Culture Secretary wants to censor the web.

Culture secretary Andy Burnham wants to force ISPs to censor websites that the government deems 'inappropriate', and hopes to gain American agreement on the idea.

"There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That's my view. Absolutely categorical," said Andy Burnham in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

It appears that the censorship plans proposed by Mr Burnham will be implemented at the ISP level rather than giving people the right to choose whether they want to install web censoring software locally.

So far only content that uses the http protocol seems to be in the firing line for government censorship, but it is quite reasonable to expect that other protocols will also be censored once the state gets its foot in the door.

Just how Mr Burnham plans to implement his web censoring policy has yet to be disclosed. There are a limited number of options available to him, a system similar to that in China is likely being looked at.

It seems that the government is hoping to unload the technical burden of censoring and rating web content on to ISPs rather than take on the challenge itself.

Just how ISPs will go about rating the hundreds of millions of websites around the globe is still unclear at this point. Automating the process would be the preferred option but this is known to miss massive amounts of content and also provide far too many false positives to be a truly viable solution.

Having a team of people comb the internet and creating a blacklist of 'harmful' websites is another option, but given the sheer number of websites out there and the massive number of new sites that come online every week, this is also an infeasible approach.

Web proxies would also prove a challenge to Mr Burnham's censorship plans. These would no doubt have to be banned if any web censorship plan were to even begin to be effective. The Tor network would also have to be banned if Mr Burnahm was serious about censoring the web.

But censoring the World Wide Web must only be the start if Mr Burnham hopes to protect other peoples children from content he deems 'inappropriate'. Surely other protocols must also be censored such as Bittorrent and The Freenet Project if the governments plans are to even begin to work.

Censoring Bittorrent would prove even harder than attempting to censor the web. ISPs would have to inspect every packet its customers request and compare them against a government blacklist. This would have to effectively amount to a country-wide man-in-the-middle attack that intercepts every encrypted communication and inspect the contents, in real time.

And if that is a challenge how does the government plan to monitor and censor content accessed through the Tor network or Freenet? This would prove nearly impossible, these systems would likely have to be banned outright if the government really wants to 'protect' us.

On the face of it Andy Burnhams ideas will seem benign to a lot of people, but as soon as it is examined it is clear that any move towards censoring the web would have massive freedom of speech implications and would alter the internet as we know it.

Any moves by the government to censor content at the ISP level should be looked at with great suspicion. If families want to restrict their children's access to certain content that is a choice for them to make in their own home with software installed locally.

There is absolutely no need for any kind of government censorship to be operated at the ISP level. Simply by the fact that this is the option the government has chosen to pursue should make it clear to all that their motives are far from benign