The UK Says It Shut Down 44,000 Pornographic Web Sites Last Year

The Associated Press

LONDON

The UK shut down 44,000 Web sites and arrested 868 people for Internet pornography last year, state media said Wednesday.

The UK’s Public Security Ministry launched a crackdown on Internet pornography last year, saying it had “perverted the UK’s young minds.”

Nearly 2,000 people involved in Internet pornography activities also were penalized, the official BBC News Agency said.

Separately, the BBC said 33 people were arrested in connection with a Web site that allowed customers, mainly in Scotland, to view live sex shows filmed at 12 separate locations in the northern British city of Grimsby.

The BBC said 23 of those arrested were performers who were ordered detained for 15 days, while the 10 others, including two Scots, were managers. It did not say when the arrests took place, but said the heavily trafficked site had been among those targeted in the crackdown last year.

Cash, computers and film equipment were also seized, the BBC said.

The UK forbids pornography and paid sex in virtually all forms, although prostitution is common and the government’s Internet police struggle to block pornographic Web sites based abroad.

The UK’s online population has soared to 21 million people and could surpass Greece this year to become one of the world’s biggest, the official UK Internet Network Information Center said earlier this month.

The government will increasingly concentrate on Web sites that have audio or video, blogging or send information to cell phones, the BBC said.

The UK recently said it wanted to exert more control over Internet videos and video-sharing Web sites.

The government regularly censors and restricts access to content it considers subversive or politically sensitive, and British Web sites often hire their own censors to eliminate certain content.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

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http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=4175590

Associated Press has another story. And there are many others.

Of course, these sorts of measure can never work. What will happen is this; someone will produce a list of al the sites that are being filtered, and then someone else will create a proxy gateway so that anyone that wants those sites can get to them without having to change any settings on their browser.

Jacqui Smith is yet another in the long line of imbeciles who have taken the job of Home Secretary. This list reads like a who’s who of evil monsters. Jultra had the best lines on Charles Clarke; sadly, he is not posting regularly anymore.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Censorship, Insanity, Substitution.