'Censorship creep': Pirate Bay block will affect one-third of U.K.

Found on CNet News on Sunday, 17 June 2012
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Designed by telecommunications giant British Telecom (BT), "Cleanfeed" was used to filter out child abuse imagery, and it did so with great success.

In 2007, Home Office minister Vernon Coaker ordered all U.K. ISPs to subscribe to Cleanfeed to prevent access to scenes of sexual abuse and "criminally obscene" content.

In April 2011, the High Court in London ruled BT must block access to file-sharing site Newzbin2 at ISP level -- using none other than the Cleanfeed system. It was widely seen as a "test case" building up to forcing bigger file-sharing sites off the British Web.

Almost exactly a year later, six of the U.K.'s largest broadband providers were told by the same High Court to impose a block on their customers from accessing magnet-link sharing site The Pirate Bay.

Which was the plan right from the start. By abusing the "think of the children" argument, those in favor of censorshop are trying to silence the critics; simply by implying (or even openly saying) that if you are against this proposal, you support child abuse. Once the few critics who still dared to speak up have been silenced and the proposal became a binding law it only takes a few years of silence around the project. Then you can begin to extend the now existing censorship infrastructure and abuse it.