British Prime Minister David Cameron’s plan to create an opt-out great porn firewall has more in common with the Great Firewall of China than previously understood.
Cameron’s plan to excise the naughty from the British life is being spearheaded by Conservative MP Claire Perry, who recently had her website stuffed with porn and blamed the incident on a reporter, mistaking him for the perpetrator of the hack.
Cameron has singled out UK ISP TalkTalk and its filtering tool, “Homesafe,” for special praise. TalkTalk, he said, showed “great leadership” in setting up its filtering regime, according to the BBC.
The technology TalkTalk uses for Homesafe is made by the Chinese company Huawei, which has recent been accused by some U.S. intelligence officials of being barely more than a front for the People’s Liberation Army.
According to former NSA head Gen. Michael Hayden (ret.), had the company been allowed a purchase on the American market, “Huawei would have shared with the Chinese state intimate and extensive knowledge of the foreign telecommunications systems it is involved with.”
TalkTalk initially claimed the filtering technology’s blacklist of sites to be blocked was written by U.S. firm Symantec, and Huawei provided only hardware.
“However, Symantec said that while it had been in a joint venture with Huawei to run Homesafe in its early stages, it had not been involved for over a year,” according to the BBC. “TalkTalk later confirmed it is Huawei that monitors activity, checking requests against its blacklist of over 65 million web addresses, and denying access if there is a match.”
Honesty may be the best policy, but it is clearly not the company policy of the ISP Britain’s prime minister believes is the future of his country’s relationship to the Internet.
H/T BBC | Photo by Thierry Ehrmann/Flickr