US lawmakers target the web

[darkes]

Interesting debate. As a general point, I think one of the problems here is that the vast majority of politicians (in Europe & the USA) know next to nothing about the net, or computers in general, and tend to believe what they are told by their advisors. For example Tony Blair barely knows how to switch a PC on, let alone how to use it. This can lead to highly entertaining moments when his hand written notes are miss transcribed
This should begin to change as younger politicians get elected.
I've written to my local political representative about several matters over here, and he has agreed with me on almost every point. Mind you, that is because he has worked in the IT sector in the past, as I have done for the last 20 years or so.

It gets a lot more tricky when you consider the issue as to what information sites should be able to display. The laws in each country are very different - to take an example, any site that showed pictures where a woman was displaying too much leg would be illegal in Saudi Arabia - hardly a porn site by western standards. I'm sure everyone would agree that pro nazi propoganda is offensive, but does that mean it should be banned? And how would you do that anyway? Oh, and btw I don't think that Europe respects the privacy of their citizens (not in the UK anyway) - otherwise why did the UK goverment pass a bill authorising interception of any email without requiring a court order to do so?

[rcgreen]

Originally posted by Pooh-Bear
Time to read up kid, not a single american soldier set foot on swedish soil. (or russian or british for that matter)

That's because so-called "neutral" Sweden was on the German side.

[Vorlin]

Well you got me there but if it was run by one I´d call it america.

I'd say you're mistaken there as America isn't run by a "few". The US government is a huge entity and yes, there's probably a small table where a select few made big shot calls but the american people as a whole is an assload bigger and technically, the government is supposed to work "for the people".

As I see it, the internet "freedom" that we have is severely misguided. They're worried about bandwidth and whatnot yet we have kiddie-porn being displayed rampantly (I got an email this morning from www.russianrape.com saying I signed up for it...wtf, I sent an email back saying "I don't know where you got my email from but don't ever send me this **** again. You have been warned."). They need to get their hands out of issues they know nothing about because I guarantee that 99% of Congress has no idea how the computer works, much less the internet.

[Pooh-Bear]

Yeah, that´s right rcgreen. But the comment was for the person that assigned the points. The swedish government did a ton of dirty stuff during the war and we are not proud of it. But the fact remains, sweden was never attacked.
And vorlin, ok maybe not one but in was in the context of EC being a fascist regime and I was pointing out that the US might not be so different. That was one of my main reasons for voting against Sweded joining it, the many similarities with USA. (and with that I don´t diss US, I just felt fine the way it was)