In UK, Search Engines Urged To Block More Online Porn Sites

An anonymous reader writes "Search engines such as Google should do more to restrict access to online pornography, a government adviser on child internet safety has said. John Carr said increasing the number of sites automatically blocked by search engines would make it more difficult for paedophiles to get images of abuse. It comes after Mark Bridger was found guilty of the abduction and murder of five-year-old April Jones in Powys." It sounds like a continuation of the blocked-by-default porn white-listing plan that's been going around in the UK for a few years now.

Comments

Think of the children blah blah

[sl4shd0rk]

How about parents doing more to restrict their kids from getting into age-inappropriate things on the internet.

Re:Think of the children blah blah

[alendit]

How about parents doing more to restrict their kids from getting into age-inappropriate things on the internet.

How do you imagine it? Sitting next to the kid and watching over her/his shoulder?

How about we grow up as a society and rely on education instead of prohibition? How about explaining to a child what porn is and how it relates to sex and leave her/him make decisions.

But no, it could be awkward, stressful and demand something like actual parenting. Forget it, censor this shit off my internets!

Re:Think of the children blah blah

[kasperd]

How about parents doing more to restrict their kids from getting into age-inappropriate things on the internet.

Yes, but there should be tools helping the parents in doing so.

The suggestion in the summary is mixing up two completely unrelated issues. Those issues must be addressed separately, otherwise we are going to end up with the wrong solution.

There may be people who do not want to see porn online and wish to be protected from that. That is fine, but it should be a voluntary decision. Unless the person is a minor, in which case it is the parents' decision. But in order to do this, you need to have the content classified. Now it boils down to who has to pay for maintaining this classification. You cannot just require the sites themselves to do that, because some of them will be outside your jurisdiction, and some of them may not have an interest in being correctly classified. Once you have the classification, getting it applied to the right set of people is not all that hard. But don't force it upon grown ups, who do not want it.

The other issue, which is completely unrelated, and should be treated as such, is the issue of child pornography. Many people are acting as if the main problem to be solved is that of people looking at such pictures. And as long as we can prevent anybody from looking at those pictures, then the problem has been solved. That is not true. All which has been achieved by that is hiding the real problem. The real problem is, that what is depicted took place in the first place. That pictures were taken of it and that somebody saw them did not make the abuse itself any worse for the kid, but in some cases it does help reveal that the abuse is taking place, which can help stopping it.

Current laws may actually do more to destroy evidence of crimes rather than stopping the crimes themselves. How would things change if possession and distribution of child pornography was legalized, but manufacturing and trading it remained illegal? Instead of interest organizations building up censorship, which is ultimately going to hurt more, when it is used for other purposes, those interest organizations could collect child pornography and perform data mining on it, and as soon as they have identified individuals in the images, they can hand that over to authorities. I believe that would do more to stop abuse of children, than the current laws.

Re:Think of the children blah blah

[aj50]

Just for a change, the article isn't about that at all. It's about paedophiles advertising through easily searched for codewords on porn sites.

Seems to miss the point that such adverts could easily made to look innocuous and placed elsewhere.

Re:Think of the children blah blah

[MysteriousPreacher]

How do you imagine it? Sitting next to the kid and watching over her/his shoulder?

How about we grow up as a society and rely on education instead of prohibition? How about explaining to a child what porn is and how it relates to sex and leave her/him make decisions.

But no, it could be awkward, stressful and demand something like actual parenting. Forget it, censor this shit off my internets!

The child can learn about sex on their wedding night. Prior to that no-one really has much of an interest anyway and certainly won't be finding ways to slake that curiosity.

Re:Think of the children blah blah

[alendit]

Subtle trolling from an AC hinting that being gay is somehow abnormal? How original...

And I would be the first one to show my kid how to circumvent such software.

Re:Think of the children blah blah

[arkhan_jg]

It's nothing to do with kids getting age-appropriate material (this time). Their contention is that adult pedophiles first see pictures of children being abused (or anime versions, which are no different according to them) which then encourages them to go out, abduct, rape and murder children.

The obvious solution for the censor brigade is the same setup that mobile phone networks have largely switched to - heavy filtering by default (in this particular example, they want maximum google safe search as default on for everyone) so adult men can't find pictures or anime of naked children, and thus, will never go on to rape and murder real children. Tada! In order to see any sites that are otherwise filtered - such as legal porn, medical sites, art sites, any site to do with the town of scunthorpe - you have to register yourself as a dirty porn watching perv, which list presumably the police will be watching closely in case you start desiring to go on a child abduction and murdering rampage, and will explicitly discourage people from doing, thus keeping their minds clear of unpure thoughts in good Christian fashion.

