USENET CENSORSHIP THREAT
RETURNS IN U.K.

In 1996 the UK police took a heavy-handed approach to Internet censorship. ISPs were "only" private companies with none of the privileges of mail companies. Gangsterish threats were issued of massive raids and removal of equipment if they did not shut down dozens of newsgroups on demand. When secrecy was broken, there was carefully arranged character assassination with baseless charges of promoting child abuse against an ISP official and against anon@penet.fi -- probably by intelligence service assets acting on behalf of the Singapore government, who hated penet -- which got penet closed down. A compromise was arranged where only a very few individual articles are removed from servers as child pornography, and the Internet Watch Foundation acts as a clearing-house for complaints.

Now compromise is broken: whole newsgroups are targeted again. Netizens recalling last time are naturally outraged. But they are a small group; let us examine the case more calmly.

As always, there is another side. IWF say that this child porn [which is a few ten-thousandths of the total usenet articles per week], is 3/4s of it found in 28 or so newsgroups which regularly have 10% of such material. If removing those newsgroups from news-servers in the UK could stop that 3/4s flowing, and ISPs could be made to do this, then a lot of good might be done. Plus if this caused an appreciable decrease in the amount of child porn flowing then it might decrease the amount of child abuse done to produce porn, and less potential abusers might be led into offending by seeing it. If this analysis holds up, then the logic is irrefutable.

PRACTICAL SNAGS

One might see a few small snags even if unfamiliar with the technicalities. If these newsgroups are closed, does anything stop it going onto other newsgroups? No, there is no central control. If they are closed in the UK, can any user get them from foreign servers? Yes, in about 2 minutes with no great technical knowledge; some programs do it automatically. Can IWF make ISPs have a ban? No, IWF has no power to change the law. Would less porn flow if one medium were blocked, and does porn make potential abusers more likely to carry out child abuse? Ask experts who have studied child abusers, but the answers are probably "no" and "no". A recent UK study shows that child abuse is more often violent beatings than sexual assault, and that almost always by male relatives of the same or parent's generation rather than this kind of stranger activity.

To treat the Internet, but not phone and postal services, as without any protection for speech or privacy for such a small gain would almost certainly be seen as "disproport- ionate" under the Human Rights Act / European Convention for Human Rights, if not in UK courts then in the ECHR

"TRAFFIC WARDENS OF THE INFO-HIGHWAY"

Why even raise such a proposal when, on basic practical considerations, it has no benefits? Because the censorship advocates on IWF have a fanatical bent not deterred by such small matters as reality. They want to become "traffic wardens" of the InfoHighway: those power-crazed traffic not-even-cops who hand out parking tickets in the UK. Lord knows how to bring them to their senses. Put the onus on them to bring researched and reasoned figures for what would happen if the ban were put in place, perhaps. Have them talk over what is technical possible with -- if they feel all ISPs are spawn of Satan -- then at least those operational policemen who know what can and cannot be done.

UK journalists often aren't qualified in sciences, as they are in the US, which may account for the "killer tomatoes stalking our high streets" stories. Rational discussion on this subject is rare. There have lately been howling mobs who drove a paediatrician [child-doctor] from her home on the belief it meant a paedophile [child-abuser]; and there are those who don't hesitate to threaten starting such madness in the scummier newspapers if they don't get their way.

This is also in a context where the more extreme policing groups have asked for a seven year store logging the sender, recipient, and time of every email sent, every web page browsed, and every similar transaction: a move equivalent perhaps to logging not just the sender, recipient and date of every letter, but the start and end of every car journey and the title of every book bought. There may be very little sympathy over a measure "dealing with child abuse" when even the above threat is met with widespread apathy. Britain is still a kingdom of owned serfs with no formal constitution protecting civil rights, which have suffered grave erosion under this right-wing "Labour" governement.

Any struggle over such a measure would need to call on overseas support, for the will and money to fight libel actions over character assassination, and to expose and dismantle any intelligence service assets brought into play. Not least because the current extreme attacks on freespeech or privacy in Britain and New Zealand look suspiciously like an attempt at policy-laundering measures which can then be introduced in America because everyone else has them already.

U.K. LEGAL DIFFERENCES

Child pornography in the UK is pictures of people under 16 clearly offering or having sex -- common sense would add "with an older person", and most of the material here is of that latter kind. UK law is unusual in treating this, like banned drugs, as illegal to "possess": presumably aimed at those who own or sell it. However it applies to mail carriers when they are ISPs, unless they prove they "could not feasibly have known it was in their possession" [which is untrue if they chose not to receive or act on available warnings]. It does not apply to ordinary carriers of mail or telephony, because they happened to be government monopolies at the time which aren't subject to such bothersome restrictions if it will mess up their business: even though the clear result of exempting them is that some extra child porn most likely does get through. Clearly that isn't an over-riding consideration when it comes to government-owned communications. But people using the Internet get second rate civil liberties and privacy, because it is "only a bunch of commercial companies."

The one good thing that may come of fighting an ECHR case all the way to Strasbourg, to get it really judged "on the standards of the most liberal, plural and civilised cultures" is that the rules for some mail and voice carriers are the rules for all: it is simply not proportionate to put this burden on ISPs and people writing, or written about, on the Net. This is what the trade associations really ought to push for, whether or not they will get it inside IWF.

Dave Bird, Dave@xemu.demon.co.uk

There is a usenet debate on alt.censorship, message ID<iddddddddddddddddddddddd>.

Specific replies to the consultation: newsgroup-consult@iwf.org.uk by 31 Jan 2001;

my own detailed response is found at htto://www.xemu.demon.co.uk .