The Information & Communication Technologies Authority (ICTA) has announced that, as from now, some pedophilia websites cannot be accessed from Mauritius. Websites which are blocked belong to a black list created by Interpol (and, I suppose, regularly updated). Technically speaking, the blocking is done at the IP level with tweaked Border Gateway Protocol routing tables.
I am uneasy with this decision for two main reasons:
- pedophiles who are sufficiently knowledgeable in networking won’t have any problem bypassing this filter,
- this filtering, which is a form of censorship according to me, opens the door to a lot of abuse (even though ICTA says it has no intention to block other kinds of websites… but we all remember this). Who knows what ICTA will come up with later?
What do you think?