UK government will deputise newsagents to collect and retain identity documents from the nation's pornography viewers

This is the dumbest, most ill thought-out… actually, words fail. A national database of porn viewing habits? What could possibly go wrong? Coupled with the snooper’s charter, it’s an authoritarian’s (teflon theresa) wet dream.

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VPN and Yandex.com … sometimes I need to try a few different VPN servers (PureVPN - yes, I know, I know…) but eventually I see the pictures that match my search terms.

More than enough out there for free.

Porn preferences exist as more of a spectrum than a binary.

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Controlling access to and mapping users of porn is so much more important than preventing greedy builders and building owners from having firetraps that kill scores of their tenants. I can’t believe politicians actually try and cram this shit down people’s throats.
I wonder if Western society will completely implode before I’m dead/gone? Doubt there will be much warning.

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That would certainly be a tragic, and completely unintended, consequence. Especially if it happened to a member of the opposition party.

Ah… so the London Sun newspaper is will have to stop the page3.com section if this gets rammed through?

The consultation documents are here:

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/about-bbfc/dea-consultation

Nothing in there about cornershops keeping a copy of your passport or indeed any mention of cornershops at all.

I’m not sure where this “porn code” idea comes from. It’s not in the consultation document and the Indy doesn’t give any source for it.

The closest it gets is “David Austin, chief executive with the BBFC, told The Daily Telegraph that such a process would be “simpler than people think” to create.”

That links to the Telegraph which is of course paywalled.

Page 3 is A-OK as far as this law is concerned. It is a) only concerned with online pr0n so the print stuff is fine, and b) pornography for the purposes of the Act is defined in various ways that all require the material to be stuff that if it were subject to BBFC classification would be at least 18 rated.

Rating guidance is here:
http://www.bbfc.co.uk/sites/default/files/attachments/BBFC%20Classification%20Guidelines%202014_0.pdf

Short version: nudity in and of itself is fine so long as the “sexual context” is limited.

Given Page 3’s usual schtick is just photos of a young lady in her knickers, possibly giving commentary on some issue of the day, they’re not going to get anywhere near an 18 certificate.

The Sport might struggle but then they are as @the_borderer says basically a soft-core porn rag, advertising harder porn and phone sex lines with a bit of ‘news’ thrown in.

It’s bonkers but it’s nicely calibrated bonkers to keep on the right side of ‘white van man’.

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My comment was less to do with whether or not it’s okay within the confines of the law, it’s pointing out the staggering hypocrisy that says that casually objectifying women in a newspaper is A-OK, but the government needs to know if you’re looking at any of that filthy pornography.

This is because the law isn’t really about stopping pornography, but about suppressing individual freedom and forcing conservative, heteronormative, “values” on people who didn’t ask for them in order to appease the reactionaries. It is unlikely that the law will stop anyone from viewing pornography. The people behind this who know how the Internet works, know it won’t work, and nobody who thinks it will work has any idea what they’re talking about.

The real purpose is to give the UK surveillance monster even more to feed on. Every square meter of London is already covered by half a dozen cctv cameras, but Big Brother needs more, and this is just another “in” that allows for yet more egregious surveillance. They’ve been angling at this for awhile, so you can be damned sure that someone has some horrendous Machiavellian scheme in mind that depends on it.

It might be simpler than I think to make this work, and still really really complicated and unworkable. (Same goes for Brexit…)

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