One step closer to everyone ceasing to pretend the Internet is in any way free or democratic. It was a nice fantasy while it lasted. Even where ISPs are nominally private, you can't be a licensed user of the airwaves or have fiber along government right-of-ways and expect not to have the government impose its own interests on you. I wonder how long it'll be before they outlaw any kind of overlay network they can't snoop on? I guess that's what the attempts to outlaw useful crypto are all about. I bet we'll eventually see warrants to decrypt legal, escrowed crypto envelopes entirely on suspicion that the user is using a layer of unescrowed crypto inside. Which will accomplish exactly what the content cartels want by forcing those who care about privacy into low-bandwidth covert channels while doing nothing to make it more difficult for genuine criminals to communicate privately. Maybe it'll be harder to share kiddie porn. But at a huge cost to the future of humanity, as we all know where this road is leading.

Maybe there's some hope for wireless services where the hardware is licensed rather than the user. Or extremely line-of-sight stuff like FSO.

On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 11:38 AM, grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com> wrote:

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/09/14/1420226/gchq-planning-uk-wide-dns-firewall
UK surveillance agency GCHQ is exploring the use of a national
'firewall' in its fight against cybercrime, according to the
organisation's head of cybersecurity. Alongside BT, Talk Talk and
Virgin Media, GCHQ will work to filter out websites and email
campaigns which are known to contain malicious content. The
intelligence organisation believes that the best to way to set up such
a blockade would be to build a national domain name system (DNS). In a
speech delivered at the Billington Cyber Security Summit in Washington
DC, director general for cyber security at GCHQ, Ciaran Martin, said:
'We're exploring a flagship project on scaling up DNS filtering: what
better way of providing automated defences at scale than by the major
private providers effectively blocking their customers from coming
into contact with known malware and bad addresses?'

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/09/14/1512257/10-years-in-prison-for-online-pirates-a-step-closer-in-the-uk
The UK Government's Digital Economy Bill has moved a step closer to
becoming law after its second reading in Parliament. With unanimous
support, the current two-year maximum custodial sentence for online
piracy is almost certain to increase to a decade, TorrentFreak
reports. From the article: Due to UK copyright law allowing for
custodial sentences of 'just' two years for online offenses,
anti-piracy groups such as the Federation Against Copyright Theft have
chosen to pursue their own private prosecutions. These have largely
taken place under legislation designed for those who have committed
fraud, rather than the more appropriate offense of copyright
infringement. Physical pirates (CDs, DVDs) can be jailed for up to 10
years under current legislation. During the past few years, there have
been lobbying efforts for this punishment to apply both on and
offline. That resulted in a UK Government announcement last year
indicating that it would move to increase the maximum prison sentence
for online copyright infringement to ten years. They also urge Google
to do something about growing incidents of piracy.