Internet Extends The Legal Reach Of Governments
from the they're-everywhere dept
Can we all just move to Sealand? A few weeks back we posted a story about police in Italy taking down some websites hosted in the US that they considered blasphemous. At the time, I wondered why more people didn’t make a stink about Italian police shutting down US websites (though, a reader pointed out that they did so via the same computers used to post the material – so they might have a stronger argument). However, now an article has come out looking at that and other cases where governments (including the US) are reaching beyond their borders via the internet to enforce their laws. While it hasn’t created any huge problems (though, that may depend on whether or not you’re someone who has been involved in some of these lawsuits) it’s only going to get worse. The fear is that it’s going to become very difficult to do anything on the internet, without the risk of violating some law in some unknown country.
