And I Thought Our Government Was Insane

Let me tell you a horror story about creeping totalitarianism moving under the disguise of protecting people.
There is a government that told its people that it was going to protect them from child pornography. To do this, it would implement mandatory internet filtering nationwide, but there is no efficient way to filter specifically for child pornography. It is self-evident that most websites dedicated to such criminal activity do not blatantly advertise the fact. Using obvious keywords would only block the tip of the iceberg, at most. Instead, the government will use an official blacklist and block all sites on that list that are rated as Refused Classification (more on that RC rating shortly). There is a rather severe shortcoming to this method though. The vast majority of sites on that list with an RC rating have nothing to do with children at all. In fact, as a tangent to their “protecting the children” motif, the government in question has adamantly refused to allow any video game ratings higher than 15+ (that is, content suitable for those 15 years old and above) and thus any video game that is not appropriate for children is automatically classified under the RC rating.
Do you start to see where this is going?
To stick with the tangent for a moment, this same government recently banned the sale of all RC games in stores nationwide. These games could still be legally purchased through official download sites (many game companies offer their games in digital formats as well as the traditional boxed variety), but they could not be carried on any “brick-and-mortar” store shelf, with stiff fines for anyone caught on the wrong side of the law. Enter the internet filtering scheme. You know, the one that was supposedly for the purpose of blocking child pornography? Guess what. It has been officially announced that this filtering program will be used to extend the brick-and-mortar ban to include banning online sales of these same games.
It keeps getting better.
There is a specific subset of video games commonly called MMOs (those of you who are gamers, please have a little patience for those who are not), which stands for Massively Multiplayer Online. These are online games with lots of people logged in to play together in virtual worlds that continue to exist whether or not any specific player is present. These games are not traditionally rated in the normal sense because their content is not static. Most MMOs do receive what we in America call the “T for Teen” rating because most MMO publishers do try to keep their content teen appropriate, but there are constant additions to any MMO, making any true rating impossible. The government we are discussing has always exempted MMOs from its ratings classification system (meaning they did not receive an automatic RC rating just because they could not be formally rated) because it was just obvious to do so. Not any more. The government decided recently to slap these games with an RC rating, meaning that it is now illegal to sell them in stores or online and, once the new filters are fully in place, it will be impossible to play them at all, even for people who purchased the games when it was still legal to do so.
Do you remember where we started? It was something about protecting children, wasn't it? So how did we go from there to telling grown adults that they cannot play World of Warcraft or Second Life?
This has not been a fictional, scary What If scenario. It is really happening right now. Contrary to what you might be thinking, we are also not discussing China or Iran or some other such place where everyone assumes such government overlord behavior to be the norm. This is happening, even as you are reading these words, in Australia – modern industrialized nation, one of our allies, and supposedly one of the bastions of modern democracy.
People like me, people who say, “Be careful what power you give them because they will abuse it,” are often dismissed as being paranoid or extremist or pick your pejorative, but I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried. When I first started hearing about this some months ago, I dismissed it as some nutjob in the Australian parliament making a lot of noise that wouldn't amount to anything in the real world, but I was wrong. Obviously I'm not paranoid enough! I didn't think it was possible that anything this stupid, this creepy, or this blatant could possibly gain any traction in one of the top democracies in the world, but it's happening. The Australian government has already rolled out the pilot program in nine ISPs across the country and they are discussing tripling the size of the blacklist. What's worse is that they have publicly admitted that they have no success criteria in place for the pilot program. They have started “testing” this with no fixed goal, no means of measuring whether or not it works! The only thing they're testing is how much strain they can put on the filtering software, how many sites they can add to the blacklist before the whole thing explodes.
If you think this has nothing to do with you because you're not a gamer – well, if you're that myopic, you shouldn't be voting in the first place, but seriously. This kind of thing affects everyone! Think about it. They started a censorship program with one stated goal and now they are brazenly announcing that they are tacking on a whole list of things that have absolutely nothing to do with that goal. It doesn't affect you because you're not in Australia? Really? Are you that foolish? Do you honestly believe that you have a different breed of politician in your country than they have in theirs? I know I don't believe any such thing. I know that the politicians we have in America are just as crooked, arrogant, and power mad as the ones they have down under. I'm more than a little concerned at what nasty ideas our nutjobs might get if the Australian nutjobs actually get away with this.
I am of the opinion that a sufficiently tortuous punishment has not yet been invented for those who would abuse children. However, I will run the other direction from anyone who uses the phrase “protect the children” or any of its variants. I can almost guarantee you that the person who says that is getting ready to point a gun at your head, shove a hand in your pocket, and add new locks on your life. Locks for which you will not possess the keys. You cannot protect children by treating adults like children and you certainly cannot protect children by treating everyone like criminals. Those children will grow up eventually and then they'll be criminals, and then what was the point?
This is how tyranny grows. People foolishly grant power that should not be granted because it seems like a good idea at the time, and then that power expands until it no longer resembles what it was and no one is quite sure how it happened. It's happening there and it can happen here. The only cure is for people to wake up and realize that the danger is real. Tyranny is not a thing of the past and it is not something that only happens “over there”.

