pumpkinstrokemarrow

I am clear that anything and nothing respectively are not good enough.

On the first, we do not yet have thought crime. It is not, for example, an offence to have thoughts about child abuse, provided that those thoughts have no external manifestations. But we do have speech crime and it is an offence to talk about the interesting smell of aboriginal Australians in a public place. We also have media crime: publishing such talk on media accessible to the public at large is an offence. All this strikes me as reasonable, provided of course that enforcement is reasonable and punishments are proportionate. Publishing something on the Internet is somewhere in the middle of these three, so while publication on the Internet is weaker than publication in the Sun it is stronger than thought. There is offence.

The difficulty lies with enforcement. I do not think that enforcement before the event is practical. The Internet is just too big and the offences are so various. But I also think that I read about what Facebook do, which is to build a large shed in some low cost country and fill it with lucky people whose job it is to search Facebook for inappropriate content and to take appropriate action, perhaps closing the accounts of persistent perpetrators. They might be helped in this by Facebook providing facilities for snitches - so if I come across something I don't like I can send a report into the shed for action. Such arrangements would probably do the trick for the large and respectable providers of Internet services. More thought needed on how one might best tackle the small and dodgy providers, the ones who pop up somewhere else as soon as you close them down.

Then we have the difficulty that some countries will have a different take on inappropriate than others. Knocking out anything that anyone thinks inappropriate is clearly going way too far. Service or country specific filters might be OK, or at least they would be if one was starting out intending to do that. Might not be so easy given where we are now. Perhaps we need a branch of the UN to look after all this, far too important to leave in the hands of old Etonians or the geeks at the helm of the likes of Facebook.

On the second, I have no problem with the forces of law and order being able to trawl the Internet for evidence  of wrong doing or of wrong intentions.

And again the difficulty lies with enforcement. How can be sure that the intrusion is reasonable? A place to start would be for there to be a proper legal framework which we can all sign up to. What sort of things are intruders allowed to go fishing for? Would it be OK for providers to tell the forces of law and order about a customer who had an interest in home made bombs? All of this needs to be thrashed out somewhere: the chattering classes can make a start and when they get bored with the business they can give it over to the civil servants to finish the job. Having got that out of the way, there is then the need for trust. Do we trust the intruders to stick to the rules? Perhaps the same wheeze as we have for the security services would do; a small group of people trusted by both sides who have oversight of what the intruders are up to.

All eminently soluble to my mind. So perhaps the biggest problem is all those people out there, some of them in positions of Internet power, who start at the anything and nothing position and who need to be brought round to a more reasonable position. Imposition of a solution from above probably not going to be good enough.

PS: moving to the more mundane, spent the breakfast hour perusing a communication from some organ of the Benefit Sponge. A two page communication with several pages of notes, one of which told us that we needed to tell them if the amount of time we spent on dialysis machines had changed. The communication itself told us that the weekly benefit of a third party had gone up by approximately £1, which fact now needs to be communicated to fourth and fifth parties. The transaction cost must be the same order of magnitude as the extra amount the third party will receive in the course of the coming year - not that he cares too much; I think it all gets handed over to the fifth party anyway. One can see why it is all like this: one only wonders whether the shiny new universal benefit - of which I am all in favour -  will prune it all out, or at least all down.