About as often as it rains in the English country side, you can find a claim about how the United States has “big brother” and is trying to rule its people with an iron fist. Ironically, just as often you can find an instance where a European government, especially England has attempted to go beyond anything the US has done it her own citizens. A primary example was released in a news story today:

UK ISPs switch on mass Wikipedia censorship
Posted by Rupert Goodwins

The following notice has appeared on Wikipedia today when many UK users attempt to edit content:

“Wikipedia has been added to a Internet Watch Foundation UK website blacklist, and your Internet service provider has decided to block part of your access. Unfortunately, this also makes it impossible for us to differentiate between different users, and block those abusing the site without blocking other innocent people as well.”

According to discussions on the Wikipedia administrators noticeboard, this is because a transparent proxy has been enabled for customers of Virgin Media, Be/O2/Telefonica, EasyNet/UK Online, PlusNet, Demon and Opal. This has two effects: users cannot see content filtered by the proxies, and all user traffic passing through the proxies is given a single IP address per proxy. As Wikipedia’s anti-vandalism system blocks users by IP address, one single case of vandalism by a single UK user prevents all users on that user’s ISP from editing. The effect is to block all editing from anonymous UK users on that list of ISPs. Registered users can continue to edit. 

The content being filtered is apparently that deemed to meet the Internet Watch Foundation’s critera for child pornography – in one case, this involves a 1970s LP cover art which, although controversial, is still widely available. 

Reports on the admin noticeboard say that this filtering is easy to circumvent, either by using Wikipedia’s secure server or by sending a request to find the page via parameters in the URL. However, no fix has been found – nor is one expected – for the proxy address problem.

“This is the first I’ve come across UK wide internet censorship, and I’m shocked. I had no idea until now that like China, we too have built a great firewall - only we keep quiet about ours.”, user Hahnchen said, on the noticeboard. 

http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10009938o-2000331777b,00.htm

The world may not be black and white, but blatant hypocrisy sure is. While we do need to create a child-porn free Internet (and world for that matter), it is unlikely that is the true purpose of the action stated in the article. Granted, it is conspiratorial to talk about “what’s really happening”, but the UK government has a history of things like this, not to mention sister nation Australia has already blocked large parts of the Internet.

I guarantee you won’t see many of the same people ranting and raving about the US speaking bad about this - even if they did, they’d be caught on one of the many billions of cameras in the UK - but wait, even the UK has laws against protesting, apparently you aren’t allowed to say anything negative during a protest there… So much for big brother here in the US.