That it achieves one of their other goals, the appearance of a kiddy-friendly internet with no adult-only activity ever, is just a happy co-incidence.

In a separate but parallel move, the Home Secretary is trying to revive the Snooper's charter - i.e. ISPs, webhosts, service providers such as google and facebook would have to keep extensive logs of what emails and websites UK users visit, which the police and security services can troll through at their leisure, looking for Islamic terrorists planning on chopping down passersby in the street with machetes. And probably now porn-viewing adults, in case they turn out to be child murdering pedo's.

It is the usual 'ban this filth, won't someone think of the children' attempts to whitelist the internet, but this time it's to protect the children from the men who murder them because they saw porn on the internet and decided to get the real thing. That child porn is ALREADY blacklisted by the list run by the IWF, and subscribed to by most ISPs, and he was getting stuff that wasn't on the blacklist, and thus filtering wasn't actually even doing the job they wanted it to when running as intended is being conveniently ignored.

That they and the home secretary don't have a damn clue about how the tech, ISPs or the internet work is a given. They see it as one giant branch of WH Smiths, and it's just like banning the sale of dirty magazines, and will obviously solve the problem once and for all, and anyone that tries to point out the flaws is in league with the terrorists and the pedo child murderers, and heaven forbid anyone express concerns about the Big Brother or Free Speech aspects.

Re:Think of the children blah blah

[kasperd]

However, there is another serious (thought not AS serious) concern. If you stealthily filmed adult couples having sex and published those videos, all without getting consent for the filming, then clearly that's not legal. The child in cp has that same right not to have videos circulated as any adult would have.

You are right. I should have expressed myself more clearly. I of course did not want the distribution to be legal under circumstances, where it would have been illegal even if the depicted persons were adults. But in those cases I think violations should be treated the same regardless of the age of the person depicted.

I suppose you could wait until the child becomes an adult and then buy the rights to the videos from the now adult person. That's all academic, though, since most voters are never going to think so calmly about cp that they could calm down long enough to comprehend such a line of reasoning.

That lack of rational thinking on the matter is so widespread that overall it might actually cause more harm than the abuse itself, which isn't widespread (or at least so we have been lead to believe).

Another topic is, does looking at cp make pedophiles more likely to molest children? Does it make them less likely to do so? I don't know. I suspect you don't either.

Claims have been made both ways. And probably there both exist cases where looking at child pornography stopped somebody from doing itself as well as cases, where looking at it made somebody do it. I think nobody knows if one or the other is true. The rational response to this, would be to do a scientific study to find out if the net effect is positive or negative. But I don't see this happening before a large majority of people start thinking rational about the issue. Currently we are doing things, which for all we know, might make the problem worse.

If people believe the former, even animated cp whose production involved no children at all is not going to be legal.

You could apply the same reasoning to movies where consenting adults are acting out a rape scene. Or movies with no sexual content, but violent scenes played by stuntmen. Those have not been outlawed in spite of some people believing they are making out society more violent.

I am not even convinced the people who want such animated child pornography to be outlawed even have considered whether it has any influence on how many children are actually abused. Many want it outlawed, just because they think it is distasteful. One has to stop and think about why people want child pornography to be illegal. Some do because they believe children are being helped by child pornography being illegal. Others want it to be illegal simply because they despise people of different sexual orientation from themselves.

Despising people because of their sexual orientation is no longer politically correct in large parts of the world. In what we usually think of as the civilised world, it is not illegal to be homosexual, and it is not considered socially acceptable to go and beat up a person for being homosexual. But if you despise people being sexually attracted to children, you can hide between a think-of-the-children defence. And justify whatever you want to do to such people, with "I'm just protecting the children".

There are differences in what means you would want to apply depending on which of the two reasons you have for wanting child pornography to be illegal. Whether you want people to be punished for looking at animated child pornography involving no real children, is one difference. If you despise the people simply for their sexual orientation, you want them to be punished in that case, even if no child is being harmed by it.

Consider the following two scenarios:

First a man who is sexually attracted to a woman of his own age. But the woman does not want to have sex

Re:Think of the children blah blah

[kasperd]

Why would kids look at online porn with a computer, at their parents home with parental controls, when their smartphones have an unlimited data plan and they can watch anywhere?

