Charlie Hebdo, Free Speech and the Values of the East and the West

Are the values of the West better that the values of the East? If you ask a Fox News correspondent then I am pretty sure you will get a very quick reply that the west is morally superior in every way. 

Personally, I can never really understand how any comparison between the 'East' and the 'West' is meaningful. The term 'east' covers whole continents and more countries and societies with many different social and cultural groups. The west does too. A term like Muslim also covers vast numbers of people in many countries and includes some of the poorest people in the world as well as some of richest.

 A few years ago Steven Hawking said that the people of earth should be afraid if aliens ever discovering earth as there is a good chance they could be hostile. I was at a friend's house and I asked her daughter (who was about 11) whether she thought aliens would be friendly or hostile. Rather than giving me a one word answer she went into a detailed thesis about how there would probably be different factions on the alien planet and different societies. Some would be friendly towards the earth and some might not. Some might even see the earth as an ally for them against people on their own planet whom they were in conflict with. I was really impressed. This girl was able to show a degree of nuance and complexity absent from many day to day conversations which I have with intelligent adults about cultural issues in our world. She really understood that trying to make judgements about large swathes of people as though they were a homogenous group was silly, especially when we know nothing about them. This has not stopped commentators, who are atheists, speaking about how they think Muslims will feel about the cartoons or what they think their religion is about.

I know very little about Islam. My default assumption is that anyone who is a Priest, Imam, or leader of any religion is a peaceful person unless they give me evidence to the contrary. However, I would not presume to tell people that Islam, Christianity or any other religion is a religion of peace. Making such statements is presumptuous (since I do not have permission to speak for them)and also a bit patronising or condescending. I would be very irritated if I had to sit through English people on tv beaming sublimely and telling viewers how peaceful and caring Scottish people were. Any established religion has commentators much better qualified to make these statements than I or any atheist politician can. Going forward from that –even if we do have a Muslim scholar on tv, no  individual theologian is going to be able to speak for a whole faith. Even the Pope can only speak for Catholics, and even then only practicing ones. Yet in the UK we have left wing atheists on websites such as Counterfire presuming to speak for the world's Muslims.

Getting back to East v West bit. Let's suppose for a minute we actually could agree on what constituted the east and what constituted the west and that we could decide what we thought a better society would look like. Which geographical and cultural block would win?

The answer, for me anyway, is that it ought not to matter as I would want to make my own life choices wherever I lived. Not everyone can take this for granted. I am thankful that I live in a time period and a place where the answer doesn't matter. I can live my life, more or less as I want to. I can take bits of philosophy for the Greeks, some mindfulness from Buddhism, some dance music from the DJs of Istanbul, some Bollywood from India, some cool comic books from France, some Cajun food from USA etc etc. This is not about being rich, it is about being free. Free to make decisions for myself. Free to make choices. Free to choose the ideas and philosophies I want to without anyone telling me I am a non-believer, an apostate or a dissident. Free from being imprisoned or executed or executed for having ideas that run counter to the state. 

This freedom is incredibly liberating but most of us take it for granted. A number of years ago, before the Berlin Wall came down I had a taxi ride in New York. The driver had escaped from a soviet bloc country. Naively, I asked him about what he thought about the propaganda which western countries pumped out about the Soviet Union and whether he thought it was an unfair representation. He laughed asked me if I had ever heard of anyone who had tried to escape in the other direction. He had a hard life as a taxi driver, and he showed me his gun which he kept under his seat but he loved being in control of his own life and living it as he wanted to.

Some say that freedom protects the privileges of the rich and that poor people don't have freedom. This is nonsense. If poor people don't have clean water then the compassionate thing to do is help them to drill a well. You don't tell them that they shouldn't worry about water because clean water is for the rich and unless you were very punitive you wouldn't make the rich drink dirty water in the name of equality.

