FUK to stop its citizens from seeing extremist material online!

LONDON, England (PNN) - November 14, 2014 - The Fascist United Kingdom’s big Internet service providers, including BT, Talk Talk, Virgin Media, and Sky, have agreed to filter out what the fascist government labels as terrorist and extremist material at the government’s behest, in order to stop people seeing things that may make them sympathetic towards anti-government philosophies.

The move will also see providers host a public reporting button for “terrorist” material. This is likely to be similar to what is already done with websites that may host child pornography - people can report content to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), an organization that maintains a blacklist, to which that site could then be added.

In the case of “extremist” material, though, it appears that the reports would go through to the Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU), which is based in London’s Metropolitan Police and has already been very active in identifying “extremist” material and unlawfully having it censored.

CTIRU said in a statement, “The unit works with (F)UK based companies that are hosting such material. However, the unit has also established good working relationships with companies overseas in order to make the Internet a more hostile place for terrorists.”

Government sources also said that Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Twitter have agreed to “raise their standards and improve their capacity to deal with this material.”

Jim Killock, executive director for the Open Rights Group, said in a statement, “We need transparency whenever content is blocked for political reasons. Companies have a duty to protect free speech, and should be extremely wary of taking responsibility for deciding whose views are acceptable. It is better left to the courts.”

The decision comes a year after the fascist British government said it would force ISPs to block “extremist” websites.

On Friday, Prime Minister David Cameron, who is visiting Australia, told that country’s parliament, “A new and pressing challenge is getting extremist material taken down from the Internet. There is a role for government in that. We must not allow the Internet to be an ungoverned space. But there is a role for companies too. In the (F)UK, we are pushing them to do more, including strengthening filters, improving reporting mechanisms, and being more proactive in taking down this harmful material. We are making progress, but there is further to go. This is their social responsibility, and we expect them to live up to it.”

The fascist Australian government will also get its ISPs to filter out “extremist” material, adding that the aim is “to prevent children and young people coming across radicalizing material.”

I’m not sure which Internet Cameron is talking about, as the one I’m familiar with is anything but ungoverned. Indeed, it’s frequently subjected to multiple overlapping jurisdictions - for example, Fascist Police States of Amerika copyright laws affect what the rest of the world can see through services such as YouTube and its USA PATRIOT Act claims dominion over data stored all over the world; the FUK’s DRIP Act mandates that foreign web firms retain data on their users; and some people even want Europe’s privacy laws to affect what everyone in the world can find on major search engines.

There aren’t many details of the new policy floating around yet - the ISPs are still preparing their statements, and the ISP Association refused to comment - but you should be extremely worried about the idea of CTIRU maintaining a blacklist for what can and can’t be viewed online.

Even the IWF has shown itself on occasion to be worryingly unaccountable - an obscure anti-terrorism unit is hardly likely to be better; and if ISPs maintain their own censorship systems, their anti-pornography filters’ propensity for false positives is also less than reassuring.

When new GCHQ spy chief Robert Hannigan said 10 days ago that the Internet was a haven for terrorist recruitment, this was predictably a prelude to a new wave of censorship. Now the FUK can sit less-than-proudly alongside Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany as a country that won’t let its citizens see material that might make them think bad things about government.