Child pornography is one of those bugbears -- much like terrorism -- that is so theoretically abhorrent to a lot of people that anyone trying to push legislation or regulation through the system can summon its specter for an instant veneer of credibility and legitimacy.
"If you don't support X, then you're leaving people vulnerable to Y!" has long been a cheap scare tactic trotted out in service of agendas on all sides of all aisles, pretty much since the dawn of time.
I hate that tactic in general, and I hate it here specifically. Not just because it's intellectually dishonest, but because it cheapens the actual victims of child pornography and exploitation -- using them as little more than rhetorical chess pieces.
In the UK, BT (The biggest ISP) introduced CleanFeed[0] and "strongly encouraged" (read forced) to be used by the government. It was claimed that it would only ever be used for blocking child sexual abuse imagery.
Recently a judge has ruled that BT must use the same system to block a website used to share links. [1]
The list of blacklist sites itself can only be edited by a small group (iirc 4 people) of unelected and unaccountable people at the IWF[2]
Cleanfeed is also pretty flawed, doesn't work with HTTPS, can be interrogated to get a list of blocked content (using TTLs) and misleadingly returns 404 for blocked content.
In Finland the government encourages the ISP's to filter a list of sites. The list is secret and managed by the police to filter out child porn. One of the sites included in that list is a site which is criticizing the filtering.
Not only that, but it makes requests for non-blocked pages on the target server look like they're coming from a small group of proxies (I guess just one in practice). This plays havoc with other assumptions around load balancing and anti-abuse that don't assume entire countries are funneled through single proxies.
"If you don't support X, then you're leaving people vulnerable to Y!" has long been a cheap scare tactic trotted out in service of agendas on all sides of all aisles, pretty much since the dawn of time.
I hate that tactic in general, and I hate it here specifically. Not just because it's intellectually dishonest, but because it cheapens the actual victims of child pornography and exploitation -- using them as little more than rhetorical chess pieces.