There’s a creeping consensus surrounding invasive surveillance and censorship issues in the UK, which according to some, is rapidly becoming the western forebear of the big brother state, and many political blogs are not taking this lightly - especially since it was revealed that a number of anti-government websites and non-mainstream media blogs have been blocked from wi-fi networks in major transportation hubs, universities, libraries and other publicly available internet networks across the UK.

The accusations are akin to something you’d find in communist china, but despite the official policy to not censor internet traffic beyond illegal content, a number of politically activist websites including thinkprogress.org and prisonplanet.tv are furious over their content being blacklisted from public buildings, and are not going down without a fight.

Liberal blog, Thinkprogress.org had this to say..

“..milder left-leaning commentary websites like thinkprogress.org and every non-mainstream news website are inaccessible.”

While many of prisonplanet’s Alex Jones’ rants are to be taken with a pinch of salt, this latest attack on free-speech seems to hold some water, which is bound to play on the fears of free-speech advocates in the UK and the US.

At the center of this controversy, is London’s St. Pancras International, one of the “biggest transport hubs in the west” which has implemented network-wide filters to only allow content from mainstream news sources, marking the edge of a very slippery slope that further erodes freedom of speech on the web. This was of course ignored by the carefully selected mainstream news outlets, who chose instead to focus on censorship in China during the olympics.

Whatever you think of these websites, no reasonable person should blindly accept that they be filtered out before you even get a chance to make your own mind up about the content. We are after all, in a supposed democracy that allows, or should allow individuals the freedom to discern the truth, and express political dissent.

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