INTERNET censorship

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Wired
(Friday 19 December 2008)

by JAMES EAGLE
INTERNET censorship, as many sharper commentators than me have long pointed out, is usually either stupid, useless, repressive, broken or some heady combination of the four.

China and the United Arab Emirates are usually the prime targets for criticism, but Britain found itself in the spotlight this month with an incident which revealed that our system is, if not terribly repressive, certainly stupid, useless and broken.

Coincidentally, it's exactly the same anti-child porn system which, as I reported a couple of weeks ago, Australia is thinking about introducing and which most Australian internet service providers (ISPs) have since rejected as a daft idea (tinyurl.com/6q8b3p).


The incident, in a nutshell, went like this. Some bright spark stumbled upon the Wikipedia page for dreadful Teutonic hard-rockers the Scorpions, who have been through more drummers than Spinal Tap and have even worse taste in cover art.


One particularly cringeworthy example is their 1976 album Virgin Killer, whose cover features a naked 10-year-old girl. The aforementioned bright spark saw the picture on Wikipedia and reported it to the Internet Watch Foundation (www.iwf.org.uk), a charity which works to crack down on illegal internet content.


The foundation, being staffed with even brighter sparks, decided unilaterally that the album cover was child porn, even though it's freely available in British shops and posted all over the internet.


So the charity stuck the image on its blacklist, which is used by most of Britain's biggest ISPs to block users from seeing child porn sites, and things quickly got silly.


Depending on their ISP, British Scorpions enthusiasts might have found themselves blocked from viewing the image, the page or the whole of Wikipedia.


And, for technical reasons detailed by The Register (tinyurl.com/5zhrnl), the way in which the blacklist works meant that some users of six ISPs found themselves barred from editing Wikipedia at all.


Within days, the charity was forced to change its mind following howls of protest from Wikipedia users and the site's owners the Wikimedia Foundation, although it continues to insist that the offending image is "potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978."


So, what have we learned from the whole affair?


First, that the quicker the Scorpions end up in the dustbin of history the better, though that's by the by.


Second, most people probably realised for the first time that Britain's internet traffic is censored in this fashion, which might help to prevent such idiocy happening again.


Third and most important, serious questions are now being asked about the nature and role of the Internet Watch Foundation, particularly whether it deserves to have such power with so little accountability or openness.


Now, just to be clear, the foundation is far from evil. It's a non-profit organisation which ISPs opt into, although they generally don't tell their customers that they've done so, and which was set up because self-regulation was seen as a better option than having the police raid ISPs which were unwittingly hosting child porn.


But that's no excuse for wielding too much power badly. And the foundation's power could end up extending a very long way.


One minor detail of the faltering Australian plan is that it would use the British charity's blacklist as well as its own, meaning that Australians would find their internet usage censored by an organisation not based in their country, accountable to no-one in their country and working from legal definitions of obscenity which may not have anything to do with Australian law.


So far, these haven't been major issues in Britain, because the foundation has mostly done its job well. No-one, after all, is going to risk seeming to side with paedophiles purely for the sake of principle. But, if the foundation perpetrates any more high-profile blunders like this one, its immunity might not last much longer.


One big public work that's proven its worth

IN this age when big Keynesian public works projects are firmly back on the political agenda, there's a timely reminder from the Yorkshire Ranter (yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com) - actually no ranter at all but an astute, "noisy and socialistic view on politics, security and whatever may take my fancy" - that such grand works can have huge value for entirely unexpected purposes decades down the line.


He points out (tinyurl.com/3gjtdf) that Amazon is the latest IT giant, after Google and Microsoft, to build a "really enormous data centre" way out in the largely rural north-west US state of Oregon.


Why? Because Oregon is home to the Bonneville Power Administration, a giant hydroelectric project set up under Roosevelt's New Deal and hymned by lefty legend Woody Guthrie in songs including Grand Coulee Dam. Back then, it powered the smelters "makin' chrome and makin' manganese and light aluminium" to build B-17s to fight the nazis. Now, it now offers the huge quantities of power and cooling water needed to run massive "server farms."


Swords into ploughshares in a way that even visionaries like Roosevelt and Guthrie could never have imagined.


Wired Favourites

Old Computers
(oldcomputers.net)
Nostalgic gallery of archaic technology which immediately whisked your correspondent back to his young days laboriously prodding BASIC programmes into a ZX81 via the useless solid plastic sheet that passed for a keyboard.


Government Bullshit Risk Detector
(tinyurl.com/4sdok6)
Why government plans to use lie detectors to catch out benefit fraud are "hopelessly misapplied" and "no more effective in detecting benefit 'cheats' than flipping a coin."

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