When I was growing up I didn’t have internet. When I finally did it changed my life and my perspective of everything. It freed my mind and it freed me.I will do anything it takes to protect it’s freedom.

I knew how to make the difference between right and wrong without a commission censoring anything they consider to be terrorist activity.Not to mention terrorists will find other ways to spread the word, ways which will be harder to track then open websites.

We also live in a world where most legislative solutions are permanent, even when it is obvious they aren’t working. The usual solution is to “tweak” and build on the same flawed foundation rather than looking for the root cause. In many cases, it isn’t that the solution didn’t go far enough, it was that the solution they tried was simply wrong, maybe even 180 degrees off.

Freedom and liberty are the MOST IMPORTANT values we hold. The concept of giving that up, even a little of it, to “protect” the population is wrong. It simply isn’t worth taking away the rights of everyone in order to capture a few more criminals (assuming that happens). It’s much better to let a few get away (and yes, that may result in acts of terrorism, murders, etc.) than to force every citizen to pay (in time, money, inconvenience, etc.) every day to prevent it.

It may sound cruel, but it simply isn’t worth it (as a country) to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and billions of hours to save a few hundred or even a few thousand lives. If that were true, there are many more lives lost to non-terrorist causes that could be saved for much less time and money.

* “Governments must disseminate lists of illegal, terrorist websites”

* “The Council Regulation (EC) No 881/2002 of 27 May 2002 (art 1.2)
should be explained that providing Internet services is included in providing economics instruments to Al Qaeda (and other terrorist persons and organisations designated by the EU) and therefore an illegal act” (swedish IPs that respect their customer’s privacy)

* “On Voice over IP services it must be possible to flag users for terrorist activity.” (skype)

* “Internet companies must allow only real, common names.” (4chan)

* “Social media companies must allow only real pictures of users.” (facebook)

* “At the European level a browser or operating system based reporting button must be developed.”

* “Governments will start drafting legislation that will make offering… a system [to monitor Internet activity] to Internet users obligatory for browser or operating systems…as a condition of selling their products in this country or the European Union.” 

(MS,Apple,Google,Mozilla,(im not including linux because none of these clowns have heard of it…sorry linus))

seriously, government officials, stay away from the internet. you don’t understand it, you don’t know what you are doing, just stay away.
maybe in 60-70 years when this generation have most the seats you can start talking…

If you have a feeling for what the stakes are, and what kind of games are played on the grand level, you will understand this is inevitable. Only when we get a bunch of people elected who are not war crazed maniacs will we get our privacy back.

=> Not the supidest thing ever, just lots of half-assed ideas, many of which probably come from people who’ve no idea what they’re talking about, and which are not likely to make it into law form. That’s not to say people shouldn’t keep an eye on the development. This whole thing seems to be very much biased to perceiving threat avoidance as more important than allowing free comunication. That said, there’s even a sentence demanding that monitoring of the Internet must focus on specific threats and may not target the general public — also “to be discussed”…

What I’m saying is, those ideas are indeed crazy, but not in the sense that they’re wild ideas no one has ever proposed; they’re crazy in the sense that anyone who has used the internet consistently would understand they’re unfeasible to implement and equally untenable.

Edit: Found it. Sucks.

Incidentally, it seems that the plural of ‘formula’ is ‘formula’s’. Good to know.

No, the OTHER one.

You may have opinions about how well it’s doing its job, but attributing some sort of monovalent bad motive is simply unwarranted.

I don’t think you have to assume consciously bad motives.  People make moral decisions on the basis of emotion.  The reasons they give are almost always ad hoc rationalizations bearing no resemblance for their true reasons for doing the thing.  When you give a guy a job like “protect the internet from terrorists” he gets a charge out of the self-importance and — unconsciously — does everything he can to justify that self-importance.  This includes inflating the threat (something we’re seeing a whole lot of with respect to terrorism) and trying to justify rather more draconian measures than someone with other incentives would think was wise.

Bad guys never believe they’re the bad guys.  Usually they think they’re actually the good guys.  Almost no one ever has bad intentions; that’s not really the point here.  People in power work to keep themselves in power and accrue more power because that’s the way the incentives are set up and because human beings are incredible at rationalizing their actions.