"Go Away Cameron" Is a Plugin to Free Britain's Porn

Well, that didn’t take long. Just a few days after British internet service providers began blocking porn by default as part of Prime Minister David Cameron’s “war on porn,” there’s an easy way to bypass the filter.

A Singaporean computer science graduate who identifies himself by the Twitter handle @nubela has built “Go Away Cameron,” a Chrome plugin that allows users to access sites blocked by their ISP in a valiant attempt to “bring porn back.” On the download site, the creator explains that Go Away Cameron is a smart proxy service that routes around the block so you can access your favourite porn in peace (if it was even successfully blocked by the leaky filter in the first place).

It’s just the latest blow to Cameron’s woefully misguided attempt to censor internet access, and it goes to show quite how futile the whole effort is. In brief, the idea is that Britain’s major ISPs will automatically block porn—and a rather unsettling array of other online resources—unless users opt out.

But last week, BBC’s Newsnight found that some ISPs’ filters failed to block obvious porn sites while restricting access to entirely above-board material such as sex education sites and domestic abuse sites. That highlighted the ridiculousness of trying to use an algorithm based on key words to detect pornographic material.

And now, the Go Away Cameron plugin proves that, even if the filter were absolutely accurate in terms of which sites it blocked, it could still be rendered useless with minimal effort. That’s pretty much the nature of the internet—there’s always a workaround.

The Telegraph reported that the browser extension is a variant of a tool the creator built to get around government filters in Singapore, and it’s somewhat disheartening that the same kind of technology is now needed to combat internet censorship in the UK.

In FAQs on his site, @nubela wrote that he (he identified himself as "1 guy" on a Reddit thread) had three reasons for creating the plugin: “One, It was a holiday project as I was learning Twitter bootstrap. Two, I enjoy my internet freedom, and urge all of you to never give that up, let alone to any government agencies. Three, I did have some blind hopes for it going viral.”

Of course, it’s probably still easier to just tell your ISP to allow you to access your favourite smutty material, but for those who don’t want to have “the conversation” with others in their household (something Cameron has said couples should do), it’s a face-saving solution.