Last week, a high school boy threw a bomb he built into a classroom full of people in order to punish one of the occupants for bullying him. Bullying has long been a problem in Japan, and news reports are filled with grisly stories of students killing themselves and each other because of it.
The youth said he learned how to build the bomb and pack it with nails for maximum casualties on the Internet.
So what is the government’s response in the aftermath this latest school bullying?
That’s right. . . Stricter policing of the Internet!
The government may go after what it regards as harmful information on the Internet following last week’s bombing of a Yamaguchi Prefecture classroom by a youth who claimed he learned how to make explosives from a Web site, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said Tuesday.
“Government agencies and ministries have begun considering (via a task force) how to deal chiefly with illegal and harmful information,” the top government spokesman told a news conference.
How, exactly, they propose to do this has not been made public.
i was bullied before the net existed
China’s web police and filters are well known (scroll down), South Korea’s experiments in censoring the internet don’t get as much attention, but at least we still have nice open Japan to set an example for the rest of Northeast
It’s a bit of a laugh to watch old politicians, who mostly cannot even open their own e-mail, talk about policing the net. However, it’s easier to talk about that than to actually address the real problems.
So far as China, I would expect to have no problem finding a bomb recipe on the Net there. They don’t focus on that stuff. They block the BBC, Sites about Tibet, and always mysteriously, a comprehensive site that lists shipping schedules for merchant vessels.
They block BBC?? Yeeesh…
And CNN for a while, but they obviously kneeled, bobbed and polished the right knobs and got back in.