When, in Poland, new Internet filtering and censorship ideas came about, one of the arguments used against such schemes was that it violates the principle of secrecy of correspondence, guaranteed by the 12th Article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and 49th Article of the Polish Constitution.

While it was usually quite hard to convince the proponents of net censorship that this is precisely that – censorship and a violation of this important freedom – nobody questioned that in the regular, physical variety such actions are completely unacceptable, unheard of in a Free Country, and remind of the times rightfully gone by.

This, however, might change soon – European Union decided it’s more important to defend “intellectual property” than human rights and freedoms. According to new EU regulation being drafted, customs will gain powers to open small packages coming from outside the EU (but addressed to EU citizens) and destroy their contents once materials infringing IP rights have been found.

That was definitely not what I meant when I wrote that the same basic principles should be upheld in the Internet as in the AFK…