn is what the Government wanted to focus upon and ban. great… Mr Cameron. There are specialised units within the police which deal with this issue BECAUSE it is not something which can generally be found in the top ranking pages of (for E.g. Google) The internet you are trying to police is not the internet of the general public. It is underground, Secret and difficult to trace. It is a network of criminals, paedophiles and abusers – underground, hidden from the surface. It is the most disgusting of crimes.

Yet, Mr Cameron, you cut the budgets of the police teams whom serve under great stress, work their best to stop these disgusting groups, individuals, organisations. instead of putting the money where it is needed – to catch the gangs of distributers, producers, paedophile rings and the worst of society, you decide to spend a HUGE AMOUNT OF MONEY policing the 0.04% of the internet where these images are limited.

Let's look at the maths Mr Cameron. 0.04% of internet is ‘general public’ (and includes the porn adults watch. )so, let's say 80% of the population have access via search engines like Google to 0.04% of the internet. Now, that may leave 20% of the population being into kiddie porn who have access to (possibly) 99.96% of the internet – the side that sex crimes units, paedophile police units etc have to monitor……. AND you cut their budgets BUT wish to spend £££ on policing the 0.04%???

Below is an article which will make what I have written make a little bit more sense – and it was written in 2011.

Thursday 1 September 2011 11:13 pm

Benjamin CohenTechnology Editor

Today, I reported on the shocking contents of the ‘hidden internet’, accessed using services including Tor. This isn’t the internet we all know and love, this is an internet beyond the control of governments or regulators, with no standards of taste and decency. It’s a seperate, hidden internet, you can only access if you have special software and it’s one where it’s extremely hard to track people down.

There are many legitimate uses of these sorts of  services, sometimes in repressive regimes. But in the UK, it seems the real purpose is to trade drugs, weapons, stolen personal data and most shockingly of all, sickening images of child abuse. The names of the files are in themselves enough to turn your stomach.

Today, we met with the head of the UK’s e-Crime unit to find-out how she is looking to tackle what she describes as a “cyber supermarket” for everything nasty.

Below is an article by technology producer Geoff White who undertook much of the research for my report.

There’s the internet most of us know and use; websites with friendly names which operate publicly, trade legitimately and are easily found using search engines.

But beyond this there is another internet.

The websites have deliberately obscure addresses and cannot be found by accident, and they are not indexed by any search engines. In order to access them a user must download special software – and when they access the sites, the technology means that they do so anonymously.

Some of the sites are nothing more than a hidden club for geeks. But when Channel 4 News accessed the “dark web”, sometimes known as the “hidden web”, we found a marketplace flooded with illegal goods and services.

Forged passports, stolen credit card details, and hardcore drugs are all openly offered for sale and – most worryingly – there are scores of sites offering images of child sexual abuse.

The head of the UK e-crime unit, Detective Superintendent Charlie McMurdie, told Channel 4 News the dark web was a major “enabler” of crime.

“These sites are the main place where cyber criminals trade data, trade hacking kits, tools, techniques. So it’s a real enabler that facilitates loads of other types of criminality.”

She said that many kinds of illegal goods are available.

“Firearms, drug-making paraphernalia, hacking kits, compromised data, any illegal commodity, that’s where they are going to trade,” she said.

“They’ll bury it in one of these underground cyber supermarkets.”

The underground sites are also a magnet for paedophiles operating online, with scores of sites offering images of child sexual abuse. One child protection expert told Channel 4 News he believes it is attracting the hard-core of paedophiles – including so-called “contact offenders”, who have access to children and are using that access to create material for distribution to others.

Former police child protection officer Mark Williams-Thomas said: “The material they are producing or sharing or discussing is absolutely horrific, so what we need to do is change the way we police.

“For a long time now we have policed the internet in a reactive way, which is how we police generally – in other words we wait for a phone call then we respond to it. What we need to do is become proactive, we need to start hitting the underworld, the sites that exist under the surface.

