One of the problems I have with all the monitoring, filtering and surveillance that goes on online it that it rarely works. For a start surveillance, 99.999% of the time all you are doing is monitoring the innocent. Anyone who has anything to hide can easily takes steps to bypass the monitoring. So in the end all the online big brother stuff does is invade our privacy – it rarely picks up anything from the guilty as they cover their tracks.
It’s the same with blocking and filtering access to sites that we decide are no appropriate. You may argue that it’s right to filter websites with dangerous and criminal content – I would argue back it’s also normally just a huge waste of time. Any site that contains for instance illegal pornography can be copied and rehosted on a thousand other sites with ease. They can be encrypted, sent on usb keys or DVDs or hosted on darknet sites. In effect it’s a great big fat waste of time, the URL filtering slows down our surfing and the only thing you achieve is this
A completely false feeling that you’ve dealt with the problem, when of course you haven’t.
You’ve Blocked access to websites to people who weren’t going to use them anyway
Driven the criminals responsible for this further underground.
Let’s get this straight blocking the website of a paedophile ring does little to help the victim, other than pretending they don’t exist. What we need to do is cooperate and catch the criminals involved.
This is a perfect example of what should be happening – http://www.cps.gov.uk/news/press_releases/140_10/
, a racist uploading videos onto Youtube, don’t put resources into monitoring access, or filtering the web site out. Simply catch the people responsible and bring them to justice.