This week, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, gave a speech in which he challenged search engines to impose pornographic search term bans, on top of the expanding ISP-level porn filters. In addition, Cameron said that “family-friendly” porn filters, known as “active choice,” would go onto nearly all British existing customers’ accounts.

“By the end of next year, [the four major ISPs] will have contacted all of their existing customers and presented them with an unavoidable decision about whether or not to install family friendly content filters,” the prime minister said earlier this week.

Smaller ISPs like Andrews & Arnold have said they will not comply: “Sorry, for a censored Internet you will have to pick a different ISP or move to North Korea. Our services are all unfiltered. Is that a good enough active choice for you Mr. Cameron?”

In his speech, Cameron singled out the Homesafe program run by the major UK ISP TalkTalk. Although Cameron praised the program as an example of “great leadership” in banning pornographic search terms, it turns out that Homesafe filters far more than just pornography. And according to a new report Thursday from the BBC, Homesafe is run by Huawei, the Chinese company that has found itself the subject of security concerns in the US.

“David Cameron wants people to sleepwalk into censorship”

In a new diagram based on previously seen Homesafe filtering pages and published by TorrentFreak and an advocacy non-profit called the Open Rights Group, British customers will have, by default, a whole host of items filtered—not just pornography. These include: “dating,” “games,” “social networking,” and many others.

As the Open Rights Group wrote on its website:

What's clear here is that David Cameron wants people to sleepwalk into censorship. We know that people stick with defaults: this is part of the idea behind 'nudge theory' and 'choice architecture' that is popular with Cameron. The implication is that filtering is good, or at least harmless, for anyone, whether adult or child. Of course, this is not true; there's not just the question of false positives for web users, but the affect on a network economy of excluding a proportion of a legitimate website's audience.

The Chinese telecom firm, Huawei, is no stranger to controversy both in the United Kingdom and the United States—the company pulled out of the American market earlier this year after facing Congressional scrutiny.

As the BBC reported: