Claire Perry, a conservative MP (Member of Parliament) in the United Kingdom and the architect of Prime Minister David Cameron’s porno firewall scheme, has seen her website hacked and stuffed to the brim with porn.
The porn firewall is a plan to make filtering standard on British Internet connections. Among others, one problem with this scheme is that incorrect classifications could block things like breast health sites and leave open more salacious ones. And that’s of course assuming there’s a way to combat the omnipresence of circumvention measures. (News flash: Young boys in particular will move heaven and earth to get an eyeful of boob.)
So Perry’s site was defaced with pornographic images. But the mess doesn’t stop there.
Guido Fawkes, a British blogger and columnist for the British tabloid the Sun, noted the hack on his site. Upon reading that, the confused Perry apologized to “anyone affected by the hacking of my website sponsored by @GuidoFawkes.”
She then proceeded to threaten Fawkes on Twitter, announcing that she would be talking to his editor, the implication being that said talk would result in punishment.
“He gets a lot of crank calls,” Fawkes responded.
“Perry is so technologically illiterate,” notes Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing, “that she can’t tell the difference between writing about someone hacking your website and hacking itself.”
The MP’s confusion and panic seems silly from inside the technobubble, but it is worth considering that her level of understanding when it comes to Web security may be much more common than yours.
And before we laugh too loud, we should probably pause to consider that while we may make the rules, people like Ms. Perry make the laws.
H/T Boing Boing | Photo by NFU pics/Flickr