England seems to be further and further along the curve on the path to totalitarianism.  From this side of the pond, it serves as a wonderful Panopticon to see where the erosion of privacy and civil rights in this country are headed.

Latest in the cabaret of big brother is the new government controlled network filtering software.  This software is to protect English sensibilities from such sites as Wikipedia and other such bastions of degenerate thought.  Lest you think this is a Britain only item, Austailia is implementing a similar policy.

Right now the "goal” of these filters are to block questionable content (read porn and bit torrent). But since these are live firewalls these filters could easily be programmed to block by keyword, or country of origin.

Don’t want your citizens to find out about the riots in Greece, just block any page containing those two words.  Sounds crazy paranoid, but these types of filters are what schools and libraries use to block content every day.

Implementing a similar scheme in the US is a bit trickier, rather then 6 ISP’s like in England, there are thousands…. or are there?  Most of those hundreds of ISP’s license bandwidth from the big providers who in turn control the bulk of internet traffic.  Implementing filtering at this level, would cover those thousands of ISPs easily. Even those that are large enough to have their own infrastructure will route traffic into the major pipes allowing for filtering at this level.

More and more folks turn to the internet for all of their information these days, newspapers are on the verge of collapse, and with filtering in place, the information presented by the net will be incomplete or slanted.

These thoughts make me shiver every time President elect Obama mentions getting involved in broadband access.