Porn-blocking season is here again..
The world woke up this morning to a rising crest of hysteria about the arrival of a Royal baby, and the sound of David Cameron making a determined lunge to secure the Daily Mail/Mumsnet vote before everyone (including him) goes on holiday : by “declaring war” on Internet porn. As someone said on Twitter (there’s always one), we’re very keen on babies, just not on letting anyone see how they’re made..
Dodgy jokes aside, Dave’s latest vote gathering strategy is more sickening than funny. His speech — aimed apparently at a pre 1996 stage of Internet governance — about how to tame that pesky unregulated Internet and drive online porn into the sea can be found in its full glory here. Anyone who knows anything about the field will notice immediately that the speech cunningly and quite convincingly intermingles two entirely different topics: (1) access by children to entirely legal pornography (which is nonetheless “corroding childhood” — see below) and (2) the eradication of access to images of the abuse of children, possession of which is universally criminalised.
Children and legal pornographic content
Re (1), Pangloss is no more keen than most on some of the nastier aspects of modern easy access to legal pornography — recent research apparently showing that teenage male sexual expectations of girls (and girls expectations of their own bodies and actions) are formed largely by what they see porn stars doing springs to mind — but, as a society, we long ago made a decision that where we were talking about content that some like, but others find objectionable, and that does not, like “child pornography”, record sex with persons who could not possibly consent, in principle, domestic use of it by adults is legal. That attitude may need revisited — we seem , possibly , to have seen public support for creation of new types of universally illegal pornography, such as violent and rape porn, and snuff videos. But to do so is a matter for parliamentary and public debate — not a matter for Google or ISPs to fix overnight because David Cameron likes to be seen as a caring family man. Hiding legal but nasty porn away from UK ISP subscribers by default-on porn filters may be a relief to some adults who can then happily assume the Internet is fixed and go back to the telly — but it is unlikely to stop children accessing it, and very very unlikely indeed to stop people making it when there are so many distribution channels left where a buck can be turned.
Cameron says he wants to stop “how online pornography is corroding childhood”. But in fact even if we accept this is entirely the fault of online porn (what nothing to do with Rihanna? cheap alcopops? reality TV? the Sun?) almost as much as can sensibly be done to monitor or stop child access to unsuitable materials has already been done, destroying Cameron’s voter-friendly assertion that Internet providers and search engines are obdurately refusing to take responsibility (we already know they don’t pay tax, don’t we boys and girls!) .
In fact driven by the abysmal PR associated with any tinge of friendliness to pedophilia, service providers too often lean in the other direction, of over blocking content. UK mobile operators, working on the assumption that children have unprecedented unsupervised access to Internet content via the mobile Web, sign up to a voluntary code where a safe filtered Net is provided unless you can prove you are an adult (not easy, and often a pain to do). Schools provide still further filters, often draconically over blocking everything from Facebook to fashion sites. Almost every UK ISP now provides family friendly filters to subscriber households for free on request. Google provides a Safe Search option which if used on strictest setting stops anyone searching on words like porn or rape — yes , just like Cameron says doesn’t happen right now. The accountholder — ie, an adult — can lock Safe Search so that any kids in the household can’t turn it off.
Yet strangely evidence, empirical and anecdotal, shows generally low uptake by parents on both these impressive safeguards. Why is that? Could it be parents aren’t actually as bothered as they say about child safety ? Is that why Cameron thinks default opt-out from porn will solve the problem and if so, are children likely to be isolated from porn just because an automated filter is switched on? I doubt it — most kids do or can find out how to run a VPN or a proxy server access nowadays, , having learnt what these are by the kind educational services of the anti filesharing industries . What requiring adults to “opt into porn” will mainly do is provide a nice database somewhere of adults who dare to opt out of filters on the ground they have no idea what these so called porn filters might scoop out (LBGT material? Almost certainly. Safe sex or breast cancer info? Probably. Fanfic? Quite likely. ). At the moment we also have no idea who might get access to that list in some future unpleasant scenario (unevidenced rape accusations, custody battles and school or public sector employment checks come fast to mind). It would be nice to see the Information Commissioner having something to say about this aspect.
