Why Doesn't the IWF Notify Those Whom They Block? 203
The chief executive of the Internet Watch Foundation, which maintains a list of sites allegedly containing child pornography which are then blocked by most U.K. Internet providers, recently declared that the organization had erred in blocking the Virgin Killer poster art on Wikipedia. But Peter Robbins also called it "one mistake in twelve years" and said that "[t]here are a lot of very credible people on our board, and we want to give assurance that there is independent oversight on what we do." The issue of "oversight" raises a question that I don't think received enough attention during the Wikipedia block controversy: Why doesn't the IWF notify domain owners or hosting companies when it blocks their content?
If an image is a borderline case, such as the album cover that was hosted on Wikipedia, then IWF could notify the hosting company that they had determined that the image could be illegal under U.K. law. If the host — in this case, Wikipedia — disagreed, they could provide arguments to the contrary and possibly change the IWF's mind, which is what in fact happened once Wikipedia users eventually found out about the block anyway. On the other hand, if the image is very obviously illegal, then a notification to the hosting company might persuade them to take the image down. In that case, any argument against notifying hosting companies has to be weighed against the obvious good that would be done by removing the image from that location on the Web.
I sent this question to the IWF, which must get this inquiry a lot, since they replied with a form letter which stated in part:
Contacting international hosts of such content directly may undermine a police investigation, is contrary to our remit and is contrary to INHOPE best practice.
Well, saying that it is contrary to their remit or to INHOPE best practices, obviously just begs the question of why it is contrary to those "best practices"; I replied to ask that question but didn't receive a response, and INHOPE did not respond when I sent them the same question. So consider the only substantive reason given in the IWF's response, which is that notifying the host "may undermine a police investigation." This could hypothetically be true in some cases — if police are preparing to move in on a suspected child pornographer, but he finds out that his ISP has removed content from his account after a notification from the IWF, he might know that he's about to be caught, and delete any incriminating pictures from his hard drive.
But this reason makes no sense in the case of images such as the cover art on Wikipedia, where the content has been generally available in the host country for a long time, and the original content producers are publicly known and wouldn't be able to run for cover even if the local government did declare the image illegal. It also would not apply in a wide range of other situations where the creator of the content is known and admits to creating it. Consider the case of Dr. Marcus Phillips, who was convicted of producing child pornography after he was hired by the parents of two girls, age 10 and 12, to take semi-nude photos of the girls (with the parents present) that could be digitally manipulated and super-imposed to produce "fairy art." Suppose Dr. Phillips had posted his photos in a portfolio online. In cases where the person posting the content admits that they took the photos themselves, and the subjects of the photos are identifiable people with a connection to the photographer, then consider the two possibilities: either (1) The images are such that the police and the courts will ultimately determine that they are child pornography. In this case, you might as well notify the user and their hosting company that the images are being blocked by the IWF, because even if this "tips off" the guilty user, they won't be able to destroy the evidence by erasing their hard drive, because the existence of the image is enough to incriminate them. Or, (2) The police and courts decide that the images do not constitute child pornography, in which case they should not have been blocked at all. In either situation, there's no rationale for the IWF to block the content without notifying the content owners. So why wouldn't the IWF notify the hosts in such cases — when the content creator is generally known, and admits to creating the content, and simply doesn't believe that it constitutes child pornography?
The elephant in the room is the obvious motivation that the IWF has for not notifying people when it blocks their sites: The IWF may be over-blocking such content, and doesn't want irate parties to complain when they find out that the IWF has mis-categorized their content as "child pornography." If several people came forward to say that the IWF had blocked, for example, their photographs of nudist children (which are not illegal), then it might undermine support for the IWF blacklisting system and for their mission in general. So by not telling people that their URLs are blocked, they minimize the number of people who find out and complain.