 The most oppressed people in the world need freedom the most. People like those detained in Guantanamo Bay with no rights and no voice or the islanders who were evicted from their homes to make way for the American Base at Diego Garcia. People in the UK whose lives are ruined by practices such as Female Genital Mutilation or forced marriage. People in other countries who are threatened with flogging or execution for blasphemy. People who are punished for being victims of rape.People in this country who are abused by gangs of men. These are the people who most need to be freed from coercion and oppression and to have their voices heard. Telling them that freedom is a luxury which protects the privileged of the rich or that free speech is a custom of individualist western cultures is wrong. It is an acceptance of their oppression. Many of the people I described are Muslims. They need people who care about their plight to speak up for them. These people need to speak truth to power. Sometimes that power is sometimes the USA or other rich countries.  Sometimes it is people of their own faith or people who claim to speak for their faith. They need UK citizens and UK authorities who are willing to recognise and call out abuse and coercion, not people who think all the evils of the world are rooted in capitalism or who are afraid to question or risk offending cultural sensitivities

Many people come to the UK to flee religious, political or cultural oppression. Some asylum seekers have been tortured because they have dared to speak up against an oppressive regime. Some have had to flee because they are gay or transgendered. These people are attracted to the UK because they believe that this country will protect them and let them live their lives the way they want to. We should welcome these people and make sure we can live up to their expectations. We need to stand up to tyranny and bullying for their sakes.

Central to all of our freedoms is freedom of speech and freedom of expression. This is what allows us all to live our lives as we want to and for many groups in society it has been hard fought and hard won. There would be no freedom to be gay, for example, if our society had not stood up to conservative Christians and repealed the laws on homosexuality. We would have no real freedom of religion if we had not repealed laws against blasphemy. We would not have any gender equality if brave women had not confronted patriarchy and the social, political and religious institutions which supported it. In the United States, women’s suffrage was opposed by Christian groups of a number of denominations  for many years. Religious conservatism has often been in opposition to progressive causes and people. For many people in the world it still is In some  places women, gay people and others face all forms of oppression including execution by hanging or stoning with these practices often being justified by religion. It is beyond me why people who would normally champion women’s rights are now apologists for religious fundamentalist terrorists  who would trample the rights of women given half a chance.

One would think that nobody in this country would doubt  the value of freedom of speech and that people would not flinch from defending against bullies and terrorists. Sadly, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings this has not been the case. A number of commentators of the UK left including Will Self have questioned the centrality of free speech to our society. I have seen words such as 'provocation' used to describe the actions of satirists as though ridiculing an idea or a belief is a legitimate reason for murder. Would the same people have thought that the parodies in Spitting Image were justification for Mrs Thatcher sending in the SAS to the tv studios to shoot the production team? 

I have also have seen terms such as 'free speech absolutists' and 'free speech fetishists' used to describe people who value the exchange of ideas. This is shameful. Ridiculing religion or religious ideas is not racism any more than it is racism to parody a political idea or movement.Charlie Hebdoe operates within French laws, which are similar to ours. Thinking that religious followers cannot cope with challenges to their beliefs, or shouldn't be expected to do is patronising. Many Christians though the film The Life of Brian was disrespectful and hateful towards Christianity and in Glasgow they gave it an 18 rating. But nobody said it had to be banned and nobody was murdered for producing it or acting in it. 

Nick Clegg http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jan/13/nick-clegg-snoopers-charter-intelligence-surveillance  showed a rare moment of courage and backbone this week when he spoke up for free speech as a right without any qualifications, buts or apologies. In a short statement he showed that he really understood what free speech means. While others have condemned the terrorists, few in the UK have said much about free speech and why it is absolutely central to a diverse and multi- cultural society. Debate and the sharing and challenging of ideas is what helps us to understand each other. It allows people to express their culture or distance themselves from it, or find and adopt new ideas. It is not something you can be fundamentalist about - it is either something you have or something what he you don't have.

The Charlie Hebdo events have not tarnished my views of Muslims or Islam. My default position is still that religious people are trying to make the world better even though I don't personally desire what they have to offer. In fact, the two real heroes of the Charlie Hebdo situation were both Muslims. One was Ahmed Merabet, the Muslim police officer shot dead in Paris. The other was Lassana Bathily  who saved lives by hiding customers in the shop's cold room, while the hostage taker walked into the kosher supermarket in Vincennes. Please sign the petition in Change.org to have him given the Legion of Honour : https://www.change.org/p/give-french-citizenship-and-legion-of-honor-to-lassanabathily?recruiter=66500828&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=share_twitter_responsive

I haven't changed my view that multi-culturalism is good thing either. However, we should not reintroduce blasphemy laws, either by design or default. We certainly can't allow restrictions in free speech to be defined and policed by terrorists.

 Having said all that however, my view of some elements of the British left and the British intelligencia is severely damaged. They have abandoned the principles which are required for everything else they claim to stand for. The left has lost its moral compass in its failure to stand uo to terrorist bullies.

