piersonthe.netBlocking Social Media in the UK? Can't be done
Unless you've been hiding under a rock over the past week, you will have undoubtedly heard that in certain areas of London as well as other cities in the UK gangs of teenagers have been looting and stealing high value (as well as not so high value) goods from various shops. It got to the point that David Cameron cut short his holiday and recalled Parliament to discuss what was going to happen next.
Apparently the way that these riots (although I'm not so sure if riot is the right word since it just seems to be mass robbery) have been organised have been through Blackberry's BBM service as well as the usual scapegoats, Twitter and Facebook. So the government in their usual kneejerk fashion is talking about the possibility of cutting off access to these services if the rioting continues.
So this brings me onto why this cannot be done. There are (at least) two reasons why.
Firstly from a Democratic point of view:
If the government had its way and blocked access to these services, that would affect me and the millions of other residents of the UK who have nothing to do with these acts of violence. Admittedly I don't own a Blackberry, nor do I have aa Facebook account, but I use Twitter on a daily (if not hourly) basis. I haven't been involved in what's been going on. The only thing connecting me and the so-called riots is that I've been using Twitter to keep myself in what's going on from a grassroots level. So why am I getting punished? I, like I'm sure many of my fellow tweeters, would not stand for it.
The second reason why it cannot happen is a purely technical one. In an age of virtual servers, where it takes less than 5 minutes (usually far less) to have a fully functioning server, connected to the internet and serving content the government would basically have to completely cut off the UK from the rest of the world as far as the internet goes.
There is nothing they can do to stop me from setting up a proxy server in the US and routing all my traffic through that. Or setting up a server (again, outside the UK borders) as a proxy and connect that to the Twitter API to make and read tweets. Obviously if the government were to take the step in blocking UK citizens from connecting to these services then this would probably become illegal and so I would never do it, nor would I suggest that people would do the same.
So what can the government do? Firstly I would hope that they can see this stance as it is: nothing more than a knee jerk reaction. Secondly they can look to the causes of these problems: the fact that most of these kids (most seem to be under 18 so I think that justifies me calling them that) are bored and have nowhere to go except their homes since the government seems to be cutting various facilities where they could be; they also need to be taught to respect both the law and those who protect it. I don't want to go as far as suggesting that military service should be brought back but some kind of activity to teach both respect and discipline would go a long way.
