European Union Internet Censorship

Yes, it's arrived, that bright glad morning. The European Union has now decided to censor the internet:

Placing instructions on how to make a bomb on the internet will become a criminal offence across Europe under plans outlined by Brussels yesterday.

Arguments about freedom of expression will not be allowed to stand in the way of criminalising the publication of bomb-making information that could be used by terrorists, a senior EU official said.

It will be part of a range of antiterrorist proposals to be published in the autumn that will also include the collection of airline passenger data from every flight in and out of the EU. The extension of measures was promised yesterday by Franco Frattini, the EU Justice Commissioner, after the British car bomb plot and the murder of Spanish tourists in Yemen.

Internet service providers (ISPs) would face charges if they failed to block websites containing bomb-making instructions generated anywhere in the world, EU officials said.

Something as simple as telling people that ammonium nitrate mixed with diesel makes a pretty good bomb would mean that all ISPs across Europe must ban access to that site. Given that just about every UK newspaper will have that information in their archives as a result of the IRA murder campaigns means that all of them will be verboeten, of course.

“It should simply not be possible to leave people free to instruct other people on the internet on how to make a bomb – that has nothing to do with freedom of expression,” Mr Frattini said yesterday.

Shows a startling lack of logic there, don't you think? This is nothing to do with freedom of expression when he wants to restrict the freedom of expression?

Nothing on The Register yet but I would be really rather surprised whether this would work on a technical level anyway. All ISPs would have to monitor the entire internet to make sure that no page was ever visible from Europe which showed the recipes. Yes, they'd have to monitor each and every blog post, each and every bulletin board. And ban those that had them.

EU officials denied that it would be impossible to track down websites based in remote places, insisting that the local provider based in the EU could be held to account. One said: “You always need a provider here that gives you access to websites. They can decide technically which websites to allow. Otherwise how would China block internet sites? There are no technological obstacles, only legal ones.”

I'm not sure whether I find it amusing or rage inducing that the EU is now taking technical advice from the Chinese censors: but I certainly find it no surprise that this federast is going to dump all of the costs onto the ISPs. At least China has the good grace to pay for it themselves.

There are others out there who know much more about this issue than I do. Anyone care to offer a cost estimate for this plan? Include all costs: equipment, time, people etc, to set up a censorship system capable of blocking access from each and every European internet user to any and all sites globally that might contain instructions on bomb making. Don't forget to add the costs of finding those sites in the first place: and of dealing with false positives. We'll then divide that by the number of users to give us a per capita cost. We might also compare it to the damage done by terrorism. See whether it's worth it, shall we?

Franco Frattini: bansturbating madly.