The Pirate Bay Proxy, an Open Internet and Censorship.

2012 May 10

 

The Pirate Party UK has hosted a proxy (tpb.pirateparty.org.uk), allowing people to connect to the Pirate Bay via Pirate Party servers since the 19th of April 2012.  We provided the proxy as a tool for users on networks where the Pirate Bay is blocked through filtering, and in support of our sister party in the Netherlands.  It continues to be a legitimate route for those affected by court orders issued to some (but not all) UK ISP's requiring the site to be blocked. Whilst some providers continue to allow access to the web in an unfiltered manner, others are limiting access to specific parts of the internet.

To date our proxy has seen in excess of 10 million hits, with almost 2 million additional visitors making use of the proxy each day, more than 5 GigaBytes of data (but not content) has been transferred in the last 24 hours alone. 

 

The threat of Internet Filtering - "To belong here is to believe in these things"

2011 June 10

This week the Home Secretary Theresa May unveiled the Coalition Government's optimistically titled new counter terrorism strategy 'prevent'¹.  'Prevent' is being billed by the Government as a way to deal with all forms of terrorism and extremism that the country is supposedly overrun by, as well as things like non-violent extremism and harmful ideas being disseminated by groups hell bent on... well, something.  

The problem with this approach, as with any that intends to change how people think and what ideas are attractive, is how we define the threat.  When we look not at terrorism, but at extremism, extremist views or radicalisation we leave ourselves open to making some fundamental mistakes, to trading fundamental freedoms and rights for protection against an  ill defined enemy.