“And until we start doing that and changing the way we police we’re not going to make a significant difference.”

The software which is used to gain access to the sites disguises the computer’s IP address, meaning that police cannot track offenders. Police have previously relied on tracing payments, but now more and more the criminals have been using a global system of online credits called Bitcoins – which have the advantage of being anonymous.

Professor Peter Sommer, a cyber expert at the London School of Economics, told Channel 4 News: “These schemes are devised by geeks who are interested in the problem of anonymity, how you can pass on information or do deals anonymously, but they obviously get mostly used by criminals. So they are deliberately hidden.”

Bitcoins pass between computers rather than individuals. They are bought using “real world money” and can then be spent online. Bitcoins can also be exchanged back into real money.

According to their Twitter feed, the hacking group LulzSec accumulated a Bitcoin account worth several thousand US dollars.

The fact that Bitcoins are untraceable means the police can’t just follow the money. So cracking down on this version 2.0 of the black market could prove to be a headache.

But police are adamant that they have the situation under control.

Ms McMurdie told Channel 4 News: “We have proven a number of times in the past that they will be arrested, we will identify who they are, we have conducted prosecutions and brought these people to court.

“The technology which is often used by cyber criminals – that’s something that law enforcement have to exploit as well.”

- See more at: http://blogs.channel4.com/benjamin-cohen-on-technology/the-hidden-internet-shocked-me-but-how-can-it-be-controlled/2826#sthash.knKiovEH.dpuf

An election winner you are Mr Cameron... What a great idea... I am not alone in the struggle to understand what The Daily Mail and Mr Cameron might be aiming towards...

BY ZOE STAVRI – 26 JULY 2013

As a feminist, I am against rape, against the sexual abuse of children and wholeheartedly in favour of grinding the culture which allows these things to happen into dust.

That's why I'm against David Cameron's latest proposals for increased filtering of the internet, blocking search terms and banning porn depicting simulated rape.

Taken as a whole, the plans are technologically unworkable and politically dubious; with content-blocking possibly leading to decreased access to support for survivors of abuse, while allowing the state a frightening level of control over internet freedom.

An integral feature to nostalgia is the cultural memory of the porn fairy, the mythical beast who leaves top shelf magazines lying around for any young lad to peruse. Blocking content would do little to stop children from looking at porn.

However, little of this broader critique of David Cameron's proposals covers my reservations about banning 'rape porn'.

The general rationale of a ban is rooted in social psychology from the early 1960s: Albert Bandura's iconic 'Bobo Doll' experiments, where children watched an adult act aggressively towards a doll and then, when offered the opportunity to play with the doll, they repeated the behaviour they had seen modelled.

Therefore, it follows, if someone watches violent behaviour in porn, they will act in a more violent manner sexually. However, actual evidence of cultural harm caused by rape porn is very weak. Let us assume that porn does have the potential to teach those who see it about how they should and should not behave when it comes to sex.

Why are we not directing all of our energies into flooding the internet with better porn, which teaches people about consent?

  

Porn depicting simulated rape tends to fall under the umbrella of BDSM porn, which is better at showing the process of negotiating consent than 'vanilla' porn, reflecting a general trend within the BDSM community.

Within BDSM porn, there is often a short interview between the performers discussing what they would like to do and what they would not like to do and how they can signal that they want the scene to stop if needs be.

After the scene has finished, the performers talk about the scene in a debrief. Would it not be better if all porn contained this process of negotiation and boundary setting, showing its audience that this is something which ought to be an inherent part of sex?

Banning rape porn will not make it go away, but send it underground, where we are less able to observe the safety of the performers and actual abuse may well increase.

We need to see better sex and relationship education for people of all ages. The key difference between porn depicting simulated rape and images and film depicting a real rape is the consent of all parties involved.

