Original Article

According to the times online: People who illegally download films and music will be cut off from the internet under new legislative proposals to be unveiled next week.

Users suspected of wrongly downloading films or music will receive a warning e-mail for the first offence, a suspension for the second infringement and the termination of their internet contract if caught a third time.

It seems like the government is well in the pocket of the entertainment industry. You would expect this kind of laws in the US, but apparently Brown has to show to the "people" that he has a spine and is willing to make the "not very popular" decisions.

But what is next? Anyone that knows anything about the internet knows that this isn't going to stop people. It will just make encrypted services more and more popular which effectively make it "impossible" to see what is being pushed down the line, which would make it impossible for ISPs to see if what you are pushing down the line is Steven's latest master piece or your HD amateur porn, or anything in between. Seeing that many of the services have already started offering encryption in their software the government knows this is going to be the next "safe haven" for piracy.

Faced with this dilemma the next step is obviously going to be to make encryption illegal for uses other than encrypting banking transactions etc. As encryption is a pain in the governments ass, as any idiot with some free software can encode their data in two clicks so that it would take months if not years for the government to break (if not 10's or hundreds of years). Obviously the government doesn't like this idea at all as that would mean anybody can just hide anything from them where it normally was the other way around.

If you take into consideration the recent changes in the law which mean you face a couple of years in prison for not handing over your encryption key I wouldn't be surprised if banning encryption all together, and using piracy to "legitimise" this decision, wasn't the idea all along.