“We don’t want to be left alone in taking action because we don’t believe in… simply leaving it to trust,” he said. “It is not the role of the intermediaries to be judge and jury. It’s to empower people to express themselves.”
Meanwhile, in April, the Web’s five largest Internet companies—Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Yahoo—delivered a thinly veiled warning to Theresa May that they will not voluntarily cooperate with the Communications Data Act, dubbed “snooper’s charter” by the UK press.
In a letter leaked this week to the Guardian, the Web giants said May’s proposals would be “expensive to implement and highly contentious.”
May’s comments have provoked a fierce free-speech debate. “Generalised pre-censorship of ‘disgusting views’ at the behest of an interior minister would start us down a very slippery slope,” Timothy Garton Ash wrote in a Guardian commentary. “To entrust our freedom of expression to the Home Office is like putting your aching tooth in the tender care of a road-mender wielding a waist-high pneumatic drill.”
Tim Stevens, the coauthor of a 2009 study into countering online radicalization, told the Guardian that any strategy that relies on restricting online content alone was bound to be expensive and counterproductive.
“Anyone who knows anything about the Internet knows that [even if] you take something off the Internet, [it] is likely to be back on it again within an hour, or downloaded onto hard drives,”said Stevens.
Disclosure: CJR has received funding from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to cover intellectual-property issues, but the organization has no influence on the content.
CJR should be REJECTING that tyrannical crap, root and branch and in no uncertain terms! C'mon, free press! Get your family jewels back and stand the **** up to this BS!
#1 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Mon 3 Jun 2013 at 05:29 PM
The State will tell you, citizen, what you can think and believe and bring into action! Let us hear no more of these so-called threats to freedom and rights! For the selfless and ever well-intentioned servants in your faraway capital want only to protect you from yourself and others who might do harm to your government which, after all, is "us"!
Now, stop your kvetching and get back to praising Democracy and its Wonderful Overlords of Equality Enforcement!
[W]hich categories of crime does the State pursue and punish most intensely — those against private citizens or those against itself? The gravest crimes in the State's lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of person and property, but dangers to its own contentment: for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, conspiracy to overthrow the government. Murder is pursued haphazardly unless the victim be a policeman, or Gott soll hüten, an assassinated Chief of State; failure to pay a private debt is, if anything, almost encouraged, but income tax evasion is punished with utmost severity; counterfeiting the State's money is pursued far more relentlessly than forging private checks, etc. All this evidence demonstrates that the State is far more interested in preserving its own power than in defending the rights of private citizens. -Murray N. Rothbard
#2 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Mon 3 Jun 2013 at 06:12 PM
There are a couple of things that should have gotten done before Germany was defeated at the end of WWII. Had these two incidences occured, humanity, world wide would have suffered tremendously less, to this date. One incident would have been if Germany had bombed England into the Atlantic.
#3 Posted by todawgs, CJR on Tue 4 Jun 2013 at 02:12 AM