Perhaps the IWF does not over-block a lot of content, but the point is that we don't know. When Peter Robbins says the Wikipedia over-block amounted to "one mistake in twelve years," and adds, "Nobody in the years that we have been operating had any real reason to complain," there is no way of knowing if those statements are true, because any other mistakes made by the IWF are unlikely to have been brought to light, for two reasons. First, if a site or an image is blocked, most users are not going to realize what happened, since to them it simply appears that the remote server is not responding. Second, even if a user realizes that an image is blocked and the user knows that the image does not constitute child pornography, they may still be embarrassed to come forward and complain that they were visiting, say, a site full of nudist child photos or a porn site featuring adult models pretending to be mid-teen Japanese schoolgirls, and their favorite picture was blocked. The Wikipedia incident was probably a once-in-a-decade perfect storm of factors that led to the IWF having to retract a decision:
- Wikipedia was popular enough that people quickly noticed the blocked content.
- Wikipedia had the halo of legitimacy accorded to a popular research site; nobody had to feel dirty for admitting that they had been browsing it.
- The image in question had been commercially available for a long time, and nobody had been arrested for selling or possessing it.
- The image had a credible claim to artistic merit. Strictly speaking, "artistic merit" is not a defense against child pornography charges, but there is no unambiguous definition that can be used to determine if a given picture constitutes child pornography, and in a borderline case, a judge would probably be influenced by the fact that the photo was used as cover art for a "serious" album, and not seized from a darkroom in some creep's basement.
That last factor brings up a final irony: that the IWF, in labeling the Virgin Killer cover art as "child pornography," may have just been applying an objective standard that many people might not have disagreed with, if it hadn't been for the fact that the image was used as cover art for a rock album. Suppose you read a news article about a man who was arrested for possession of child pornography, and you happened to see a sample of the images (never mind how) that he was arrested for. And suppose the Virgin Killer album cover photo were been mixed in with those images. Would it have jumped out at you as an obvious case of over-reaching by the police? Would you speak out publicly, saying that even the guy should be prosecuted for the other images, he shouldn't be prosecuted for that one? (Again, ignoring the issue of how you happened to be looking at the photos in the first place, and assuming you couldn't get in trouble for that!) I doubt that I would have the nerve. By defending Wikipedia for hosting the same image, I'm guilty of a double standard. But would the IWF have agreed to un-block the image, if it hadn't been the cover art of an album, but instead had just been a grainy photo stuck in a sub-directory of someone's home page that they never intended to be made public? If not, then the IWF is guilty of a double standard too.
So not only do we not know how many mistakes are on the IWF's blacklist, it may be hard even to agree on an objective definition of a "mistake." But at least in cases where the content creator has already identified themselves — such as a public image on Wikipedia, or an image in a photographer's online portfolio — the IWF should notify people when it blocks their content. That would at least bring to light the cases where the content creator disagrees with the IWF's determination that their content constitutes child pornography. In some cases, such as the Wikipedia controversy, people would side with the content providers. In other cases, they wouldn't. But there's no reason to assume, as the IWF does when saying that Wikipedia represented "one mistake in twelve years," that in 100% of such cases, the courts and the police would side with the IWF's judgment.
Re:Post the blacklist (Score:5, Interesting)
Worse than that - They may find themselves liable as accessories to a crime. I'm in the U.S. where, like in most places, viewing/possessing child pornography is a crime. If I were to verify one of the sites listed on the blacklist and it did, in fact, contain child porn, I'd be guilty of a crime. By providing me the link, the IWF may find themselves in hot water too. In court I may even be tempted to drag them in saying that, by providing the list, I felt an obligation to help them refine it. I never wanted to see those images - They pointed me to them and victimized me by encouraging me to view them.
May be kind of far-fetched, but I dunno - IANAL.
We need a change of tack (Score:4, Interesting)
If it undermines a police investigation, don't you think that as soon as the site is blocked, it might give them a clue the fuzz is on to them?
In my opinion, it should be the police's job alone, and not the IWF and ISPs' job to police these sorts of pages. True, there are some horrendous images of children being abused out there—but if the IWF can't tell the difference between a Wikipedia image of album artwork and child porn, surely there's something wrong?
If the police go after the pornographers, presumably they'll eventually find the servers and confiscate them—therefore, the stuff is taken off the net, and not with the sticking plaster of the IWF block. The contents of the pages also needs to be made public: only the text, however, because one can usually make a good guess at what's in images and video by looking at the text.
