re: #293 wheat-dogghazi

If the United States government has the power to imprison terrorists without proper trial or evidence or due process, who will they imprison next? I don’t know, maybe you should ask Brandon Mayfield. Sometimes the slope really is slippery, and you might want to consider some cleats before you step out onto it.

To Obdicut: I personally don’t believe that those controls should exist. Certainly they could use whatever system they were going to use to detect and censor, and instead use it to detect and report to the proper authorities. Find those bastards and prosecute them as hard as possible. But I don’t think that it’s a good thing for a company to have a button they can press that makes undesirable information suddenly disappear — not when ‘undesirable’ can be defined arbitrarily if they so wished.

Detection of illegal content, accurate and swift reporting of it to the necessary parties, and quick response by those parties to remove it at the source; I’m all for that. But installing a system to censor search results (yes, I am aware that some of this functionality already exists: I don’t think that it should) opens some very precarious doors. And it doesn’t even solve the problem, not really — just because something doesn’t show up in a Google search doesn’t mean it’s not accessible. It just means you need to know the address. Even if it’s not in the DNS, you can still get to it if you know the direct IP. How long and how hard have we been fighting the War on Drugs, yet anyone anywhere still knows where to get it if they really want it. The same principle applies here.

I think the effort would be better spent working on the source of the problem, rather than building systems to censor the information and hoping those systems are never misused.