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Re: [ProgSoc] Time for a letter to your local rep?



On 01/01/2008, at 7:26 PM, John Elliot wrote:
That is, how can you describe why this is a highly undesirable course of action?
You're right that it's difficult, but in no way should that stop me  
from caring or trying to lobby against it. We'd all be foolish to sit  
back and chill to avoid being labelled child-pornography apologists,  
despite what Conroy says.
In reading about this rehashed circa-1996 proposal (originally  
proposed by the ALP), I stumbled across a new word in Swedish;  
"ändamålsglidning". Roughly, it translates to "sliding purpose" and  
was used to describe the situation in Sweden (the Scandanavian  
country mentioned by Conroy) whereby the Swedish government supplies  
a URL list to ISPs who are then encouraged to block requests to those  
URLs to mitigate the risk of exposing children to child pornography  
and violence.
Why "sliding purpose"? As you can imagine, it didn't take long before  
the government started slipping the URLs of filesharing websites onto  
the ban list. The situation is similar in the UK (4Chan, anyone?),  
which was also mentioned.
Ros' put it nicely when I told her about it:

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" -- Benjamin Franklin
But I don't need to tell you this. You already understand what I'm  
talking about, why this is bad &c. It does strike me as strange that  
you have an "I don't care" or "It's not worth it" attitude about  
this, or perhaps you're just yanking my chain and seeing what I'll  
do. My guess is, most people (truly) won't give a damn for the same  
reason those very same people roam the streets of London under 25  
hour surveillance.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see what happens. Best case, it  
gets turned into an optional, transparent system whereby ISPs &  
parents opt in after weighing up the pros and cons (i.e. business  
casing & parenting respectively). Worst case, we become a nanny state  
much like we've already become a welfare state.

Cheers,

--
Nathan de Vries
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