Because when they do not censor those who are uncomfortable to them, they just might censor you ‘by accident’!
Being labelled a pedophile is a serious thing. For a site to be shut down for hours – and all visitors who go there to be informed that the site had been shut down because it s involved in child pornography – that is the kind of accusation that could kill some smaller sites!
Yet, that is exactly what happened to 8,000 sites in Denmark.
According to TorrentFreak:
‘In Denmark yesterday the Internet didn’t exactly collapse, but for thousands of businesses it was hardly service as usual.
For several hours, customers of ISP Siminn (although it could have easily been the whole country) were denied access to thousands of websites including Google and Facebook. When attempting to view any of the blocked pages visitors were given a worrying message relating to the most emotive blocking reason of all – the protection of children.
“The National High Tech Crime Center of the Danish National Police [NITEC], who assist in investigations into crime on the internet, has informed Siminn Denmark A/S, that the internet page which your browser has tried to get in contact with may contain material which could be regarded as child pornography,” the message began.
“Upon the request of The National High Tech Crime Center of the Danish National Police, Siminn Denmark A/S has blocked the access to the internet page.”
NITEC is responsible for maintaining a list of sites which they want to be made unavailable to Danish citizens. Each day the country’s Internet service providers retrieve the list and then apply DNS blockades across their infrastructure. Yesterday, however, someone made a huge mistake.’
Yes.
A bureaucrat ‘made a mistake’.
And publicly accused innocent people of criminal participation in pedophilia.
Do you really think there will be any serious repercussions for anyone for having smeared people’s reputation and interfered with their ability do do business? If you do, then I have this here bridge you might be interested in purchasing…
Sure, the Googles and FaceBooks will shake it off and do just fine – but what about the rest?
Obviously, governments and their apparatchiks cannot be trusted with this level of power over real human lives!
Whether from malice or incompetence, we have sufficient evidence to convince even the most ardent ‘law&order’ enthusiasts that it is inappropriate to permit governments to have any oversight or regulatory authority over the internet.
Now if we can only explain it to our governments…
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 