UK Child Abuse Investigators Resent Being Charged For ISP Data

nk497 writes "In the UK, ISPs are charging a child protection agency for access to IP user details they need for their investigations into online-related abuse. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre has paid out over £170,000 since 2006 on IP data requests related to child abuse cases, and expects to pay another £100,000 this year — enough to fund another two investigators. The CEOP's CEO said that any ISP which can't afford to give the police such help 'simply can't afford to do business.'" Surely it must cost the ISPs money to comply with such requests, no matter how official the quest.

Comments

Re:Good

[Tx]

Absolutely, having these charges will hopefully reduce the amount of spurious fishing trips. Let's face it, if it didn't cost them, we all know how that would end.

Mind you, when I read about this yesterday on theregister, it said that ~10000 requests had resulted in ~300 arrests, but no data was available on how many of those arrests had resulted in convictions. So we don't really know the quality of those requests as it is.

British Government idiocy

[Kupfernigk]

The root cause is nothing to do with IT or information policy. It is the ability of the British Government to govern by statutory instrument (SI), an essentially undemocratic tool not overseen by Parliament which allows civil servants to make laws. The result is that they pass laws in response to to Murdoch- and Rothermere- dominated tabloids, without stopping to consider how they will be paid for. Additional work is placed on the police, the emergency services, local government and the NHS without any funding. They are then left to consider which activity, not being screamed about by Paul Dacre just at the moment, they will have to cut. We're at risk of child abduction by paedophiles! Stop it! OK, let's cut the traffic police to pay for it. Or stop manning local police stations.

The answer, which won't happen while the Civil Service is run by Civil Servants, and while the government is run by politicians, is either to roll back the SIs and rely on properly thought out laws, or to require that any SI must first identify all funding issues required and explain how they are to be addressed.

My favourite idiotic SI is the one passed a few years ago, under which it is now illegal for, say, a professor of electrical engineering to rewire his or her own kitchen or bathroom, while the same job can be done by an unqualified trainee who merely works for a registered electrical contractor. That's typical of Civil Service thinking: don't look at the job to be done, look at the paperwork.

Re:Children at UK

[Stuart Gibson]

Because the tabloids use child abuse as a big stick to further their own political aims, whipping the unwashed (and mostly dumb) masses into a frenzy with a big "think of the children" stick.

Of course, this is a really easy one, because anyone who tries to logically argue that there has been no actual increase in child abuse or child kidnap in the last 30 years can be pointed at and branded as "doesn't care about children being abused" or onside with paedophiles. I thoroughly recommend getting hold of the satirical "Brass Eye" special on paedophilia which addresses this exact hysteria and caused outrage in the tabloids for trivialising this "serious issue". Most notable was the Daily Star who had a full page decrying the show and writer Chris Morris while the page opposite had a picture of a then 15 year old Charlotte Church in a bikini with the headline "She's a big girl now".