If you have freedom to choose your own values, have your own thoughts and express your own ideas then nobody needs to guarantee you any other freedoms. They all flow from these basic central freedoms. Most importantly if you don't have free speech and free expression the you can never truly have any other freedom.

And if you have any comments please make them here especially of you found this article interesting and please share it on social media. We only have so long on this planet. Use it wisely by standing up for values that are worth standing up for.

Je suis Charlie!

 Je suis Ahmed!

Je suis Lassantha!

Vive la liberte!

Sex, Lies and The Guardian- Miranda, Snowden and Assange

The Guardian is currently most indignant about the treatment of David Miranda, the partner of one of their journalists who reported on the case of the documents leaked  by Edward Snowden.

The Guardian is portraying itself as defender of freedom of information and opposition to government surveillance. This is slightly ironic considering that Guardian columnist Deborah Orr had a few weeks previously written a cover story praising David Cameron’s plans to turn on default internet filters in every home in the U.K. However, that is not the main instance of double standards and hypocrisy which I would like to highlight in this blog.

A year ago columnists from The Guardian  together with other segments of the U.K. ‘liberal’ media turned on Julian Assange, a man who had previously been their darling.

The reason for this about turn was attempts by the Swedish Government to have Assange extradited in relation to suggestions that he had committed sex crimes. It is important to note that he had not actually been charged with anything, despite having previously gone to a Police station voluntarily to answer questions and waited in Sweden for 5 weeks before legally leaving the country. The current state of play is that the Swedes would like him to return to Sweden to answer some more questions- after which they will decide whether there are charges to be answered. Despite  doubts about whether  charges were going to be issued, tactics were used to try to return Assange to Sweden which would normally be used for dealing with terrorists.

A few male writers have foolishly published very ill advised opinions about the Assange’s alleged conduct. Having a sensible conversation about the allegations against Assange was actually very difficult. There was practically a media blackout in the U.K. When one interviewee on Newsnight mentioned the name of one of the women who had made the allegations he was told that it was not appropriate to mention the name of an alleged victim of sexual assault. However, the names of the women were easily available on the internet all of the world. In fact the situation about these allegations are extremely complicated and it is difficult to make a reasoned opinion about whether there is a reasonable chance of Assange being charged with anything or successfully prosecuted. Please note that is a separate issue from whether his conduct was appropriate or not.

If you want to get an understanding of the chain of events behind the Assange case I would recommend that you watch the brilliant Australian documentary Sex, Lies and Julian Assange.

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2012/07/23/3549280.htm

Watch it and make your mind up. This information has never been openly discussed in the U.K. media- allegedly because it is not U.K. practice to debate these issues before a case is tried. However, in this case it seems unlikely that there will ever be charges and in any case all this information is available in most of the world including the country in which any trial would take place.

Despite the lack of any clarity that Assange was ever going to be charged with anything (never mind be proven guilty) Guardian columnists went hell for leather to disparage and savage Assange’s character. If you read the link below you will find details of some of the abuse which was directed at him.

http://medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2012/686-incinerating-assange-the-liberal-media-go-to-work-sp-1707777774.html

Suzanne Moore accused him of being a ‘turd’ in a tweet and also suggested that he put hamsters up his anus. Deborah Orr, vanguard of liberty, said that he should return to face charges in a Guardian on-line article. This article has since been altered (with an acknowledgement that this was done) to reflect that he has not been charged. However, writing this in the first place shows a real disregard for journalistic rigour.

Assange was championed by the Guardian when he was revealing things which embarrassed U.K. and foreign Governments. However, as soon as the allegations of sexual misconduct were made he was suddenly transformed into a sleazy persona non grata without any reasonable debate about the validity of the allegations made against him.This is not of course an isolated case of shoot first and do the journalism later. George Monbiot reached a settlement with Lord MacAlpine in March for having written a libelous tweet  linking him to a sex scandal. It seems that when sexual misconduct is alleged all forms of process and evidence are considered unnecessary. In spite of this Will Self has written a piece recently about how upset he was about being wrongly suspected of being a pedophile while on a walk with his son. Clearly Guardian columnists are entitled to fair treatment and presumption of innocence while public figures they dislike are not.  