Roping The Wind

You have to love the naievity of politicians. Sometimes they are just so cute that all you can do is laugh at them. Of course, this same "endearing cuddliness" is also exactly the reason why they should not have anywhere close to the levels of power they believe they have, but that is a different matter entirely. Actually, it's this matter, that we are going to laugh at - I mean discuss today.
Andy Burnham, who is identified as something called a "culture secretary" in the United Kingdom, has stated a desire for the UK government to tighten controls over the internet, reining in a chaos that was actively designed to be outside of government control. To make matters even more amusing, Mr. Burnham intends to get together with President-elect Obama and work toward making it a transatlantic operation. Apparently Mr. Burnham does not believe that Mr. Obama - America's first black President taking over during a financial crisis that is scaring the hell out of the rest of the world - has enough on his plate.
You might be wondering why I find this so amusing. Doesn't every new administration claim that they are going to make the internet a safer place? Of course they do and it is always in the name of "making it safer for children", that favorite magic phrase that is supposed to automatically confer propriety and unassailability to any proposed plan. The problem is that the plan itself is utterly impossible. The internet cannot be made safer except by the act of actively hunting down those who use it for illegal purposes, a process that both America and the UK already follow. The fact that much of the illegal activity takes place in countries where neither America nor the UK has any say in the matter does not make the task any easier.
The reason I am laughing is because the proposal being discussed is to use a movie-style ratings system on all English language websites and to have that ratings system administered by individual service providers. Apparently Mr. Burnham is unaware that there is somewhere in the neighborhood of three times as many websites on the internet as there are people on the planet. Would anyone like to even consider retroactively rating all of those websites? Add in the simple matter that it takes less than five minutes to establish a basic website and it is pretty easy to see that the logistics alone make this a task that would send Hercules fleeing in tears.
Not only are their billions of websites, there is not exactly any shortage of service providers. I would actually consider paying good money to watch the attempt to get even a representative sampling of them into one room to hash out how they are going to administer this ratings system. That would be the comedic event of the year, at the very least.
Let's make matters even more complicated, shall we? What qualifies as an individual website? Is it everything under a single domain name? Everything under a particular subdomain? Is this blog one website or are the individual articles each their own website? With the possibilities that exist to this question, who would have the authority to decide? Who would even want the headache of deciding?
There is, however, ample reason for not laughing. The fact that this task is impossible does not guarantee that the politicians won't try it. The fact that even suggesting the idea is proof that Andy Burnham shouldn't have anything to do with internet regulation does not mean that he won't. Those of you in the UK who might read this would do well to take note. We, in America, got the unmitigated disaster that is the Digital Millenium Copyright Act precicely because people who knew nothing about digital technology or copyrights still thought it was a good idea to write sweeping new regulation covering those fields.
Attempting to rate the internet makes about as much sense as attempting to rope the wind but absurdity has never stopped politicians. Unfortunately, it is we who end up having to live with the messes these idiots create. Imagine what would happen to today's global economy if there were suddenly major internet disruption because of monkeeing politicians. Keep that nightmare in mind if you hear any of your politicians discussing this idea.