Access to images of child sexual abuse and stopping the underlying abuse
But returning to (1) , this is the part of this speech where Pangloss feels she has historical expertise and which made her truely angry this morning. Cameron’s advisers — and hence Cameron himself, indubitably — know and have known for a very long time, that web blocking via the IWF blacklist does nothing but stop amateurish and accidental access to images of child sexual abuse (“stumbling upon” is the phrase most often used) and that this is a tiny, tiny part of the problem of real abuse to real children by hardened paedophiles and their suppliers. The IWF was truely set up to facilitate removal of child abuse images from UK servers and in that it has succeeded — less than 1 % of this material is now hosted in the UK. It was never meant to stop determined acess to foreign hosted material bceause it was known this was impossible. As long ago as 2005, Mike Galvin, then of BT and the IWF and one of the architects of Cleanfeed, admitted to the Guardian that it “won’t stop the hardened pedophile” and that its main use was to help protect people who eg accidentally followed links to images of child abuse if sent in a spam email.
Unfortunately any political gesture connected to web blocking, that tiny part of the problem — recently brought to public attention in the not very statistical sample of the shape of the killers of Tia Sharp and April Jones — guarantees a Daily Mail headline. Result for politicians. But hardened or repeat pedophiles do not, as a rule, find the images they seek via Google — what and have their search record archived? — but from parts of the Net which are not part of the Web and which are not mapped by Google spiders — and hence not blockable by Google either.
These places are sometimes known as darknets, eg P2P sites for swapping illegal material — or “hidden services”, the phrase the IWF uses in its latest report to describe anonymised websites where new pedophile material often makes its first appearance. The IWF know all about this, which is they recently hired a technical analyst to look into how to monitor this kind of traffic. CEOP knows too. The European Commission has spent a great deal of money funding research into P2P content blocking. In fact even I knew, as far back as 2000 when I first wrote in detail about the law and child sexual abuse. You can find a version of the same argument in the 2009 version of that piece here.
How then can pedophile access to images of child sexual abuse be controlled by mainstream search engines, if these predators do not largely use mainstream search engines? Simply, it can’t. This doesn’t stop Cameron saying that search engines should “step up to the plate” by blocking certain search terms. We dont know how this is meant to work yet, so it’s difficult to critique. But one obvious criticism is that filter by keywords is easy for pedophiles to avoid — just use code words that run ahead of blocking, just as right now the word “Lolita” has come to signify underage sex — but will stifle legitimate searches by ordinary people. For example today I searched for Cameron’s speech by putting in “cameron porn Internet speech”. Tomorrow I may not be able to do that perfectly responsible thing. As usual the items that suffer from over-blocking tend to be the same marginalised concerns: survivors seeking advice, confused LGBT teens seeking community, etc.
What more can be done sensibly then? Spending money on the option that actually works: not avoidable and plaster-over-the-cracks blocking but actual take down of material abroad — most prevalently in the US (56% origin of child abuse images, say the IWF) , not some inpenetrable lawless post Soviet republic — and associated international policing co- operation. The IWF knows this. Their 2012 annual report still says : “We believe that the most effective way to eleminate child sexual abuse contentis to remove it at its source” Banks know this. They spend money on securing local take down of fraud and phishing sites abroad with the result that these sites come down in hours, while the sites that host child sex images stay up for often up to 60 days (also from the IWF report). CEOP knows this. Their former CEO Jim Gamble resigned two years ago because CEOP’s budget was effectively being cut. Web blocking is much cheaper than policing, especially if you get Google to pay for it. Gamble was on the circuit the last few days, castigating Cameron for grandstanding for election votes .
So if all these experienced child welfare advocates know this , why doesn’t David Cameron ? Could it be he isn’t thinking of the children after all?
