Lebanon Banning Websites Using Fax Machines

I believe in freedom of speech but I’m not an absolutist. Child porn should be banned and known terrorists should be monitored and their tweets blacked out.

So my reaction to the leaked document below is not “Oh my god I can’t believe they’re banning websites”, It’s “Oh my God I can’t believe how ineffective their banning is”. Think of how absurd this is: A fax machine request to ban a list of websites. Forget about how this list will go viral and how everyone will now know about these websites (regardless, I’m not contributing to this so I’m redacting them here), this is a technologically primitive way to ban websites.

Blacklisting (hard coding a list of websites that should be banned) only worked when the web was so small we had actual lists of websites (Think Yahoo! Directory). But in today’s age of apps, social media and data streams, you need hugely sophisticated algorithms, big CPU power and large bureaucracies to analyze keywords, patterns and natural language, only to achieve a partial ban on information (the hackers will always find a way).

What the leaked document tells us is that our cyber crime fighters only have bicycles but they’re trying to catch criminals with cars and planes and spaceships.