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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."
I'm rather surprised personally that they even admitted that it was their efforts that created the opposite effect rather than trying to label those talking about it as being "part of the problem" like most groups do for these kinds of issues.
Let's get it right; the IWF didn't say the page was porn; they said it was "potential illegal child sexual abuse." Most people seem to have assumed this was because the album cover artwork on the Wikipedia page included an image of a naked girl, but the reality is that IWF only wanted to protect children from the horrors of having to listen to anything released by the Scorpions.
omeone better start blocking this bit of smut from that den of molesters at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Raffael_030.jpg
Sick, I tell you, sick!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
huh, a censorship organisation that's capable of acquiring new information, and using that to change their actions.
I didn't think that I'd live long enough to see the day where such a thing would happen.
Isn't there someplace in Revelations where they mention this?
"And yea, look ye unto the people running the anti-child porn organizations on the intertubes. For they shall learn the error of their ways (temporarily) and it shall be a sign that the end of all things is upon you."
They still didn't admit it was wrong, they said their plan didn't work.
They are also admitting that kiddie porn images can be copied and transferred all over the world with no effort.
Unfortunately, I bet they still think it's possible to censor thoughts out of existence.
No, it's pretty tasteless, and probably was at the time too. However, I don't consider it child porn, otherwise I think the band would have not been allowed to release it and several people would have been arrested.
This particular situation was so ridiculous, I'm glad they realized what fools they were making of themselves. I mean, if the image had been hurting anyone in any way at all, I would have a different opinion. But as we have heard, the girl in question has stated herself that she's fine with it, was fine with it back then, and her parents were fine with it back then. Plus the fact that it's been available since the 1970s, in my opinion, means that it is actually a culturally significant work of art. Etc. Censorship is such an old issue, you would think people would realize when these policing agencies are crossing the line.
The only thing that I find hilarious about this is that the people behind groups like the "Internet Watch Foundation"
are from the same social strata that regularly gives us child molestors of the likes such as Marc Dutroux in Belgium
along with his cronies in the Belgian Government.
But of course the child pornography / pornography / minority rights etc. etc. debate is just the right orbital slot
for the popular indignation needed to fuel the underlying agenda which is to monitor and restrict free thought
and free speech, I think many of us not so profane anymores have already realized this.
...not in this instance anyway. These people were effectively forced to see the light and had to defend its indefensible actions. Finding that they could not and that, as the streissand effect goes, causes more attention to the matter than they were seeking.
I'm not sure what a better tag might be, but the image of cockroaches running away hiding from the light might be more apt in this case. These people seeking to censor too much find themselves in indefensible positions when light is shined on them.
...but they were all underdeveloped.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
What else have they censored that dont have the "name recognition" like Wiki or Amazon?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
...that an internet organisation that's been around since 1996 would understand the internet and would've realised the storm that censoring Wikipedia would cause and the resultant effect.
But frankly, to me there's a more important issue here- the IWF has accepted they're wrong which raises the question as to whether procedures need to be put in place to prevent mistakes happening again. The IWF is in a position of immense power and failures to perform their duties correctly need to have repercussions.
There have been various conspiracy theories as to whether the IWF was testing the water in light of Britain's new extreme porn law which makes BDSM and such illegal and hence whether the IWF was seeing what the response would be if they were to start filtering this out- particularly as scenes that could be deemed to be extreme porn exist in many common and publicly accesible places. To filter extreme porn as they do child porn they'd most certainly have to go after a lot more mainstream sites, it would no longer be a case of simply filtering out underground sites that only a small minority of people who are already classed as criminals visit.
Whatever the real aim of this was, whether it was simply a blunder or not, I hope for one thing- that the IWF now ensure they concentrate on what they're supposed to concentrate on, helping prevent child abuse and access to sites that really do gain money and so forth from such abuse and also that this has put to sleep any ideas of a power grab or increase in censorship to other, arguably harmless areas for the IWF.
Before the efforts of Internet Watch Foundation, I had never seen the image they were all worked up about, which is at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Virgin_Killer.jpg.
And now, thanks to their tireless efforts to protect me from myself, I have seen it.
Good work, IWF!
but the reality is that IWF only wanted to protect children from the horrors of having to listen to anything released by the Scorpions.