This is an opportunity for the telecompanies. They need to introduce phone subscriptions intended for kids, where the parents can apply limitations. I guess they sort of exists already with limitations on phone calls. For example the kid may be allowed to make an unlimited number of calls to certain numbers white listed by the parent, for other numbers they could be limited to for example 1$ of usage per week. It would be very natural to extend that kind of subscriptions with limitations on internet traffic. The parent should be able to login on a webpage where they can both configure limitations on phone calls as well as which filters are applied to the internet traffic.

A similar product might also be interesting for some business, who want to limit what their employees can do on a phone paid by the employer.

Re:Think of the children blah blah

[nospam007]

"Another topic is, does looking at cp make pedophiles more likely to molest children? Does it make them less likely to do so?"

That's what I think too. If they can't get videos of the stuff, they have to do it themselves.

Just as when there's no dealer where you can easily get it, you have to grow your pot yourself.

Re:Think of the children blah blah

[tomxor]

There may be people who do not want to see porn online and wish to be protected from that. That is fine, but it should be a voluntary decision. Unless the person is a minor, in which case it is the parents' decision.

Precisely, every corner of the world, a country, even a neighbourhood, is not necessarily safe or appropriate for children, the internet is an extension of that world in terms of information. It is however a lot more accessible than the real world.

But in order to do this, you need to have the content classified. Now it boils down to who has to pay for maintaining this classification. You cannot just require the sites themselves to do that, because some of them will be outside your jurisdiction, and some of them may not have an interest in being correctly classified. Once you have the classification, getting it applied to the right set of people is not all that hard. But don't force it upon grown ups, who do not want it.

Im' sure many different forms of this concept exist already and i'm pretty sure i've seen it advertised on various "internet security" packages, I think OS X has some kind of built in parental mode, whether or not that extends to the web i don't know.

Anyway, the solution: A white list is maintained.... The web is too vast to make a blacklist practical, so a white list upholds the restriction of undesirable content at the sacrifice of lagging additions to the list and vast omissions. However so long as the white list has a specific target audience (i.e. kids) then the list should be easier to satisfy with desirable content.

How that list is maintained is the hard part, but the most sensible would be collaboratively by the end users (i.e. parents), that way the list can grow according to demand (yes kids have to ask permission if they find something that's not on the list). Implementation doesn't really matter... make a White list first, make a way to collaboratively maintain the list, secondary (and subjectively) is the placement of that list... if you want it for your whole house then stick it on the router, if your kid has their own devices that move to various access points then put it on their devices and disallow them root access (if your kid knows enough to circumvent this then they are probably old enough for porn not to irreversibly rot their brain anyway, not that such a thing ever happened). Even putting it at the ISP as an opt in is plausible.... what is not ok is subjecting the whole world to it by forcing search engines to implement it, it's also futile because it would just create dammand for less restricted search engines that would inevitably spawn in places that *your country* government does not have jurisdiction over.

Re:Think of the children blah blah

[Kjella]

They probably already seem innocuous in context, because it seems to me all legally operating porn sites are extremely paranoid of being associated in any way with underage content. The suggestions are quite frankly bizarre and counterproductive, a registration requirement for being allowed to search for porn? With the implication that this'll be a huge red flag on you since the border between legal and illegal sexual images is nothing but a thin red line rather than the difference between a healthy, fun and common recreational activity between consenting adults and child abuse. What it in practice will do is make more people use the unofficial and anonymous channels, drowning out any signal to noise ratio of the really illegal material.

One of the greatest challenges of any system is the stigma of running it, sure downloading Justin Bieber and Game of Thrones via torrents isn't exactly legal but nobody really bats an eye at that anymore than admitting you were speeding on the interstate. And every male teen will understand why you'd want to torrent Asa Akira or Jenna Haze too, if you can't find them on Google. But if you start talking about things like BitCoin and TOR more will start wondering if you're involved with drugs, money laundering, terrorism, kiddie porn or you're a tinfoil hat nutter. Like, what does any "normal" person need it for and by that I don't mean law abiding. Drive porn underground and being underground will become socially accepted.

Re:Think of the children blah blah

[JWSmythe]

Nah, you have the honeymoon period right after marriage, which can last anywhere from minutes to years. For most, it's just a few days. After that, sex is strictly solo or with mistresses and prostitutes.

Oh for fucks sake, won't anyone consider the poor married blokes who need a wank once in a while.. Online smut is lot cheaper than a fine strumpet.

Re:Think of the children blah blah

[pitchpipe]

The child can learn about sex on their wedding night.

