The UK Government's Struggle With Digital Rights

With his first accepted submission, Ajehals sends this excerpt from a post by the UK Pirate Party: "... at every turn, the coalition has been exposed as having no coherent policy on digital rights. Nothing illustrates this better than its zig-zag course on Internet filtering and website blocking. ... As if any further confirmation was needed that the government's policy on digital rights, and freedom of speech is entirely made up on the fly, along came the riots and a classic knee-jerk reaction to the use of social media. ... one of the few concrete parts of David Cameron’s statement to the recalled House of Commons was a full on attack on social media. It was carefully worded, but the thrust was that the Prime Minister thought further action is necessary to combat the 'ill' done by status updates. At this point things took a turn for the authoritarian, with MP Louise Mensch saying it was 'acceptable to shut Twitter and Facebook off for an hour or two.' ... Worse still, it has been recently revealed that the Government actually asked Ofcom to make Digital Economy Act appeals harder. It also wants to rule out a public consultation – once again trying to do deals away from the public eye. I suspect it is actually this fear of the power technology can give us to hold our representatives to account that drives alarm about the Internet in the corridors of power."

Re:This feels a lot like

[Hal_Porter]

No way dude. If twitter and facebook are inaccessible for even one minute because they are rebooting their servers it is way worse than 1984 or V for Vendetta because access to twitter is a basic human right. Not having access to them would be like if North Korea was run by Hitler disguised as Big Brother. And like you know how everyone is smoking dope and shit. Well that's exactly like soma in Brave New World. We should totally legalize it. And if you like put on a mask and try and blow up Parliament people call you a terrorist.