Consent is, after all, the ultimate weapon in the fight against rape culture.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/news-analysis/why-i-dont-consent-to-david-camerons-web-censor-plan-29446979.html

According to the government, the users of the 0.04% of the internet will need to 'OPT-IN' to view pornography... REMEMBER DEAR R$EADERS, YOU MAY NEED TO OPT IN TO READ MY BLOG IN THE FUTURE!!

Below are some comments I discovered from Piston Heads (www.pistonheads.com)

robinessex

So, here we go again. Government knee jerk reaction after being harassed by the moral minority do gooders brigade. A repeat of 'Speed Kills, we're going to cure it by speed cameras, and then there won't be accidents any more, will there' scenario. Anyway, you soon won't be able to watch porn on your computer. (What's porn by the way?). Unless you tick a box to say, er, you, want to!!! So there, that's that 'problem' fixed. Prime Minister now off to solve the country's economic woes by Tuesday week. Climate change due to nasty humans burning stuff will be solved by Christmas. 

Einion Yrth

Yet another piece of populist knee-jerk crap which will be inconvenient for the majority and yet make sod all difference to those it's ostensibly aimed at. Why oh, why are we ruled over my technologically illiterate simpletons?Otherwise what a complete load of nonsense. No one in government seems to "get" what the internet is or is about. Is there anyone working there that's IT literate? They want to stop Google searches? Google is just a search engine, there are many others available and you could just write another, paedo-specific if you wish.This is the kind of state-interference that lead me to vote ABL (any but labour/libdim).  

IainT

They're trying to tackle two issues: 

1) Kids seeing porn

2) Mentally ill people seeing porn and committing sexual crimes. 

For #1 it's up to the parent to educate and control their children's access to the internet. There's worse stuff than porn out there and more dangers than accidentally stumbling across something dodgy while searching for bob the builder. An opt-in system might work or, better still, parents actually doing some parenting is the answer. 

For #2... Where to start... There is no evidence that interwebs pr0n has a causal link to sexual violence. None. With that starting position any action based on the faulty premise is likely to fail. In general: Who will bear the cost of the ISPs having to filter sites? It's won't be free and it will be passed on to the customer. Even those not wanting this impingement. What performance impact will this have?

 How will it work? Will non-UK content providers (e.g.. search engines) have to block this? What happens to links returned by google.com to the UK that contain banned sites? Will it fail when we click on the link?  Typically ill thought-through pandering action. I've been resisting the lure of UKIP up to now but the conservatives have just lost my vote. 

Teppic

Possible that those that choose to opt out may find themselves subject to extra surveillance. "Rape committed in the local area? Hmm... let's look at the list of local residents and see who opted out of the porn filter, and let's have them under suspicion..." 

 IainT

Apart from spending time and money on a non-issue? 

•             who will pay for it?

•             how will it be implemented?

•             what will be classified and blocked?

The "slippery-slope" and "thin end of the wedge" arguments are often used as a short-cut for faulty reasoning and there are a whole raft of sites that are already blocked in the UK through the list maintained by the IWF that all ISP enforce.

However, I can't see how future governments will not tighten their grip on the internet and what we access and track. If this is enacted I'll seriously consider alternative IP routing even if there is an inherent cost. Interestingly the top-rated BBC comments on the OP article are all very strongly anti this measure. 

Hoofey

It's good that Cameron is trying to tackle this serious issue now that the economy, the NHS, the housing crisis and education have been nailed. 

RobGT81

If you ask for your filter turned off, are you put on a list of bad guys and monitored? A list will exist somewhere. After all you must be a rapist in waiting if you have the filter off, otherwise why have the filter in the first place? 

 DanB7290

I wonder if this will affect the new Grand Theft Auto game? In previous incarnations, you could pick up a hooker, do business with her, then get out and fill her with an entire magazine from an Uzi. My parents never had a problem with me playing GTA, as long as I understood that it was a game and I wasn't to do anything like that in real life, and I've not grown up to be violent or a paedo.

