No dogs or atheists allowed
Moving on, from the sadistic to the ridiculous – Birmingham Council won’t let its staff read atheist websites. (So can Birmingham Council staffers read B&W? I wonder. I know B&W is banned in Iran [yes, I am proud of that, and so would you be, so quit staring] so perhaps its Bluecoat Software can detect heterodoxy just as well as Iran can. I’d love to know.)
The rules also ban sites that promote witchcraft, the paranormal, sexual deviancy and criminal activity…The authority’s Bluecoat Software computer system allows staff to look at websites relating to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and other religions but blocks sites to do with “witchcraft or Satanism” and “occult practices, atheistic views, voodoo rituals or any other form of mysticism”.
Gee, thanks. Criminal activities, Satanism, voodoo rituals – and atheism. And then people wonder why atheists get a little crabby now and then.
(Thanks to Roger Lancefield for pointing this out.)
Birmingham City Council everyone, put your hands together now!
I meant to thank Roger for pointing out this little gem. I’ll do that now.
Thanks for the nod Ophelia, but for such a small thing, now I’m all embarrassed ;-)
Actually the council has done me a favour, for this alarming nonsense finally gave me the push I needed to spend a few minutes filling out the membership form of the the National Secular Society!
I’ll never understand what goes on in the minds of people who create internet filters.
When I was at school they used filtering software that allowed access to the BNP’s official website, but blocked Amnesty International.
Maybe rabid right-wingers are naturally drawn to the censorship industry in the same way that leftists tend to go into the public sector.
Although the algorithms have (somewhat) improved, for a long time I kept hearing about one filter program after another that prevented people from accessing any medical information about breast cancer (not to mention blocking information about a few genera of birds).
Not that this has much to do with the idiocies of the Birmingham Council. Unless… Does anyone know a publicly employed birder in Birmingham who might willing to try a search on “great tits” to indulge my curiosity?
so religion is not mysticism, i think that somebody needs to check their dictionary
I’m sure OB and Jeremy will be mightily relieved to learn that B&W is categorized as “Reference” and “News/Media” by BlueCoat:
http://sitereview.bluecoat.com/sitereview.jsp
There’s a let off ;)
Just looked up Birmingham City Council’s website, odd, its categorized under “British Tits”…
As I posted on the legendary CiF yesterday, this is the same City Council that presided cravenly over the withdrawal of the play Bezhti following the bricking of it’s city Repertory Theatre by a rampaging mob of guess who – religious bigots !
Jakob Tomasovich
I may be wrong, but isn’t it likely to be a US-designed software ? Atheism does seem to occasionally get lumped into the “bad voodoo” category by some mercans.
I’m not sure if it was US-designed, but it seemed to be fairly consistent in blocking human rights organisations while allowing far-right websites.
Why is Birmingham Council shielding its staff from “bad influences” anyway? Presumably they’re all grown adults. Do they really need their employer to protect their fragile minds from information about sexual deviancy?
Actually bluecoat categorises atheist sites (and it won’t know about all of them)under “political/activist groups”. If this is just simply blocked then council employees can’t see the sites of groups who might be lobbying the council, which is most likely a mistake.
Roger, sounds as if they’ve been talking to the Guardian’s online “moderators”…
Hmm. The first part of that article makes the watchdog sound very ominous, indeed outrageous, and I was fuming away – but then it got down to specifics.
“The proposals follow a rash of complaints about malicious and inaccurate postings on Facebook and other social networking sites.
A British businessman was last week awarded £22,000 libel damages from a school friend who made false accusations against him on a fake Facebook profile.”
Jeremy and I have recently been the subject of libelous falsehoods on Wikipedia, so I know what that’s like. I don’t think that should be protected, and I don’t think a watchdog that dealt with that kind of thing would be any threat to B&W. I disagree with things that people say or write, I don’t lie about them or libel them.
@ Ophelia,
I agree that there should be a means of redress, and I think it was inevitable that the authorities have started to intimate to web application operators that if they wish to “do business” within their territory, they should obey at least the existing laws of the land. I also sympathize with you with regard to the wikipedia matter (which must be/have been very frustrating indeed).
My concern however, is not the fact that a watchdog is being considered, but that (apparently) it, rather than courts of law, will have the powers to order specific site operators to remove material deemed to have broken “the rules”. This surely begs some pretty huge legal and ethical questions.
