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IWF Backs Down On Wiki Censorship
jonbryce writes "The Internet Watch Foundation, guardians of the Great Firewall of Britain, have stopped censoring Wikipedia for hosting what they considered to be a child porn image. They had previously threatened to block Amazon for hosting the same image." Here is the IWF's statement, which credits the Streisand Effect for opening their eyes: "...in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. ... IWF's overriding objective is to minimize the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect."
Agreed. And that new law about S&M porn is pure moralistic censorship with a thin, fabricated "think of the women/children!" justification.
Going after legitimate businesses like kink.com and insex.com is counterproductive to what SHOULD be the real concern: pornography that features nonconsensual acts.
Those kinky porn models enjoy what they do and get paid well for it. In fact, if you check out the 6th preview video for all of the segments featured on www.free-hardcore.com, you'll notice that pretty much every model that does a shoot says they'd like to do it again. Which is probably pretty shocking to all of those censor-happy prudes in government, considering the subject matter and the fact that they themselves are probably not interested in such sex acts. Otherwise they'd have to realize how stupidly ridiculous all of this is.
The IWF never admitted to doing anything wrong. They merely realized that the knowledge and publicity of this event harmed their main goal and purpose of censorship, and in fact had the opposite effect of making this image more widely known and seen.
This example is one good reason to (at least) make the blacklist completely public and transparent. When a government (or in this case pseudo-government) and highly public agency want to hide things then corruption will inevitably follow. Transparency will always be better than sneakiness. If a public agency that effects the public does nothing wrong then they should have nothing to hide.