So, confusion all round then....... There are too many variables, no real idea from the government as to what it would like to achieve, how to best achieve it and what are the definitions it will use to target 'offensive material?'

Below is an article from Paul Bernal's Blog:

10 questions about Cameron’s ‘new’ porn-blocking 

There’s been a bit of a media onslaught from David Cameron about his ‘war on porn’ over the weekend.

Some of the messages given out have been very welcome – but some are contradictory and others make very little sense when examined closely.

The latest pronouncement, as presented to/by the BBC, says

 “Online pornography to be blocked automatically, PM announces” 

The overall thrust seem to be that, as Cameron is going to put in a speech: “Every household in the UK is to have pornography blocked by their internet provider unless they choose to receive it.” 

So is this the ‘opt-in to porn’ idea that the government has been pushing for the last couple of years? The BBC page seems to suggest so. It suggests that all new customers to ISPs will have their ‘porn-filters’ turned on by default, so will have to actively choose to turn them off – and that ‘millions of existing computer users will be contacted by their internet providers and told they must decide whether to activate filters’. 

Some of this is welcome – the statement about making it a criminal offence to possess images depicting rape sounds a good idea on the face of it, for example, for such material is deeply offensive, though quite where it would leave anyone who owns a DVD of Jodie Foster being raped in The Accused doesn’t appear to be clear.

Indeed, that is the first of my ten questions for David Cameron. 

1     Who will decide what counts as ‘pornography’, and how? 

And not just pornography, but images depicting rape? Will this be done automatically, or will there be some kind of ‘porn board’ of people who will scour the internet for images and decide what is ‘OK’ and what isn’t? Automatic systems already exist to do this for child abuse images, and by most accounts they work reasonably well, but they haven’t eradicated the problem of child abuse images. Far from it. If it’s going to be a ‘human’ system – perhaps an extension of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) – how are you planning to fund it, and do you have any idea how much this is going to cost? 

2     Do you understand and acknowledge the difference between pornography, child abuse images and images depicting rape?  

One of the greatest sources of confusion over the various messages given out over the weekend has been the mismatch between headlines, sound bites, and actual proposals (such as they exist) over what you’re actually talking about. Child abuse images are already illegal pretty much everywhere on the planet – and are hunted down and policed as such. As Google’s spokespeople say, Google already has a zero-tolerance policy for those images, and has done for a while. Images depicting rape are another category, and the idea of making it illegal to possess them would be a significant step – but what about ‘pornography’.

Currently, pornography is legal – but it comes in many forms, and is generally legal – and to many people have very little to do with either of the first two categories…. which brings me to the third question 3     Are you planning to make all pornography illegal? …because that seems to be the logical extension of the idea that the essential position should be that ‘pornography’ should be blocked as standard.

That, of course, brings up the first two questions again. Who’s going to make the decisions, and on what basis? Further to that, who’s going to ‘watch the watchmen’. The Internet Watch Foundation, that currently ‘police’ child abuse images, though an admirable body in many ways, are far from a model of transparency (see this excellent article by my colleague Emily Laidlaw). If a body is to have sweeping powers to control content is available – powers above and beyond those set out in law – that body needs to be accountable and their operations transparent. How are you planning to do that?  

4     What about Page 3? 

I assume you’re not considering banning this. If you want to be logically consistent – and, indeed, if you want to stop the ‘corrosion of childhood’ then doing something about Page 3 would seem to make much more sense. Given the new seriousness of your attitude, I assume you don’t subscribe to the view that Page 3 is just ‘harmless fun’…. but perhaps you do. Where is your line drawn? What would Mr Murdoch say? 

5     What else do you want to censor?

 …and I use the word ‘censor’ advisedly, because this is censorship, unless you confine it to material that is illegal. As I have said, child abuse images are already illegal, and the extension to images depicting rape is a welcome idea, so long as the definitions can be made to work (which may be very difficult).