Than and all they had to do is make a press release, and garner worldwide attention. Some of it negative, but think of all the increased support by religious types. This was just an elaborate marketing ploy on their behalf that is sure to increase donations to their coffers while providing free media coverage over such a nonstarter of a band, issue and picture.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
In a later statement the IWF said 'Don't you worry, this is a minor setback. Rest assured, wherever there are naked children, we'll be watching, ready to pounce'
I have nothing compelling to say
Now the only censorship of wikipedia is done by:
1. Wikpedia admins
2. Jimbo Wales personally
3. Cabals
4. The marketing and legal teams of Corporations
5. Governments
Still, one censorer less is something I suppose.
"The Internet Watch Foundation, guardians of the Great Firewall of Britain...
Wouldn't that be "Hadrian's Firewall" in this case?
Proverbs 21:19
the Internet is much, much older than they are aware of, and for a reason. The Internet has always been a "nasty" and "krass" place. During most of its existence, as text only, maybe there was more left to the imagination? Its great to have all the added bandwidth, but not the added hassle of "do-gooders".
Nobody is going to "regulate" or enforce their religious convictions here. Leave us alone!
According to their statement, they have decided to never take any future action against the same image if it is hosted outside the UK, but if they find it hosted in the UK, it will be "assessed in line with IWF procedures", which means they will threaten the web site with prosecution.
Which of course means that those of us in the UK we will have to be content with seeing it on Wikipedia, Amazon and so on, or with buying it in record shops, or with reading books containing the picture, and so on, and so on.
Actually, it's about the passage of time murdering everyone.
IWF has decided to make an exception for this particular image, but the underlying attitude that led to its blocking remains the same. If not for the public scrutiny this particular decision has prompted, the image in question would still be blocked. I find that very disturbing.
The biggest problem I see with this sort of filtering is the fact that, at least for borderline cases, you rarely know whether the image being blocked is actually illegal. Usually it takes the due process of law to determine that a person producing an image has done something illegal, but with filtering all it takes to block an image is for the image to seem like child pornography. Whether it is or not is irrelevant. All that matters is the judgment of a private party.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Back in the 70s, everyone had a much more relaxed attitude to this sort of thing. According to wikipedia, there was even a spread of a naked 11-year-old girl in the Italian edition of Playboy in 1976. It is only in the last few years that activists have spread the idea that it is bad to look at pictures of naked children.
So, the picture was legal when it was first released, but may well be illegal now, at least in the UK.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
- George Orwell, 1984
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
o That the people trying to censor net access in this country are not just idiots, they're incompetent idiots.
o That the "blocks" that the major ISPs have in place are effectively useless; either they're incompetent as well, or (more likely) are paying lip-service to the whole idea by saying "yes, we subscribe to the IWF block-list" while using mechanisms a five-year-old could bypass.
o That Chris Morris was right.
Sometimes (as in the case of dodgy 70s album covers), this seems just a bit of a joke; but sometimes it isn't. During the early 90s spokesmen for the political wings of the terrorist organisations in the North of Ireland had to be re-voiced by actors, making interviews essentially impossible. I remember one occasion, after a particular gruesome bombing (many innocent people killed) when the spokesman concerned was able to hide behind the actor to get his message across without answering WHY his organisation supported this indiscriminate slaughter - the "censorship" rules had the exact opposite effect to what was intended.
Today from work (instead of working) I decided to check out the IWF website.
Turns out Getbusi content filtering proxy is blocking their site as "porn"
If you wanted to get cynical over this, that's not the best approach to take.
IWF is organization set up by ISPs. I believe their remit is to flag and block anything possibly illegal, allowing the legal/illegal argument to then be made (and any action taken). Their REAL purpose is to keep governments off the backs of ISPs - we're regulating ourselves, so you can leave us alone.
Now.
New bit of law just rolling out (Jan '09) outlaws 'extreme porn' in the UK. Complete and utter knee-jerk, poorly thought out crap we've come to expect from my government - for example, a clear definition of 'extreme' might have been thought be some to be a pre-requisite to such a law. We've now got some wooly f'in mess where a sizable chunk of the internet could be considered 'extreme'.
