NixLuver's Journal: "A little bit of censorship"

Good god. I've been reading discussion by /. readers about censorship, and it seems that many otherwise thoughtful readers believe that 'a little censorship' is ok.

I'm constantly amazed by the imprecise thought patterns encouraged by our pop-media society. If asked, 'What do you think of censorship?', most /. readers would react with "Censorship is bad!" - fairly vehemently. But when the conversation comes up, they will qualify that to be "Well, it's bad unless it's censoring something I disagree with."

Guess what, people. Implementing the necessary intrusive infrastructure to eliminate 'kiddie porn' or 'bestiality' from the internet won't reduce the instance of these crimes - just the available evidence . And that intrusive infrastructure won't be used solely for protecting your eyes from kiddie porn. Trust me; the government or corporation that gets such a mandate will own your Internet overnight.

The powers that be will try and persuade you that you cannot tolerate such freedom. They will do their best to get you to finance their invasion of your headspace, in the guise of removing kiddie porn, bestiality, and spam from your internet experience. Then, when it's too late, you'll discover that they've also removed /., or Linux, or OpenBSD, or certain encryption protocols, ... etc. You'll find that you can no longer exchange emails with someone in China.

Images of crimes are not crimes, people, they're evidence of crimes. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Don't give up the first relatively democratic mass-media ever in human history so that you won't have to see offensive images. If you do, it will cost you much more than you think.