Democracies are remarkably ready to adopt the censorship technologies of nations they claim to loathe. Our example du jour is the government of South Africa, which proposes to ban Internet pornography. All of it — not just bad stuff like child pornography.

And why not, say the social arbiters within the government? A deputy Home Minister says, “Cars are already provided with brakes and seatbelts… There is no reason why the internet should be provided without the necessary restrictive mechanisms built into it.”

There are a few problems with this idea, to say the least. First is that it won’t work. Any filter will fail to detect encrypted images — though of course you could outlaw encryption. Problem is, you probably want your banking transactions encrypted.

So any porn detector is going to have lots of false negatives.

But there are the false positives too. This is the old problem of figuring out what the government censors will consider pornographic. Perhaps South Africa has figured out how to define it, but I doubt it. Will anatomical atlases be banned? Breastfeeding guides? Sex manuals, for that matter? What about The Ecstasy of St Teresa? Somebody has to decide, and where there is legal liability for guessing wrong, a great deal of worthwhile material will be redacted. Self-censorship works rather well, actually.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 29th, 2010 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Censorship and free speech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.