David Aaronvitch is also reported as having said ‘Don’t you think that supporters of Assange are misogynistic. Just for the record I don’t count myself as a supporter of Assange or a detractor. I have mixed feelings about Wikileaks and I have no idea whether he is guilty of any sexual crime. What I do have a strong dislike for is sloppy journalism and  schoolyard name calling by people who claim to represent the values of liberal and progressive society.

I think what the Assange  about turn shows is that the Guardian’s willingness to stand by whistle- blowers is not very robust. It is therefore very difficult to be convinced of the sincerity of their staunch defence of their own journalist and his partner. The McAlpine incident shows a lack of care to check the truthfulness of allegations.

The real problem with the Guardian is that there are seemingly two different teams writing in it. There is the team of hard journalists who go all over world breaking serious news stories and then there are the columnists who think the paper is just a platform for their own prejuduces where they can write nonsense  without doing any research.

If the paper really thinks that free speech and fair treatment of people are important it should stand by these principles and ignore opportunity to take a populist  slant against these principles.

Cameron, the BBFC and Censorship of Youtube- stage 2 in Destruction of the Internet

I read on the Telegraph website a couple  of days ago that David Cameron is planning for videos on Youtube and 'other' (all?) sites which involve user generated video content to have material  rated as suitable or not for different age groups and to have the ratings linked to web filters.
The details of how this will be done are rather vague. However, I understand that the method will involve a combination  of the author giving a rating and then crowd sourced ratings of the public whom can get to vote using buttons on the web site to rate the content. The system is to be designed by the British Board of Film Classification a body which currently rates (for a price) all DVDs Blu Rays and video games before they are released.
At first sight there are some things to commend this proposal. It is the public whom are doing the rating, not a faceless Whitehall body and there is a certain amount of democracy of access.
However, dig a bit deeper and think about the imlications of it and it begins to look much less attractive.
Here are the reasons why I think it is a bad idea;

1.   It is completely unnecessary. There are already ways of reporting and having inappropriate content taken off Youtube. If you find something on Youtube like a child being bullied then you want it removed quickly- not rated.

2.It is highly unlikely that there will be much consensus on what is inappropriate for different ages of children beyond what is completely unsuitable. Some parents will want music videos with suggestive dancing rated for adults. Some parents will want sexist attitudes towards women taken down or made adults only. Pacifists will want to give anything which glorifies war or weapons  given an adults only rating. Some parents will want anything to do with homosexuality made adults only and UKIP supporters will probably want anything taken down that promotes culture which they don't think is British. Pro-lifers will want anyhting that gives information about abortion screened from young people.There are many readers of both the Guardian and Daily Mail who want censorship on the web but they so not have shared motivations or views about what they want censored. One thing is for sure. Youtube will have a new audience of people who never looked at it before but now spend all day rating videos according to their political inclinations.

3.  It represents mission creep for Cameron from blocking sites to censoring content. When internet filtering was first discussed I said that it would graduate to censorship of individual items of content. This is in fact what is happening and it will only be one more stage on the way to full scale censorship of the internet.

 4. The current proposals don't represent the full extent of Cameron's censorship ambitions and his ultimate objectives will adversely affect the development of the internet. The Telegraph piece states that Ministers 'accept ' that it is impossible to use a body like the BBFC to rate content before it is put on the internet due to the sheer volume of material that is up there. The unstated implication of that statement is that if there was much less material on the internet then they would institute compulsory certification.
It is very important to note that there is only a huge volume of material on sites like Youtube and Videojug because there is not compulsory rating. Hundreds of thousands of people put up helpful videos on all sorts of  topics from how to prepare for a job interview to how to build a self assembly bookcase. People put these videos up for no financial gain and many of the people who put videos up have little or no money. Some people who post videos are victims of war or injustice. How could they afford the BBFC charge of £75 plus £6 per minute? That's £110 ($172) for a 5 minute video. Would you be inclined to put up a video of footage from your holiday for that price? What if you wanted to get footage out quickly to alert people to a crisis. Any system which involves people having to pre-submit something  will make on the hoof citizen journalism impossible.
Just imagine Cameron had been around to propose this type of censorship in the early days of the internet. Most of the content you enjoy now would not be there and you would not even realise that it could have been there. What future developments in the democratization of media will be stymied by starting on the slippery slope of a controlled internet. 

