Now if you remember when the UK courts ordered ISPs to block the Pirate Bay we told you that it would not end there and it is not. However, the “protect the children” angle is just a way to put a good light on something very bad. If you think that this type of blocking systems will end at keeping the kids from watching naughty videos then you might have missed the fact that this is exactly the type of system that the US tried to put in place with SOPA.

ANY type of national block would require all traffic to be monitored. After all how will you know when someone is going to a pornographic site? So to help protect the kiddies it means any sites you head to are going to be logged and checked. Next it means that a national blocking system of DNS (Domain Name System) would need to be put into action (again just like SOPA). However, as we have mentioned before just blocking the name of a site does not prevent all access. If you can get the IP address (Internet Protocol) of the site you can get to it without ever having to hit a single DNS server. After all DNS is what changes the site name to an IP address.

This would mean that a content filtering system would need to be used to check the traffic or a block on IP addresses assigned to a list of unacceptable sites (trust us it will not stop with just pornography). While the latter is easier we imagine that the former is what the government will want. They have pushed for deep packet inspection on internet traffic for a long time and a law or voluntary system like this is the gateway to getting that.

So it now looks like the government in the UK has found a way to enact a national firewall (which is all this amounts to) complete with monitoring and blocking without ever having to put it to a vote and by-passing their citizens voice entirely.

Perhaps this is why The Pirate Bay is calling on users to go out of their way to show their displeasure with the new court order and find any way possible to get around the ban and continue to use their site and the torrent files they advertise (The Pirate Bay does not actually host any files). You know, we have said this before and we will say it again; this type of law does not do anything but create a criminal population where there was not one to begin with. History has shown us this time and time again. Prohibition in the US is one of the biggest examples; it wasted money and created a whole new criminal element that is still around today and in the end was repealed.

Of course the thing that I find the most amusing is that the people pushing for these laws are working against people that are very technologically savvy. They have already shown they know what they are doing and have not had any reservations about sharing their knowledge with other people. It will not be that much longer and there will be private clouds of systems that will work with site to site VPNs creating their own internet for the purpose of sharing files or communication. We are sure that laws will be put in place to make these illegal, but they are very hard to find and stop so the laws will be of little use.

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