T'Government T'Tackle T'Internet

In slightly startling news today - startling mainly due to the fact it's taken them this long to get round to announcing something - the UK Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has said she will mount a push against sites that promote extremism.

Well good luck with that, love.

What she seems to have failed to grasp is that the internet doesn't work quite as simply as that. The more I read about it, the more frankly absurd it sounds.

She wants someone (presumably ISPs, though she hasn't talked to any of them) to block sites that have extremist content on them. Which will require whoever is doing the blocking to employ someone who can read whatever language the site is using. I doubt that's going to be cheap, what with the sudden increase in demand.

And what's to stop the people they employ from being sleeper agents for the extremists who are making the sites, but I digress.

What's to stop anyone interested in seeing this extremist material from simply leaving the country (or appearing to have left the country by using Tor or some similar IP relocation tool) and reading it in say, Holland or Belgium? Then coming back, armed (heh) with the information on a DVD, USB stick, or, perish the thought, in a notebook. As they may have written the information in a language other than English, the customs and immigration people are going to have to have a lot of translators.

And I don't think the British are going to be too happy being searched and their private documents read every time they come back into the country.

So what about a firewall, similar to that the Chinese Government use to stop their own population reading about events like Tiananmen Square and democracy demonstrations? I'm sure the population would be delighted to discover that the Government are planning to censor the words that they can read.

And isn't all this information findable in books? Why don't we burn books as well? And libraries! And then kill the scientists who might somehow try to teach other people how bombs can be built? And teachers!

I have drawn parallels between the Labour Government and the Nazi Party before. This one just writes itself.

Cunts.