Comments on: Danish Police Incident Calls for a Security Assessment

By: Dmitry

Dmitry — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 22:23:12 +0000

That’s ridiculous. It seems that freedom on the internet is going to continue diminish though. First, there is corporate pressure i.e. companies like facebook and google recording every second of our online engagement. Second, there is governmental pressure which we’ve seen transpire in the form of PIPA and SOPA.

I am pessimistic about the future of the internet.

By: Antonio Von Hiemen

Antonio Von Hiemen — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:56:48 +0000

This is a blessing in disguise for the Danish police department. Although it is a hard lesson learned, this will serve as an excellent learning process for them. World Wide Web security also involves several cases of human error on the protectors’ part. You can’t put this out of the equation. As what I’ve stated earlier – it’s a learning process.

Even in countries with a more advanced Internet security system, such as the ones applied in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, human errors do occur mainly because of bureaucracy. No single office or department is exclusively in-charge of handling cyber threats.

By: Emmanuel Carabott

Emmanuel Carabott — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:40:27 +0000

I agree that something like censorship should be dehumanized to a certain degree, because another thing that concerns me is in itself a grey area. Some sites carry content that might be censored but for legitimate reasons, such as search engines, news sites and news aggregators. At the end of the day, the risk of human error might be better than the false positives you will inevitably generate with an automated system.

Of course, a possibility would be a hybrid system where humans decide what is going to be censored and what isn’t, entered in an automated process where other people validate what is going to be blocked, and then automatically implemented.

By: Paul Morrison

Paul Morrison — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 01:27:05 +0000

Troubling, indeed. The thing about a process like this is that you really want to dehumanize it as much as possible. If a task of national censorship is laid out in front of you, you want to eliminate as much of the interpretive process as well, try and automate whatever you can. And make sure that if it falls into a grey area, it’s best to let it go most times. When you let people decide what is and isn’t acceptable on a site by site basis, you run a huge risk of human error.