Cory Doctorow on government censorship

Pretty much every major Canadian ISP has voluntarily agreed to block a list of sites provided by a government-supported child exploitation tipline, cybertip.ca, foiling the efforts of the small layer of perverts too unsophisticated for a P2P network. There’s a very good response to this by Cory Doctorow in the comments of a post made by Michael Geist, a supporter of the program. Even though Geist admits that “determined (or even not that determined) child pornographers will be able to break the law and access child pornography,” he defends the program on the grounds that it provides “some measure of protection for the overwhelming majority of the population who are not seeking to access such content yet may inadvertently come across it.” But if that’s all the program can do for us, why would we want it? It might prevent us from a moment of nausea and the responsibility to make a report, in the extremely rare case that one of us stumbles across child pornography in the course of our normal surfing, but at the cost of a whole new layer of hard-to-hold-accountable censorware. If I have a choice in the matter, I’ll pass on that trade.