In a serious embarrassment to the British government's vision of imposing Chinese-style internet filtering "to protect the children", a government aide who helped draw up plans for the filter has been arrested on suspicion of possessing child pornography. TechDirt has the dirt:
The UK government has spent years trying to impose its version of morality upon the Internet, demanding that ISPs impose mandatory opt-out porn filters, even if those filters have since been easily bypassed and often block entirely legitimate websites. Worse, the UK government has seemed intent on throwing itself face-first down the slippery slope of censorship, with plans to expand these filters to block arbitrarily-defined "extremist" content. Prime Minister David Cameron has repeatedly and loudly proclaimed to anyone who'll listen his sole mission is to "protect the children" from the beasts that dwell in the "darkest corners of the Internet." In the process he's blamed nearly everyone, including Google and Yahoo, for not doing enough to thwart child porn.Apparently, people who live in glass houses should not throw thermonuclear warheads (I think that's how that saying goes). [TechDirt]
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