Question for older UK members

[Dr. Bill Kobb]

For those of you old enough to remember: I seem to recall reading once that the UK had a very strict attitude towards any depictions of adult bondage and discipline fetishism back in the pre-Net days. So, it was nearly impossible for people there to acquire books, videos, and mags on the subject, unless they were dry clinical texts about the harm of viewing such material.

Anyway, I guess what I'm really wondering is: Do they still have such draconian laws in place, and if so, does the govt there patrol people's web-browsings, looking for that sort of fare on user's computers? Seems like it would be difficult to enforce now, in the digital age.

 

[Budweiserbob!]

Not to my knowledge. The only thing they keep an eye on nowdays is if such fetishes have material involving minors.

 

[kopfhorer1]

Actually, it's pretty damned easy to monitor peoples' web surfings these days. I don't suppose there'll be teams of uniformed spooks looking to bust viewers of certain kinds of adult material and send them off for moral re-education. But I'll bet there'll be a whole lotta political blackmailing and trap-baiting goin' on before too long.

 

[Smade1]

The answer is yes, the laws are still in place and no - they don't seem to be snooping on our activities (but would we ever know).

I looked into this sometime back when I first hosted a site and the laws governing it are the Obscene Publications Act. At first it looked very strict but it seems the only real problems happen with as the act qotes "sexual acts involving children and animals".

We do have to worry about the hysterical panics kicked off by the media every so often but fortunately they are mostly about child abuse or whatever they feel will sell the most papers.

The technology and bandwith are in place now to have end to end encyrpted browsing so I think if it became apparent that we were being tracked to a large degree more traffic would switch to "darknets"

For those wondering "darknets" are encrypted end to end networks that will become the standard for communications in the future.