[LINK] IT: Essay: ICRA - Censoring The World, Round 2

[Kevin Littlejohn]

I don't get this.  ICRA have just announced a tool to help people,
what, filter?  And you're telling me that making filtering easier
doesn't make the job of people who want the 'net filtered any easier?

I think perhaps whether govts are doing this or not already has no
bearing on the matter.  Fact is, ICRA pushes a way to categorise, in
an attempt to make filtering easier.  And Seth's right insofar as he
says "what works for parents, works for govts".

It's the script kiddie argument all over again - release a scripted
exploit for a bug, and it _will_ be used by people who otherwise didn't
have the skill to exploit the bug.  Implement filtering, and it _will_
be used by various govts to ease implementation of filtering.

Australia's a classic example:  Our laws say, essentially, that
filtering will be mandated when it becomes easy enough to do so.  ICRA
are in the business of making it easy to categorise content.
Therefore...

KevinL

On Sat, Mar 23, 2002 at 03:51:47AM +1100, David Goldstein wrote:
> Oh dear, more scaremongering from Seth. Seth, if there is this desire
> to use something like ICRA to filter content, why is there no
> movement towards it? And as has been demonstrated, governments who
> wish to filter online content can easily do so, with varying degrees
> of success, and they use nothing based on PICS.
> 
> This is the typical scaremongering from people who want to deny
> people the ability to filter out the content they do not wish to see.
> 
> Regards
> David

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