| Your tax money at work |
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| Written by Tim Worstall | |
| Thursday, 05 July 2007 | |
Apologies for my near monomania but I do love to point out that our
politicians and rulers do not always make the very finest decisions
about how to spend the tax money that they so gleefully extract from
us. As reported in The Times
, Franco Frattini, the European Union's Justice Commissioner, thinks
that censoring the internet in order to stop wannabe terrorists from
learning how to make bombs would be a good idea. Leave aside the
freedom of expression and civil liberties implications of this for a
moment (although they are sufficient in themselves to kill the idea)
and think just of the cost effectiveness:EU officials denied that it would be impossible to track down websites based in remote places, insisting that the local provider based in the EU could be held to account. One said: “You always need a provider here that gives you access to websites. They can decide technically which websites to allow. Otherwise how would China block internet sites? There are no technological obstacles, only legal ones.”Again, leave aside the thought that we are looking to Chinese methods to regulate public discourse: is there not one further obstacle, the financial one? I asked Bruce Schneier , the security expert, how much this would cost: It would cost an infinite amount of money, because it would be impossible to do.Hmm, I'd say that's a fairly large obstacle, one to add to the technological and legal, wouldn't you?
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