In muslim countries the child certainly can learn about sex on their wedding night.

porn or violence

[Ubi_NL]

it never ceases to amaze me that legislators are paranoid over even the slightest form of nudity while it took a massive public outcry to get a facebook movie removed in which a woman was decapitated with a kitchen knife.

I rather have my kids accidentally stumble upon some extreme acts of intercourse than extreme acts of violence.

Re:porn or violence

[rduke15]

I agree. And I also noticed that children tend to go sites for children because that is where they find what they want.
The "pornography" they might stumble upon accidentally is soft, and they don't even notice it because it's not intersting
Once they start finding pornography interesting, you cannot prevent them from finding it, and why would you anyway.
As teenagers, before the Internet, we had some pornographic magazines which someone would have found and which we would look at in a far away corner of the school yard. It hasn't traumatized me.

In short, my children who are now almost adult always had access to the Internet, and I have never noticed a problem with pornography.

Play spot the fallacy/error

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure exactly what it is Carr wants blocked? He seems to be calling for all sexual imagery to be blocked, and to justify this he cites behaviour related to pretty fucking horrendous child porn. It's like banning all metals because sodium reacts pretty explosively on contact with water.

Mr Carr said there was "no question" that some men who look at child sex abuse images go on to carry out abuse.

Earlier, speaking to BBC Radio 5 live he said: "There is enough evidence to suggest that if we can put more barriers towards guys getting to child abuse images, fewer of them will do it and more children will be safe."

He said between 15 and 50 per cent of men who previously had no involvement with child abuse images would go on to physically harm children once they accessed them.

This rate seems very high. I'm assuming he's referring to the kinds of images that most people wouldn't really want to be seeing, in which case these are deviants who have self-selected themselves. The impression he's giving is that up to 50% of normal otherwise sexually healthy people will driven quite mad by porn.
To put it another way, 40% of people who enjoy lettuce in some part of their diet are obese, therefore we should restrict lettuce if we wish to reduce obesity.

His comment on increasing barriers to porn being an effective way to reduce child abuse is pretty fucking telling. The same logic can be used to ban or restrict pretty much anything. Let's say that 10% of people who steal cars will use them in bank robberies, therefore introducing a levy on car purchases will decrease purchases, reducing car availability, thus decreasing bank robberies. Whether its the journalist or him, I don't know, but the tack keeps shifting. I agree that restricting access to images of child abuse is sensible, but is that all he wants? Earlier he seems to be going after legal porn sites as well. I get the impression he's happy to drive a bulldozer through a house in order to crack a walnut.

It has been suggested that some internet companies are reluctant to change their search settings as it would drive users to sites unwilling to change their policy and put them at a competitive disadvantage.

And the same would be true if Carr was asking Google to censor all search results depicting black people. They'd have no good reason to do so, and it would indeed gimp their service and drive customers away.

But he said one of the "key routes" paedophiles used to find content was through adverts containing "code words" that are placed on legal hardcore pornography sites.

So paedos have their secret code words anyway for locating their child porn - what's the fucking point in using Google then? Also, what he's getting at here is that legal porn sites are providing super secret access to child porn, so the solution is to remove all porn sites (legal or not) from search results? Website operators found complicit in the distribution of illegal images should be dealt with by the law - not everyone blocked because Carr claims there are some bad apples. Certainly people caught browsing such sites should be hearing from Plod.

Re:Is England turning Islamic ?

[Cenan]

Why yes, yes it is - run kitten, run.

Re:Pedo Panic

[lxs]

Come to think of it, it's a small miracle that bbc.co.uk hasn't been blocked yet. Judging by the news the BBC appears to be the largest pedo ring in the world.

The Internet isn't a nanny

[SpaghettiPattern]

The Internet isn't a nanny. You should prepare your kids to use it instead of sticking them behind a screen so that you can sod off to do secondary and pathetic things. Raising kids can't be automated. It takes a great deal of effort. Expecting search engines to filter all bad and thinking your kids will never watch questionable content is very naive and bloody daft. I don't expect everyone to be perfect and I understand "cheating" by, for instance, putting the screen in the living room.

Re:Is England turning Islamic ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooh yes the 5% of the population who are Muslim are tooootally dominating English culture and online pron is a concern exclusive to Islam. They have imams in the House of Lords, oh wait, no they Bishops from an Established Church (WTF) the Church of England in the House of Lords and the head of state is also the head of that church.

