Iceland's porn ban proposal sparks row over censorship
Move to combat children's exposure to explicit material denounced as 'affront to free society'
Anticensorship campaigners have called on Iceland to ditch its proposals to ban pornography online and in print, labelling the plans "an affront to the basic principles of society".
An open letter co-ordinated by Iceland's International Modern Media Institute, signed by activists and academics from 19 countries, claimed the proposals "jeopardised longstanding efforts to prevent censorship in totalitarian regimes worldwide".
The International Modern Media Institute is chaired by Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, the former WikiLeaks activist.
Writing to Iceland's interior minister Ogmundur Jonasson, campaigners including the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the US, the Netherlands' Open Source Working Group and Tunisian activist Rafik Dammak dissect the plans, pointing out that they suggest no specific technology or definition of what to block, and claim it is not possible to censor content without monitoring all telecommunications.
"Everything must be examined automatically by unsupervised machines, which make the final decision on whether to allow the content to continue or not. This level of government surveillance directly conflicts with the idea of a free society," they said.
Everything must be examined automatically by unsupervised machines ... This level of government surveillance directly conflicts with the idea of a free society
Such censorship would require technology similar to that employed by China and North Korea, implicitly justifying the censorship of those regimes, the letter stated.