If the text says, for example, 'Virgin Killers is an album by [X band]...' you can guess the page is going to be legit. If it says 'cum see the hottest ch1ld pr0n0 & k1ddi3 pix...' well... you can guess what's going to be in there.
so they fix the list, and we move on (Score:2, Interesting)
i understand the argument of some people here: the list can have errors, therefore, the list idea is bogus
but this argument is ineffective: the list can be fixed. there can even be punitive damage costs delivered to anyone shown to be put on the list in error, which i would suggest, to make sure governments don't block carelessly. let a law be established where the government can me made to suffer dearly financially for blocking content that is deemed permissible in an open court of law. but what is not going to happen, nor should happen, is that the list itself should go away
i am going to receive flak from slashdot in general, but here goes: there is actually material on the internet that even the most socially liberal, libertarian-minded society would find objectionable, and has every right AND duty to block
that doesn't mean there is tons of content that is currently blocked by one government or another that is blocked wrongly. plenty of blocked material fails any morally or intellectually coherent test for validity of being blocked. but that doesn't mean there is actual genuine content out there that society has a right, and a duty, to block
look: you lose the argument if your argument is nothing should be blocked
but you WIN the argument if you say plenty of stuff is blocked wrongly
change the nature of your argument and your fight. but if you keep up with the fight that nothing should be blocked, you lose and are further marginalized in the argument. and it is an important argument, so that governments don't start blocking content without impunity, and that their block lists are transparent to the public and reviewable and vetoable
THAT is the important the fight. but the fight against the idea of blocking is over. it is happening, and will happen. get used to it. if you can't make peace with this fact, you have left the realm of the coherent argument and society is not listening to you
Not first mistake, first reversal (Score:4, Interesting)
They claim it's the first mistake they've made- this is clearly false, and it isn't hard to find examples where they've been clearly wrong.
It is, however, the first time that they've reversed their decision and admitted that they were wrong.
Re:Post the blacklist (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, that just points out the obvious incompatibility between the concepts of blacklists and possession laws. The company can't verify a proposed submission because to do so would violate laws about viewing and possessing child porn, either, so you can probably assume that the majority of sites on the blacklist are bogus. Either that or the company is forced to violate the law to confirm the sites.
Guess which of those two things must go away for society to function? Give you a hint: it isn't the blacklist. Possession laws are about as asinine as they get. They make illegal the legitimate screening of reported illegal content, they make reporting child porn that you accidentally discover on the Internet impossible without risking prosecution for possessing it (if only momentarily in your browser cache and RAM), and in general are fundamentally contrary to efforts to rid the Internet of child pornography. Any law that achieves the opposite of its stated goals is pretty clearly a fundamentally bad law...
...unless, of course, the members of Congress enjoy child pornography and passed laws like this to make it hard to eradicate so that they can enjoy it in the privacy of a secure government network with no logging.... You don't... like... child pornography, do you, Senator? Makes you wonder, doesn't it? :-D
Re:Post the blacklist (Score:5, Interesting)
They may find themselves liable as accessories to a crime. I'm in the U.S. where, like in most places, viewing/possessing child pornography is a crime. If I were to verify one of the sites listed on the blacklist and it did, in fact, contain child porn, I'd be guilty of a crime. By providing me the link, the IWF may find themselves in hot water too.
Easy way around that. Just have the IWF throw up a web page where you can type in a URL, and it'll tell you if that site is on the list. You don't have to give out the entire list to anyone. Everyone can check that their sites aren't being wrongfully blocked, without giving away the list of known CP sites.
Re:so they fix the list, and we move on (Score:1, Interesting)
There never ever is any reason to censor this content. Even if it is horrible and it violates laws such a list is still the wrong approach.
Over 80% of all child pornography sites are hosted in Europe or the USA. They are clearly illegal there so the servers themselves can be taken offline, a list is not required.
The funny thing is that these servers remain online. Either the police doesn't care or they aren't "real" child pornography servers, just some older chicks pretending to be teens and stuff like that.
On top of that nobody is harmed by viewing these pictures. Not a single case of child abuse will be prevented by blocking pictures _that already exist_. If anything a working block of such pictures will motivate pedophiles to create new ones.
The list is not only pointless, it's actually harmful and a shame to any democracy. Censorship is always wrong, no matter the intentions.