Ridiculous

[X10]

Both John Carr and I have been involved in the foundation of Inhope.org. But ever since hotlines and online child protection came into fashion, there's been differences in policies in various countries in Europe. In the Netherlands, policy makers, service providers and volunteers have always had their focus on preventing and fighting (pictures of) online child abuse (aka "child pornography"). In the UK, the focus has been on protecting childrens poor souls from seeing things that policy makers think children should not see. Hence, they block the obvious porn sites, leaving only the more hidden and nasty sites for children to visit. Even the EU in the early 90's quickly switched from preventing online child abuse to blocking porn. There was plenty of subsidy from the EU to local hotlines (of which Meldpunt was the first and the Internet Watch Foundation second), but as the focus shifted, Meldpunt was party left out from the subsidies, because it kept its focus where it should be: preventing and fighting child sexual abuse.

Sex is part of life. Educating children about sex makes them better prepared for life as an adult. You can easily see that by comparing stats for porn intolerance and teen pregnancies. Holland has a very low teen pregnancy number. And if parents don't want their kids to see online sex, why can't we just leave that to parents?

Governments should spend tons of money catching the guys who sexually abuse children. They should not interfere with sexual education, let alone censor the internet.

Re:Ridiculous

[X10]

Oh, and as for blocking child porn sites: blocking those sites makes them unavailable to the general public. They will remain available for pedophiles, one way or another. But if they're not visible for most people, no one will urge their members of parliament to spend more money on catching pedophiles. As a founder of Meldpunt.org, I know for a fact that if the stuff is visible, papers and blogs write about it, and the government (parliament and police) take action. If child porn had been blocked from the start, it would have still been there, the same number of kids would have been sexually molested, but there would have been no Internet Watch Foundation or Meldpunt, or Missingkids for that matter.

confused meddler

[Cederic]

His statements seem to be very confused. He wants Google and others to do more to block material depicting child abuse. Well that's already blocked in the UK, and it's done at the ISP level with no need for Google to be involved.

He wants Google to use 'safe search' as their default search setting. I thought they already did?

He seems to think people will have to register to be able to search for porn. Register where? Search how? And register for what? This is where I'm utterly confused by what he's assuming, what he's proposing and how he thinks it will work.

The only certainty is that it wont.

Mark Bridger viewed non-pornographic images of April Jones from Facebook. So does Carr want Facebook banned? Does he want images of five year olds banned from Facebook? Does he want it to be impossible to search for images on Facebook?

Mark Bridger had a collection of images of child abuse. Those images are already illegal. Access to them is blocked when possible already within the UK. There's not a whole lot Google can do about that, not least because anybody finding any material via Google can already notify the Internet Watch Foundation and let them know about it.

The good news is that in another ten years or so the politicians will start to be replaced by people that grew up with the Internet, that understand it better and that will at least have a grasp of the pragmatic realities involved.

Re:Nudity is sinful.

[budgenator]

I'm intreged by this pagan concept call HELL.

Re:Is England turning Islamic ?

[xelah]

This seems to be being pushed by rather conservative types, not by the UK population or government coalition as a whole. Bear in mind that the Conservative party here is feeling under pressure from the even more conservative anti-EU UKIP, and have a lot of unhappy backbenchers currently busy being revolting over gay marriage. Also bear in mind that there's quite a big generational attitude difference to things like this, with younger people being a lot more liberal but not well represented politically. There's been a lot of conflation of child abuse, child porn and adult porn in debate and reporting, which only makes me think even more that this is as much about older generations dislike of younger generations sexual attitudes as it is about child porn or online 'safety'.

Conflation

[Admiral Burrito]

It's amazing how quickly they leap from "porn" to "paedophiles". Just two paragraphs in, and both of them very short.

It used to be "gays == paedophiles" but they can no longer get away with that.

Re:You can install a guardian whitelist yourself.

[kasperd]

Rather than have it all done by Google, Bing, Yahoo, BangBangDuck or whatever, you can install your guardian software on your PC where you can control which ones it lets through and which ones it bans, and use the list available to ensure you don't have to visit them all yourself.

Or does nobody have the time to install software on their kiddies' PC?

I did not say anything about where it should be done, because my comment was focusing more on the policy aspect than the actual technical implementation. Having it done by search engines is obviously not the best place to do it. But on the kids own device is not the best solution either, as even a kid can learn how to bypass that. Putting the filter on a middlebox between the device the kid is using and the internet is a good start. A bit of cooperation from the device the kid is using would help, for example that would allow a mitm on all https connections. A bit of cooperation from search engines would also help, that way you can avoid allowing access to the content through Google cache or Google Images. You could even avoid having the blocked pages show up in search results in the first place.