5. What about sites which won't or can't co-operate with Cameron's rating proposals? The internet is (at the moment) a global and relatively free to access phenomenon. However, Cameron seems to want file sharing sites other than  Youtube to adopt his proposals. If small file sharing sites are ordered to install ratings programmes then are they going to be able to afford to do so and if they cant then will their access to U.K. homes be blocked. What about sites which are hosted in other countries- are they going to be forced to institute ratings just to get access to British homes? What if other countries all start having their own ratings systems? It will be impractical to simultaneously respond to all sorts of different ratings systems. The result will be that the internet will cease to be international with sites being blocked from all sorts of countries because they don't correspond to their ratings system. What about videos posted by individual users in other countries. Will someone posting a video in the U.S.A. have to complete Cameron's self assessment questionnaire before their video can be seen by U.K. viewers? The odds are that they won't want to bother and as a result U.K. homes will not be able to watch their content. The end result will be balkanisation of the internet- a situation which will be very inconvenient for most people but a boon for MEDIA BARONS, CORRUPT POLITICIANS WITH THINGS TO HIDE AND CENSORSHIP BUREAUCRATS.

6. Who is going to Police the effectiveness of this self-censorship process? 
Cameron will want to ensure that all video sharing sites are operating according to his policies and are operatin g a ratings system 'effectively'. He will need someone to police this.
ENTER THE BBFC.
 Have a look at at the BBFC website. They have a category of charges on their charging listing called 'Digital Platforms' with fees starting at £500 per year for sites with 100+ videos. A logical extension of Camerons proposals will be fora public body to audit what video sharing sites are displaying with fines for people who don't co-operate or deal with 'inappropriate' material quickly or efficiently. This will be policed by the BBFC who will charge fees (eventually much higher than quoted above) for auditing sites. The result will be that  sites will have eventually feel that they have to pre-approve  material before they put it on. They will charge people who want to upload material so that they can recover the cost of having someone watch it and to cover BBFC fees.

7. Who are going to be the new Publishers and distributors of material on the web?
Answer: The old publishers of CDs and DVDs and satellite TV. A highly regulated media only offers access to big players and those who will dance to their tune
Since it will eventually be impossible  to view uploaded material from other countries and ordinary citizens will  not be able to afford to pay censorship fees there will be a new role for publishers. Companies like Virgina and New International will pick the 'best of the web' from other  countries and package it in a pre-censored way with all controversial political material extracted according to U.K. Government requirements. New bands and performers who want to get their work seen by the public will have to pay media companies to get exposure for their work who will probably also want to get exclusive rights to selling their music. The ability to bypass big business to sell your work direct to the public will cease.  Rupert Murdoch will once again control media in the U.K. and be able to influence political opinion.
Big media lobbyists are involved  in moves to implement internet censorship  around the world. These companies do not care about protection of children - they want to retake the control of media which has been lost to them. They want once again to control what people see and hear and be able to exploit producers and consumers in the ways they used to.
Notably Cameron does not have anything to say about the large numbers of soft porn channels available on Sky and he has explicitly said that he does not have a problem with page 3. Answer- he is still afraid of standing up to big media interests. He will undoubtedly have discussed his current plans with Rupert Murdoch who is currently rubbing his hands in glee at how he or is sun is going to control the new U.K. local  internet which we will have in a few years.


In summary- my doomsday scenario involves some extrapolation for Cameron's proposals but they are in my opinion logical extrapolations.

If you trust David Cameron to control the media then I urge you to read the brilliant book Dial M for Murdoch by Tom Watson M.P. and then see if you still feel the same way.
If you are a feminist like Deborah Orr who believes that Cameron's proposals will stop children seeing material which is sexist or offensive to women then you are very naive. Cameron is a Conservative, not a feminist.
If you think Cameron's proposals will reduce access to pornography of any kind then you are also very naive. 

Power of Big media Concerns = Billions of Dollars

Power of pornography industry = Billions of Dollars

Power of self help groups +
 civil rights groups+ 
 musicians who sell their music through the internet+
 and bloggers who want to talk to the world about what concerns them+
 people that want to upload their holiday and hobby videos   
                                                    = Maybe enough dollars for a pizza if they all chip in.

All these groups have equal access to the internet at the moment but they won't once the internet becomes regulated.
All Camerons proposals are the thin edge of a very fat wedge which will destroy the internet as we know it. 

