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from the going-to-need-lots-of-volunteers-to-build-the-block-list dept.
Rhode Island is the latest US state to discuss mandatory censorship of web content, at first targeting pornography:
Rhode Island Democratic state Senators Frank Ciccone (@senatorciccone) and Hanna Gallo (@hannagallo27) have proposed grandstanding, unworkable legislation, "Relating to Public Utilities and Carriers—Internet Digital Blocking" which would mandate the state's ISPs to identify all the pornography on the [I]nternet, and then block it for all Rhode Islanders, unless those Rhode Islanders specifically requested their porn to be unblocked and paid $20 for the privilege.
These proposals fly in the face of the observation that automated pornography filters don't work and that even the manual ones are neither practical, reliable, nor scalable.
Source : Rhode Island proposes blocking all online porn and charging $20 to unblock it. Boing Boing.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 09 2018, @05:41PM (7 children)
So what? Those violations no longer exist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @06:00PM (2 children)
So what? The presence of such things automatically mean the US was not "pretty good" in the past. Even now, the US is far from merely 'not perfect' given the countless ways in which it is violating people's freedoms. I guess you just don't value liberty as much as I do.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 09 2018, @06:43PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @07:28PM
Your reply is completely nonsensical. I do see liberty, which is why I vehemently object to violations of it, such as mass surveillance. Your standards are simply very low.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @06:04PM (3 children)
There's no reason why they couldn't be re-instituted or even enshrined; the system still allows for such a thing.
The trajectory is correct, but not because the system is sound.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday March 09 2018, @10:42PM (2 children)
That's the problem with a free society. We're free to make bad choices and sometimes we do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 10 2018, @05:19PM (1 child)
That has nothing to do with protecting the rights of the individual, especially the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The Soviet Union had plenty of mechanisms for people to participate in the shaping of society; was the Soviet Union just a free society that made a few bad choices?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 10 2018, @07:24PM
And nobody said it did. We can make collectively bad choices just like we can make individually bad choices.