As always EFF is 100% right. This is a hard but important line to draw in the sand. Laws surrounding networks should be enforced “at the edges” not in the middle. Your ISP is a router, all dozen hops between your computer and the website you are visiting are routers, their job is to route, not filter. If some internet cable routes through a country with different laws, you want them enforcing their weird laws on the wire about how you can’t insult their king? Of course not.
Or better yet, as is happening in this article, you want fucking comcast (or some other isp), the company that fucks you with their monopoly power at every possible opportunity, to be the arbiter of what is acceptable content and what is not? Fuck them. Leave that to the legislative process and courts.
If what you or the website is doing is illegal in the jurisdiction it is located, let local law enforcement handle it. They can imprison you or the website operator, that is where the crime is happening, the crime is not happening because packets are flowing from one end to the other.
This one is a tough nut to crack, because generally I agree, but holy fucking shit we’re talking about Kiwi Farms here.
There is nothing not one fucking thing that place produces that isn’t a garbage fire of harassment, abuse, and violence.
Usually the EFF is spot on, but I find their argument in this case pretty weak. While I think there are better ways to handle this as well than straight censorship, like give me a break, EFF, no one is doing anything about these scumfucks. I would give one shit about such an argument if I felt there was anything that would happen to stop this, but I’m pretty fucksure it won’t. If I felt like law enforcement was closing in and as was going to charge everyone involved in the site under some sort of gang-harassment law (which probably doesn’t even exist), then maybe this argument would hold weight. But I don’t feel like that, and I feel like the more people make weak arguments for horrendous places like this, more vulnerable people will continue to suffer Kiwi Farms abuse, harassment, and violence.
To put it even more simply: When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail. We know that this will backfire in the long run. Instead, we go after the bad guys themselves and hold them accountable.
Who the fuck is actually doing that, EFF?? You’re basically arguing for endless abuse from these fucks because the justice system doesn’t give one fucking shit about what they’re doing because the justice system doesn’t generally give a fuck about vulnerable people.
That’s what must happen here. The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal. We should be giving them the resources and societal mandate to do so. Solid enforcement of existing laws is something that has been sorely lacking for harassment and abuse online, and it’s one of the reasons people turn to censorship strategies. Finally, we should enact strong data privacy laws that target, among others, the data brokers whose services help enable doxxing.
- ACAB, the cops are corrupt and you can’t trust them.
- The courts are corrupt and you can’t trust them.
- We’re living in a hell-hole of a gerontocracy where government can’t pass a fucking bill to end Daylight Savings time, and you expect them to do something about policing this when we can’t even get cops to do their fucking jobs without murdering innocent citizens in the process? Get the fuck out of here, EFF, you’re a joke now.
Your argument really sucks. You don’t trust the courts or law enforcement to uphold laws, but you’re willing to allow ISP’s, like Comcast (the most hated company in the US), to regulate what speech can be used online? That’s absolute madness and defies all logic.
It seems odd to say the authorities aren’t trustworthy so let’s give authority to yet another person. Why do you want to give more power somewhere because you don’t like the other people that have that power. It’s still a corporation. Why trust corporations over government?
Edit: keep in mind one is supposed to abide by law, the one you want though is only beholden to itself.
@pjhenry1216 @zquestz @dingus are you seriously asking why it’s okay to let IBM sabotage Hitler?
IBM didn’t sabotage Hitler though, neither did Ford. But that isn’t at all what anyone is saying anyway.