Oppose him now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Why Cameron's Default Porn Filters Will Herald the End of The Internet as We Know It. Just Ask the Experts in Communist China Who are Designing the Filters

David Cameron is currently succeeding in persuading all the major Internet providers in the UK to turn on automatic porn filters in the internet service to all U.K. consumers by next year. If you don't want your Internet access to be filtered you will have to request your Internet provider to turn off the filter. 

Understandably this may cause you some embarrassment and some annoyance regardless of the reasons you choose to have it disarmed. It is perfectly possible for families to install these filters in their own households at the moment but for inexplicable reasons few are choosing to do this so the nanny state needs to step in. One of the suggestions is that it will only be turned off for periods at a time before it kicks in again automatically. So you may have to constantly produce your ISP with a running log of how often you want to access adult material and/or all the other stuff that the filter will stop you getting access to. In the end you may just think it is less bother to leave the censored internet on all the time and then capitulate to compulsory censorship- Nudge- I think they call it. You just need help form the Government to do the right thing for your children -even if you haven’t got any.

I am not going to waste time arguing the merits or otherwise of pornography on the Internet. If you believe it is a serious problem and that censorship of it is a good thing then nothing I will say is likely to sway you.  I just want to alert you to the costs you will incur to achieve this objective (or rather not achieve it- as it will almost certainly not succeed in limiting access to pornography).  

  

Many of you will think that porn filters are irrelevant to you because you don't access porn sites. If you think this then you are SERIOUSLY WRONG! I don't believe that Cameron is concerned about people watching pornography in any case. What irks him and the interests which he represents is that he can't currently charge providers of pornography large license fees for the rights to broadcast it or ensure that all the profits are channelled to Rupert Murdoch and his other friends in big media.

Mandatory Porn filters are not designed primarily to reduce access to pornography- like every other form of censorship which has existed in the UK they are designed to block the flow of free ideas, limit citizen access to broadcast media and to prevent certain types of knowledge and information being circulated.
Most of the things that all of you enjoy about accessing the Internet now are under threat and that is everything from cheap or free music downloads, to cheap Internet shopping to free and unhampered access knowledge about pollution, food safety, science , medicine and anything you care to mention. All of it will be gone.
I realised this as soon as the porn filter initiative was first announced. However, I was reticent to write a post on it as people would think I was a conspiracy theorist. I was going to rely on past experience of censorship in the UK to build my argument. Fortunately, I don't have to. Information leaked to media in the last few days about the conversations between the Government and Internet providers prove conclusively that all the concerns I have are legitimate.  The overall intention of these proposals is to develop centralised control over what people are all allowed to see on the Internet and ultimately who can publish on the net and what they can make public.

The current state of the Internet is very inconvenient for many large vested interests.
It is inconvenient for large media companies. In the days when you could only access an audience by tooling up record production and getting expensive promotion it was very difficult for musicians to get their music heard  and most of the profits went to the record companies. Now bands can promote their music direct to their audience and there is no need  for record companies or that sort of middleman - performers can connect directly with their audience.
A free internet is inconvenient for academic publishers. If you can publish research on the Internet for free why waste money funnelling profits into academic publishers who will only limit the potential audience to your research. Book publishers, distributors, media critics and a whole range of hangers on have all become redundant...... At least for the moment.
A free internet is inconvenient to people who want to charge British customers £20 for a CD or DVD that is available for $5.00 in the USA or a range of other items that are cheaper overseas. Many people on the left believe that big business wants to liberalise markets. They don't. Free markets are the enemy of business which wants to develop a monopoly or dominate a market. Conservatives are not libertarians- they represent vested interests - not the interests of the majority. Government regulations whether they be censorship, licensing rules or other forms of regulation do not hinder big business. Rather they support it by making it difficult for new providers to enter the market or access customers.
A free Internet is also inconvenient to Governments who want to prevent their citizens from knowing about inconvenient facts such as institutional racism in the Police, dangers of pesticides, the effects of global arms trade, the spurious justification for the Iraq war and other conflicts, mobile phone footage of Police brutality and all sorts of other things which they don't want people to know about.
If you Don't believe me then  google Spycatcher - this was a book which was freely available in the U.S.A yet banned in Britain and that was less that three decades ago.  Read about the biased media coverage of the miners strike or the fact that a passing reference to the war in Northern  Ireland was censored out of a Star Trek to give two examples of how mainstream media of the UK suppressed the exchange of ideas. Read about how the Obscene Publications Act was used in the 1970s against people who published books on how to grow marajuana or against people who ran gay bookshops. Censorship is ALWAYS abused by Governments for political purposes including the U.K.
Another case in point is the Video Recordings Act. This was brought in to the U.K. On the basis of a similar moral panic to one surrounding Internet porn. In the early 1980s there were ridiculous assertions about how the nations children were watching so called 'video nasties' were published in tabloids, backed up by very methodologically unsound research. As a result the Video Recordings Act was brought in which makes it compulsory to have footage watched and rated before it can be released on a DVD. This may not seem to be an unduly unreasonable measure until you consider the implications. Video certification is very expensive and the cost is borne by the producer of the DVD. If you are a small company wanting to release a very specialist silent or foreign film in the UK. Then you may find the costs of certification prohibitive - I think it was something like £10 a minute 15 years ago. If you wanted to film you amateur dramatics society performing Macbeth and sell the DVDs in HMV you would have to stump up something like £1000 for certification before you even start. If you don't then selling the video is illegal. Of course nowadays people will just upload the video to Youtube. However, the ultimate end point of Cameron's aims will make sites like Youtube off limits in the UK. He says he wants the same restrictions on web material as exist in what sells in the shops. This is only possible if content is scrutinised before it is uploaded and that will cost money and restrict people's access to the web as consumers and publishers.

