The people in charge of the U.K. seem to believe that George Orwell’s “1984” is a how-to guide… for beginners… and if anything, the current censorious regime is anything but amateurs, especially when it comes to pornography.
With the justification of stopping minors from viewing pr0n, the U.K. is requiring that anyone who wants to view anything declared to be pornographic submit personal information as part of an age verification system in order to view it. Sites that do not provide a non-pornographic splash page where this mandatory verified identification check can be undertaken will be either fined to the tune of £250,000 or outright blocked in the U.K. This applies even if most of the site’s content is non-pornographic. This age-ID check will be regulated by British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), which has been heavily censoring in the U.K. for more than a century, and the private MindGeek, which would warehouse a list of pornography watching Brits, including the plethora of perverts in the House of Commons (even inner party members in 1984 could turn off Big Brother for a short amount of time…).
The fig leaf of potential privacy is the possibility of buying a “porn pass“.
“As well as registering with AgeID, Brits will also be able to access porn sites using a voucher you can buy from high street shops.
“Thousands of shops will offer the special ID cards, which users can link to an app known as Portes.
“Through Portes, they can then login to sites without having to hand over their email address.
“Clark said: ‘The PortesCard will be available to purchase from any of the UK’s 29,000 PayPoint outlets as a voucher.
“‘It will also be available from selected high street retailers, which we can share more details on soon.
“A unique validation code on the purchased card must be activated via the Portes app within 24 hours, otherwise it’ll expire, he added.
“Verified users will then automatically be granted access to all sites using AgeID.
“Each PortesCard will cost £4.99 for use on a single device, or £8.99 for use across multiple devices.”
PayPoint is a system for paying bills and utilities, and would presumably have at least some verification, which of course will be recorded in a searchable database, similarly to the online verification system. Even if this was set up such that a person verified the information and didn’t record the information, this could be abused, such as from people buying them in bulk and selling them, at which point recording all transactions, and who gets what pass codes, will quickly become mandatory.
The irony of all this is that the U.K. already has porn filters and a list of people who wish to view pornography online.
“The UK has already implemented a de facto porn filter. You have to turn off your adult filters to be able to access the open web. And of course, the filters have unnecessarily restricted access to non-pornographic content on the internet. How much so? At its height, 20% of the entire internet was blocked behind the UK’s overactiveporn filters. Even today, some of these adult filters are blocking the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine – one of the furthest things from a pornographic site. Even this site, Private Internet Access, was at one point misidentified as an adult site and blocked by default in the UK.
“If you have to tell your ISP that you want to opt-out of your adult filter, and they mark that in their database – how is that different than a list of porn users? Why should you need to go to the corner shop to pick up a 24 hour porn pass if every home internet connection or smartphone dataplan is tied to a credit card or bank account? Basically, the government already has a list of which households want to view pornography – now they want to granularize that data so they can know which individuals are watching pornography.”
The only other option is VPN or using an encrypted network (wither of which could land you in a government database). But then, this just be the justification cited to banning even those option.
These are but some of the “good intentions” that the road to hell is paved with.
