> It's an inevitability that it will be used for nefarious purposes
Is it? There's a system in place already for child porn images and while they've made some mistakes, they have yet to block anything political as far as I am aware.
Well, it's now being used to block access to thepiratebay and other torrent sites if I recall correctly. And of course it's now being expanded to ALL porn (though that part has an opt-out) and rape porn.
I'd call that a very clear example of mission creep.
The blocking of Newzbin was a court order, not an action taken by the Government.
It does seem that they want to regulate material 'advocating terrorism' though, which could easily be a slippery slope. Still, without evidence such an argument is fallacious.
I'd call a court order "action taken by the Government". It might not be action taken by the legislature, but it is still government mandated filtering using systems originally intended for child pornography.
I'm not sure it's really fair to say that any system which gets used by the courts is 'the Government'. Almost any system is open to abuse if it's not perfectly constructed, and the blame can lie nowhere else but 'the Government' in this case. It kinda ruins the ability to determine where the actual fault lies. Was it faulty ruling or was it badly drafted law?
Can anyone prove it is inevitable? One might be able to prove that it has always happened that way in the past. Or that all recent attempts ended up that way.
What kind of hell will be unleashed on the poor sap who gets his/her personal webserver blocked mistakenly for the excuse of "rape porn"? I expect he/she could find themselves in a similar situation to this poor guy: http://abarristerswife.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/exhibit-a-th...
Indeed it does, but after this case these powers were removed and in fact this case was used as a benchmark.
The point is that a 'slippery slope' argument is fallacious, as anything can be twisted into this, for example:
ISPs knowing the destination IP address of our traffic? That's just a precursor to them blocking all anti government speech and therefore it is a bad thing.
> Documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden have shown that the government relies on vaguely worded provisions in Ripa to justify surveillance programmes such as Tempora.
> “I have a big problem because the business records part of the Patriot Act, which is what was used to justify this, was designed for specific investigations,” Sensenbrenner told Fox News on Friday.
I guess what I'm saying is that not all slippery slope arguments are wrong, particularly when there are examples showing the opposite has happened.
In particular, I'm arguing for a form of the precautionary principle: don't make sweeping changes to the law unless you've really restricted the scope of those changes to exactly what you want to happen. That doesn't seem to be the case in this. It seems more like:
Is it? There's a system in place already for child porn images and while they've made some mistakes, they have yet to block anything political as far as I am aware.
Can you prove this is inevitable?