It is important to look also at how an Internet filter will work. A computer programme is not bright enough to know whether something is intended to titilate. If it is programmed to block nudity it will block anything that looks like nudity to it- from swimsuit shots in a fashion catalogue to paintings of nudes by old masters. If it is asked to filter based on words or names them it will also filter out educational material, discussions and totally innocuous material that sounds like it might be salacious. For example an American College with name beaver in the title had to change its name because it was being blocked by porn filters. Not sure what steps the World Wildlife Fund or the Beaver Protection society can take (if there is one) - they may have to rename the species like they did with German Shepherds during the war.

Similarly, I worked in an organisation which had porn filters and I was unable to access information  about adult social care because the sites had the word adult in the title. Anyone in education around medicine or social care will have to go through the embarrassing process of asking their Internet provider to remove their porn filter if they want to be able to access material for their job at home.

If a porn filter is to work in terms of restricting sexually explicit material it will inevitably restrict a lot of completely non-sexual material also.

Okay so lets look at other reasons why Cameron's filtering proposal is already suspect. According to information on various news websites this week the Open Rights Group  has been told that the Government has been in discussions with ISPs about the filters being used to filter out all sorts of material including 'violent material', 'extremist and terrorist related content', anorexia and eating disorders' and other issues including smoking. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/29/uk-internet-filter-block-more-than-porn_n_3670771.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false#sb=2080122,b=facebook

 Again the only way a filter can deal with this sort of material is to restrict everything that contains certain keywords. Thus a terrorism filter will restrict websites containing intellectual debate about the topic and also websites that are critical of Government policy about how to deal with terrorism and its causes. This of course will nicely fit in with the Conservative agenda of restricting free speech and preventing anti- war rhetoric.