It’s one thing to regulate a commercial publishing industry, but quite another to regulate a medium which many regard as an extension of our social space. Clearly, a blog is not a newspaper and most bloggers are not publishers, at least, not in the traditional sense. As we are all well aware, some blogs are digital art galleries, others are effectively personal diaries to which public access exists, others are philosophical muses, or political rants, or run by 10 year olds, or model railway enthusiasts, and so on, across the entire spectrum of society. Do we really want a government body to take it upon itself to police these, any more than we expect the government to police our conversations in pubs, in parks, on trains, etc?
The technology underpinning this is radical, and IMO doesn’t mesh well with our traditional notions of control and policing. Imagine a group of late teens in a pub; someone puts her mobile phone in the middle of the table and streams a video feed of the surrounding conversation to a web application where it can be accessed by friends and the general public alike. A watchdog such as the one contemplated would be given “jurisdiction” over all such material/content. This would be an unprecedented level of control by government over our mundane social activities, with potentially, a government body being repeatedly called upon to censor the conversations (and artwork, and political and religious opinions, and sexual expression, etc. etc.) of web users (i.e. of pretty much everyone). Personally, I’m deeply uncomfortable with this idea, not least given many of the recent high profile failings of our government to protect both our civil liberties and our private data.
Many regard the web as an unprecedented extension of our social space, and IMO we need to ask ourselves whether we want a “public park with rangers” to keep it basically safe, or a “private mall with CCTV and security guards” that monitors everything from our dress-sense to our conversations.
At the moment, that may seem like a false dilemma, but recent developments such as those below (that I plucked out of the recent end of my bookmarks), provide a context which taken in combination with the current UK government’s infatuation with controlling the public via tech, makes me fear that the more “extreme” of the two metaphors is potentially only two or three policy announcements away from realisation.
Finally, I just can’t forget Tony Blair’s complaint when he left office that the Internet has rendered the country much harder to govern. One can’t help but wonder how many of his remaining colleagues would dearly love to take action to tame this unruly new medium in order that it can become a powerful new tool for the “management of public perception”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/25/illegal.filesharing
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/23/berr_isp_mou/
http://press.ffii.org/Press_releases/European_Parliament_rushes_towards_Soviet_Internet
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/15/ico_annual_report/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/23/investigatory_powers_commissioners_reports/
And there are *plenty* more where these came from.
(Apologies for the long comment!)
Roger, well…to the extent that the web is ‘an unprecedented extension of our social space’ which makes it possible for us to publish libelous lies…yes, I think we want rangers.
The thing about the ‘unprecedented level of control by government over our mundane social activities’ is that if our mundane social activities include publishing libelous lies about named individuals – then it’s our mistake to make publication of libelous lies about named individuals part of our mundane social activities. Libelous lies have always been an exception to free speech laws, and I don’t offhand see why the fact that new technology makes it orders of magnitude easier to publish libelous lies should change that.
Ophelia, first, I’m certainly not condoning libel. Existing libel law, I believe, can be made to work on the Web (the person referred to in the Telegraph article clearly took successful legal action). I can see Jeremy’s (I’m assuming) home address in Sutton simply by typing a ‘whois’ command and I could instruct a solicitor to send a letter to that address if I ever wanted to do that. Even if that address were hidden, the letter could be sent to the organisation hiding it.
It becomes more complex when overseas registrants are involved of course, and that’s where I think the government watchdog could and should help, by putting overseas governments under pressure to respond satisfactorily to such complaints.
However, I regard with utter horror the idea that such a watchdog might ever undertake to arbitrarily censor material that I or anyone else writes on the web, as readily as, for example, local UK councils currently hand out “fines” for parking and traffic infringements. Take down notices should be on solid and supportable legal grounds, not because someone, somewhere feels offended by something (or some local council needs extra cash) — surely?
Would you really want a situation in which the likes of Birmingham City Council could send an email to such a watchdog claiming that they have received several hundred complaints from local citizens about an article you wrote and that therefore you should be sent a “take down” notice for the content in question? We’re not quite there yet, but given the virtual abandonment of net neutrality, the influential lobbying of the copyright and IP owners, and the infatuation the UK government has with using technology to manage, control and punish, the “smart bomb” expedient of needing to combat terrorism, etc., I really don’t think we’re that far away from routine government monitoring and potential censorship of all web content – including yours. Unless people make a stand of course…
Roger, of course not, but surely that’s already obvious. Of course I don’t want anyone telling me to take down something because people are ‘offended.’ But libel is a different matter.
Of course, libel claims can be and are abused, and UK libel law is insane. But assuming sane libel laws, I don’t think anyone has a ‘right’ to libel people, even on a blog or website.
“Birmingham Council won’t let its staff read atheist websites”
Maybe, Birmingham Council could do with a Pontin’s holiday!
The Bluecoats there just might change its mind.