Deciding to censor pornography is one step – but what next? Censoring material depicting violence? ‘Glorifying’ terrorism etc?  Anything linking to ‘illegal content’ like material in breach of copyright? It’s a very slippery slope towards censoring pretty much anything you don’t like, whether it be for political purposes or otherwise.

‘Function creep’ is a recognised phenomenon in this area, and one that’s very difficult to guard against. What you design and build for one purpose can easily end up being used for quite another, which brings me to another question… 

6     What happens when people ‘opt-in’? 

In particular, what kind of records will be kept? Will there be a ‘list’ of those people who have ‘opted-in to porn’? Actually, scratch that part of the question – because there will, automatically be a list of those people who have opted in.

That’s how the digital world works – perhaps not a single list, but a set of lists that can be complied into a complete list. The real question is what are you planning to do with that list. Will it be considered a list of people who are ‘untrustworthy’. Will the police have immediate access to it at all times? How will the list be kept secure? Will is become available to others? How about GCHQ? The NSA?

Have the opportunities for the misuse of such a list been considered? Function creep applies here as well – and it’s equally difficult to guard against! 

7     What was that letter to the ISPs about? 

You know, the letter that got leaked, asking the ISPs to keep doing what they were already doing, but allow you to say that this was a great new initiative? Are you really ‘at war’ with the ISPs? Or does the letter reveal that this initiative of yours is essentially a PR exercise, aimed at saying that you’re doing something when in reality you’re not?

Conversely, have you been talking to the ISPs in any detail? Do you have their agreement over much of this? Or are you going to try to ‘strong-arm’ them into cooperating with you in a plan that they think won’t work and will cost a great deal of money, time and effort? For a plan like this to work you need to work closely with them, not fight against them. 

8     Are you going to get the ISPs to block Facebook? 

I have been wondering about this for a while – because Facebook regularly includes images and pages that would fit within your apparent definitions, particularly as regards violence against women, and Facebook show no signs of removing them. The most they’ve done is remove advertisements from these kinds of pages – so anyone who accesses Facebook will have access to this material. Will the default be for Facebook to be blocked? Or do you imagine you’re going to convince Facebook to change their policy? If you do, I fear you don’t understand the strength of the ‘First Amendment’ lobby in the US… which brings me to another question 

9     How do you think your plans will go down with US internet companies? 

All I’ve seen from Google have been some pretty stony-faced comments – but for your plan to work you need to be able to get US companies to comply. Few will do so easily and willingly, partly on principle (the First Amendment really matters to most Americans), partly because it will cost them money to do so, and partly because it will thoroughly piss-off many of their American customers. So how do you plan to get them to comply? I assume you do have a plan… 

10     Do you really think these plans will stop the ‘corrosion’ of childhood? 

That’s my biggest question. As I’ve blogged before, I suspect this whole thing misses the point. It perpetuates a myth that you can make the internet a ‘safe’ place, and absolves parents of the real responsibility they have for helping their kids to grow up as savvy, wary and discerning internet users. It creates a straw man – the corrosion of childhood, such as it exists, comes from a much broader societal problem than internet porn, and if you focus only on internet porn, you can miss all the rest. 

Plans like these, worthy though they may appear, do not, to me, seem likely to be in any way effective – the real ‘bad guys’ will find ways around them, the material will still exist, will keep being created, and we’ll pretend to have solved the problem – and at the same time put in a structure to allow censorship, create a deeply vulnerable database of ‘untrustworthy people’, and potentially alienate many of the most important companies on the internet.

I’m not convinced it’s a good idea. To say the least.

http://paulbernal.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/10-questions-about-camerons-new-porn-blocking/

Posted on July 22, 2013by paulbernal64

What say you? Is there room for a debate here? I have opened up the forum for discussion.....Come and join in here at http://mistressladyleyla.blogspot.co.uk/p/forum.html#/