Also worrying is that filters could restrict ' esoteric topics' and discussion forums. Thus, opinions outside the mainstream or which support rights of marginalised people or communities will be potentially suppressed. The end result will be an Internet in which only sites which respond to certain filter friendly criteria will be guaranteed access to a reasonable audience.  This will have the additional benefit from Cameron's point of view of re concentrating media ownership amongst the old media companies who can afford to have their material censored and packaged. You would not be reading this blog if I had to pay to have someone read it or have a programme screen it to make sure it didn't upset filters.
There is clear evidence for this in the fact that Cameron has laser the ISP filters to look at copyright protection. See link below. It is likely that there has been lobbying by media firms. http://www.thecmuwebsite.com/article/camerons-porn-filters-could-also-target-copyright-infringement/  A filter is not going to know whether something breaches copyright. A copyright filtering system will only work if people have to register or flag material as copyright protected in the first place. Thus there will have to be some system whereby you get you home made video of your cats chasing toy mice copyrighted before you can load it up on youtube. And you will probably have to have someone vet it (no pun intended) and rate it for suitability. All this will of course cost money which you will to pay to whoever has been contracted to this vetting. Most  people will not bother and will go back to being passive consumers of media. Citizen journalism will be dead. The winners will be people like Rupert Murdoch who will be able to charge people to access their platforms and ensure that only certain companies and people with lots of money get access to media. If you are a band starting out you will find that your opportunities to connect with your audience without using middlemen and companies become limited. This fits in with the views of Conservatives and people on the intellectual left who think that the public are incapable of coming to their own conclusions about what has artistic merit.
Many people thought that Murdoch was foolish to initiate pay walls for his newspapers online because people would not pay for online content. However, Murdoch is a smart individual and he realised that days of an unregulated and free Internet were probably numbered and indeed the filtering proposals could well be a result of his lobbying.
The next stage in this process will be a Balkanised Internet- different countries will only have access to material approved for their country. They will not have free access to news and opinions from other countries. They will not be able to shop in an international free market for goods because as I have already said Conservatives are actually against free markets and want to restrict how people trade to benefit vested interests. This is part of the rationale behind Internet regulation.
The default use of filters is an almighty step change in how the Internet operates in this country and it will be the beginning of a slippery slope towards the compulsory regulation of Internet sites and a requirement for approval of content before it goes up.
The real problem in this country and the reason that we will sleep walk into censorship is that there is no real lobby within the U.K. that is committed to protecting free speech or preserving the anarchistic and creative environment that is the Internet. The Left wing in Britain is just as in favour of a top down controlled society as the Right is and there is no strong libertarian sentiment or grassroots support for free speech rights. Tony Blair, not satisfied with large scale slaughter in Iraq on humanitarian grounds, wanted the United Nations to endorse a policy of pre-emptive intervention in the affairs of ‘failed states’. Commentators such as the Guardian's Deborah Orr take delight in the censorship of things they don't like. They forget that free speech is something that can't exist in half measure. Of course, people need to be accountable for the effects of things which they write and rights also confer responsibilities, and abuse of these rights should and does attract severe penalties. But this is not the same thing as censorship. Also it will not be Deborah Orr or Zoe Williams who will be doing the censoring (chilling enough as that prospect would be). It will be farmed out to big business who will be asked to follow a Conservative agenda.

Deborah Orr will quickly find that she cannot do her job without her filter being turned off. As a journalist she will doubtless feel that she has legitimate reasons for requesting it to be turned off. However, ordinary citizens will worry about the stigma of being identified as potential pervert of they object to the filter or ask it to be turned off. So they will accept it, and then they will accept compulsory filters and eventually they will forget there was a time when they could read what they wanted or say what they wanted without someone looking over their shoulder.

The Internet is a tremendous force for freedom and sharing across communities across the world and it offers huge opportunities for artists and academics to work outside the powers of bug media. If you accept these filters being imposed you will be a huge step closer to losing most of the things that you value about the Internet today. The company developing the filters is a Chinese company with strong links to the Chinese Government and its practices of censorship of free speech. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23452097

Do you trust David Cameron and Chinese business with you intellectual freedom. IF NOT YOU MUST ACT NOW AS YOU WILL NOT GET  ANOTHER CHANCE. The filters will quickly become compulsory.

1. Sign the petition against default porn filters NOW. http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/51746

2. Contact your MP and tell them that you are against the proposals because of the dangers they represent to free speech, free access to media and publishing and free trade.

3. Tell anyone who tells you that watching legal porn is bad and needs to be limited by the Government that is a private matter for individuals and households and is none of their business or the state's. Say this even of you have absolutely no interest in adult material or even dislike it. There is bound to be something else which you do like that they disapprove of whether that be smoking, drinking, fast cars, gangsta rap, non-energy saving light bulbs, flying abroad, sun bathing without using sun block or flower arranging. After the censors and statists have dealt with the perverts they will be trying to tell you how they think you should live your life too.

4. Read Wired magazine online and other sources of tech news to find out about how can subvert Government regulation and surveillance. Get involved with the online community around anti-censorship and pro-freedom initiatives.

5. Tell your Internet provider that you don't want the filters and you will consider changing providers to a small provider if they implement it.

6. Save this article in a file and read it in 5 years. If Cameron's proposals to through then you can evaluate how accurate my predictions about the casing down of the Internet were. I know I am right about what will happen if Cameron gets his way. I just hope it doesn't happen.

7. If you like this article share it on Facebook and Twitter and leave a comment. If you don't like it or disagree with points please leave a comment also. 

SUPPORT FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND FREE EXPRESSION, INTERNET BASED FREE MARKETS AND INTERNET FREEDOM. IF YOU DON'T THEN THEY WILL BE GONE FOREVER.