Slashdot Mirror
British Telecom Blocks Access to Child Porn Sites
An anonymous reader writes "British Telecom has taken the unprecedented step of blocking all illegal child pornography websites in a crackdown on abuse online. The decision by Britain's largest high-speed internet provider will lead to the first mass censorship of the web attempted in a Western democracy."
...how about newsgroups? IRC? FTP? There are alot more distrbution methods available to those who traffic in this type of material, and believe me, the ones you should be worried about are not the ones who are "surfing the web" to get it either. -S-
The decision by Britain's largest high-speed internet provider will lead to the first mass censorship of the web attempted in a Western democracy.
No, it is not the first case. Remember blocking child porn in pennsylvaia? Have a look here.
In North Rhine-Westfalia all providers have to block access to two Nazi websites: look here.
Plus, I don't understand why it's so wrong that child pornography gets exchanged.
Exchange = grater demand = more supply needed = more children affected.
Well, consentual adult pornography is legal in the UK
Really? When did this momentous change in the law occur? I must have missed that one as it passed me by somewhat.
The truth is, a couple of years ago the British Board of Film Censors (or whatever the hell they happen to be called now) relaxed their regulations and started granting a certificate to films that show erect penises and penetration, arguing that public standards had changed, but I think that's rather a long way from saying that pornography between consenting adults is legal in the UK.
The truth is, there are even some sex acts between consenting adults that are still illegal in the UK -- let alone representations of those acts. There has been a recent bureaucratic decision not to prosecute certain images and films lately, but there hasn't been any change in the laws relating to obscenity, etc. which are still archaic.
Since I use one of the ISP's mentioned in the referenced article, (Demon), I got interested in what the proposed technology Cleanfeed actually does. If I got the right site, it seems to be a standard filtering proxy and if you go to www.cleanfeed.co.uk/products.php you'll see that there are 44 categories defined and 12 blocked in a standard configuration, more than just child-porn.
The category list is on www.cleanfeed.co.uk/catlist.php
Some of the interesting categories are Religion, Web based e-mail, Health and Medicine and Usenet.
Though Cleanfeed only blocks 12 of these categories it can log access to all of them.
In my case I use Demon's web proxy to be a good citizen and cut down on bandwith usage on the net, therefore all my web accesses are logged in the proxy anyway - but I don't have to do it. I have the choice not to as Demon allows direct access by-passing any ISP proxies. If Cleanfeed comes in all my web accesses to sites that somebody else may deem inappropriate will be logged regardless. The list is defined as the, "Cleanfeed Master Database of classified Internet domains", and any domain of interest could be inserted into it. The use of Cleanfeed as a monitoring tool for anything that an ISP, and by extension a Government, may not like is obvious and it's use to block sites may only be secondary to its ability to monitor people's access to sites.
In the UK, pornography (excepting that involving children, which is de facto illegal) is not illegal unless it qualifies as 'obscene' under the Obscene Publications Act 1959. The test provided by this act for obscenity status is that the material, in the opinion of the prosecuting authority, is likely to deprave and corrupt.
Inevitably this is a rather subjective judgement and has lead to a very inconsistent application of the act. It also makes it all but impossible for an individual to determine whether a given image in their possession is illegal under the act or not - it all depends on the opinion of the judge that you may or may not be hauled in front of.
That said, possession of such 'obscene' material is not itself illegal unless it was imported illegally. Distribution and publication of 'obscene' material is an offence. And simply showing someone an 'obscene' image is classed as publication for this purpose.
The law regarding pornography involving consenting adults is really a complete mess in the UK.
I built and manage a Usenet binaries site (one of the original ones, but now sadly in need of an update and, since Cidera bit it, not terribly complete). A lot of pure Usenet servers (no binaries decoding) make all newsgroups available under the hope that common carrier law will apply if (when) the shit hits the fan, but we suspected early on that common carrier law wouldn't apply as we were decoding and thumbnailing images. Thus, one of the first things I did when I wrote the code was to create an MD5 checksum database to block images. Anything that appeared in a known KP group would be be checksummed and added to the database, and anything anywhere else with a checksum in the database would be blocked (a good idea, since pedophiles change newsgroups frequently, and commonly take over abandoned groups in alt.*). New or newly active newsgroups were quarantined, no image decoding but with the subject lines presented in a report for our review. We could tell fairly quickly whether a newsgroup should go into the blocklist just based on the subject lines and content filenames.
A few years ago I had occasion to speak to law enforcement (police and FBI) who were investigating someone for KP possession, and he had a subscription to our site. They decided we weren't the source (biggest sigh of relief in my life) but were interested in our blacklist system and wanted a copy of our blacklist database. I spoke with one guy (FBI if I recall correctly) for an hour or so and I got to hear more than I ever wanted to know about KP on the net. Here's what he told me. He seemed to know what he was talking about (and seemed to be rather discouraged by the whole mess) but for all I know it could be bullshit.
There are three major sources of KP on the net. The first, present in Usenet but not on the web, is scans from magazines and such that were, at one time, legal to possess, but were criminalized during the Reagan administration (I think). As you might imagine the sickos who had stacks of "lolita" magazines weren't exactly rushing to turn them in to the cops. Once scanners became available, people started scanning in images and distributing them. Now, the original scanners' series are passed back and forth endlessly on Usenet and probably will be until the end of time. Fortunately, they're pretty easy to block by name and checksum.
The second and by far largest major category of KP on the net is softcore websites (nudity and sexually suggestive poses, but no penetration or sex acts), and reposts of same on Usenet. I'd always assumed this meant casual nudity (like nudist camp photos) but the guy I spoke with corrected me and said a lot of them are highly sexual poses and attire, with genital closeups. There are only a handful of major companies involved, each one runs multiple websites, and they tend to use the same limited number of "models" (i.e., exploited kids).
And "exploited" is the right word. Regardless of the fact that there's no penetration involved, these are poor kids making very little money for themselves and a shitload for the websites, and IMO it's similar to (tho not as bad as) parents selling their kids into prostitution. But in the areas where this occurs (largely but not exclusively former Soviet republics), it's legal, or in some cases just ignored because the cops are bribed or have bigger concerns to worry about (like actual child prostitution, organized crime, etc.)
The third category, appearing on Usenet and P2P networks but not the web, is hardcore material produced by the same evil fucks who are raping the kids. There's no money involved, but most of it is privately traded (or posted encrypted on Usenet with keys exchanged privately) and to be admitted to trading circles you either have to find rare content or produce your own stuff. So this *definitely*
Look at the case law on the things that have been found to contravene the Obscene Publications Act and then tell me that you believe that pornographic material involving consenting adults is legal.
It's less than 30 years ago that three men were sent to prison for publishing cartoon drawings of Rupert the Bear fucking Gypsy Granny.
Raindrop's comment below seems to me to be a very insightful summary on the state of the law in the UK.