So who's going to be involved in this stupid law - IWF. Poor fuckers, don't envy them at all. Anyway.. if you were in the IWF's position of having to prevent people downloading 'extreme' material with the following options:
1) Arrest everybody who looks at anything vaquely offensive.
2) Allow everybody to look at everything and get government regulation applied (How's that going Australia?).
Just sort of suggesting that our collectively national focus even being very slightly brought to this issue, can do nothing but improve the current situation.
Its almost like they were trying to do the right thing and realised they did the wrong thing.
Try doing a Google Search for this sequence [ viet nam war news picture girl running screaming ]
Notice "naked" is not on the list. Nevertheless, the first result is this link
A quite famous picture (won the Pulitzer Prize) is on that page. With a naked girl-child in it. Of course, you would probably tear off your clothes and run screaming/naked too, if you had a really close encounter with napalm. I'm pretty sure I recall complaints about the original publication of that picture. Probably by relatives of the same idiots who objected to that album cover.
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.
Wikipedia says they do not censor. Yet they'll remove videos of male masturbation from -- the page on masturbation. They'll even remove images of people having sex and replace them with ridiculous drawings or drawings. They don't do that for other pages. Go to the page on a lion and they'll show you a big image, in colour, of a lion. No one says: "Well, a big image showing all the parts of the lion, and in colour, is just not necessary. Everyone knows what a lion is: A detailed image is not necessary to get the point across." But go to the Talk pages for fellatio or ejaculation and you'll see this exact argument used there. I would say they do censor. I think it's duplicitous of them to say that their official policy is "Wikipedia is not censored." And of course they censor child pornography from their pages, because it is illegal in Florida, where their main servers are.
Why stop with the albums of decedant rock bands, Wikipedia is full of images of naked children.
I just attempted to view the Wikipedia entry for "Virgin Killer" (the Scorpions album), and my employer's proxy content filter (supplied by Blue Coat) still lists this particular Wikipedia page as blocked:
Not sure if Blue Coat updated their records yet, but I'm about to complain to them about the content filter. This is the first time, incidentally, that I've seen any Wikipedia page blocked, though I've seen plenty of other asinine filters set up for other sites.
And for the record, I'm nowhere near the UK -- this is in Phoenix, Arizona. Nice to see how someone else's "community standards" are being enforced on me, across national boundaries.
"So you think that people that pay for images of this stuff don't contribute to the perpetuation of it?"
I agree with the AC. If the images are just of naked children (almost half of the child pornography cases in Ireland relate solely to pictures depicting no sexual activity whatsoever), that question is irrelevant, unless a child is actually forced to pose naked.
You're also making the assumption that everyone who is arrested for possessing child pornography has actually purchased child pornography. Many child pornography offenders are caught after taking their computer to a repair shop, having their IP address logged and traced, etc. They probably haven't harmed anyone, yet their life is now damaged beyond repair.
There should be a law against producing, purchasing, selling, requesting and trading pictures of children being molested (mere nudity should not be criminalised), but laws against accessing and possession do nothing to protect children; they simply provide an easy excuse for the government to exert control over citizens.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
The IWF are the net nanny for the UK and EU. What gives them the right to 'censor by edit'? Their view of what is illegal is being imposed globally, which to my mind is an act of vandalism. Just because they don't approve doesn't mean every county does. If every county was to follow the IWFs lead, I suspect there wouldn't be too much content left on the net...
Do you have a link to the article where it has that Playboy fact? It sounds like trolling.
Here's the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Ionesco
It took me less than a minute to do a search for that.
Try doing a Google Search for this sequence [ viet nam war news picture girl running screaming ] Notice "naked" is not on the list. Nevertheless, the first result is this link http://www.lakeland.edu/studentservices/news.asp?article=4354 A quite famous picture (won the Pulitzer Prize) is on that page. With a naked girl-child in it. Of course, you would probably tear off your clothes and run screaming/naked too, if you had a really close encounter with napalm. I'm pretty sure I recall complaints about the original publication of that picture. Probably by relatives of the same idiots who objected to that album cover.
The girl's name is Phuc. How long do you expect to be able to search for such an obscene word? Obviously, such a search could only be seeking evil images, and the nannies must prevent it...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
They don't need to, they censor sexually provocative pictures. Nude photos are fine.
To the IWF, as has been demonstrated, nude photos are sexually provocative.