Thursday 13 September 2007

EU and terrorism

According to Reuters, EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini proposes to "prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism". I haven't yet seen any updates yet, so I'm not sure how this is progressing.

Nevertheless, this is probably my favourite of EU initiatives, only in direct competition with the "take off your tie"-proposal. You see, this one has a certain elegant characteristic; once enforced, any online material on the subject will become unavailable instantly, through magic! Clearly, the journalists - I mean terrorists - need to be stopped now, before they write something that could get the Commission - I mean population - to fear for its welfare.

Out of curiosity, I'd love a more detailed report on how recent EU proposals have improved overall security. I feel some politicians are not getting the credit they deserve; it doesn't make any sense, does it?

1 comment:

Stefan Gustavson said...

"Kill" is a dangerous word? It can be found in milions of articles and works of literature. It would suddenly be illegal to search for web-based information on "To Kill a Mockingbird". That's silly.

And "genocide" is a dangerous word? What is more probable: a person googling for "genocide for dummies" in a plan to actually commit genocide, or a person looking for historical information on genocide for educational purposes?

Blocking "dangerous words" would certainly make some Nazi historical revisionists happy. Imagine a world where you can not find any online material on genocide. That would be their wet dream.