Via the Devil’s Kitchen, this piece of illiberal nonsense from our esteemed leaders and betters…
Sex offenders could be forced to register their e-mail addresses and chatroom names, the government says.
Home Secretary John Reid said he may make paedophiles put online identity details on the Sex Offenders Register.
Mechanisms would be set up to “flag up” approaches by them to sites popular among youngsters, he told the BBC.
Naturally by pressing the magic “paedophile” button, Reid and his cohorts of control freaks manage to misdirect the public who are fooled relatively simply with offers of “comfort” for parents. Forget paedophiles for a moment and just look at the core of what is being proposed here:
If everyone had a single internet identity for life, like a National Insurance number, this would make it far easier to track people, he said. Child internet safety expert John Carr, of children’s charity NCH, said: “This is a very welcome move.”
No, Mr Carr, it would not be a welcome move, it would be yet another step towards a totalitarian regime.
As others point out, changing one’s online identity is – at present – a simple matter. However, as we move inexorably towards the kind of control freakery being exercised by the authorities in Beijing it will become more difficult.
Oh, but, if we have nothing to hide… Yeah, right. One of the core principles of Internet safety is to manage one’s identity effectively; that is, don’t give out more than you have to. Anonymity is a cloak of protection for the innocent. Yes, and the guilty, too, but sensible precautions can make the web a reasonably safe place to conduct transactions.
I have more than one online persona. I shop with one, bank with another, blog with yet another. None of this is indicative of criminal activity and none of it is any of John Reid’s fucking business. True, at the moment, he shows no obvious sign of wanting to control my online activities… yet.
Today, the paedophile, tomorrow the blogger and the day after? You, perhaps. Give an illiberal totalitarian Stalinist fuckwit a micron and the bastard will knife you in the ribs for the parsec in your wallet.