[LA Home Page] The Library Association Record 98(10) October 1996 p498-499
The police have made the first moves towards censoring the Internet. But are these measures going to sacrifice freedom of speech without catching the real villains? Don Watson talks to an IT professional who doubts their efficacy.
When the American Internet Decency Act put Internet censorship on to the global agenda, it was inevitable that the UK would also have to tackle the issue. As sure as the online virus zapped across the Atlantic with the speed of a micro-byte down a fibre-optic cable, so the controversy that came in its wake has followed.
While the court case brought by the Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition was still under way in America, as the blue ribbon (symbol of Internet Freedom) began to appear on World Wide Web sites around the globe, Ian Taylor of the Department of Trade and Industry issued a statement. In it, he talked of a reluctance to follow the legislative route that was to cause President Clinton the embarrassment of having his legislation declared unconstitutional. The preference in Britain was for a 'self-policing' approach on behalf of the Internet providers.
The ramifications of this statement only became clear in mid-August when a letter was sent to all Internet service providers (ISPs) by Chief Inspector Stephen French of the Clubs and Vice Unit of the Metropolitan Police. Giving a list of newsgroups which contain 'offensive material', it goes on to say, 'we are looking to you to monitor your Newsgroups identifying and taking necessary action against those others found to contain such material'.
This action opens up many of the same debates as the American legislation did, concerning the practicalities and the dangers of censorship on the Internet.
The 'quality' press has chosen to inflame an already sensitive issue further. The Observer (25 August) ran a tabloid-style exposé of Internet providers Demon, on the basis of which Demon has initiated libel action.
The Observer aroused further ire when it claimed (1 September) that its article had resulted in a policy change at the company. Demon points out that it had announced the adoption of a system which allows for parental control over content on 20 August.
No responsible citizen can question the dangers posed to society by paedophilia. It is easy to see why, after the horrific stories we have seen unfolding across our television screens, the very idea of a newsgroup entitled 'alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.children' provokes justifiable anger and a desire for retribution. With Internet access points proliferating in libraries, and the Libraries and the Superhighway Millennium bid progressing, the question of just what people are using this access for is a valid one. But this is a more complex issue than it at first appears, and it deserves to be considered carefully.
If there are defenders of paedophilia in the Internet community they are keeping very quiet. None of the debates that are raging online dispute that there is a problem, some even suggest that there is a solution to it. But all are agreed that the action suggested by the Met is counter-productive in the extreme.
Tim Smith is a system/news administrator at service providers Zynet. He is, he says, 'the one who would be stuck with implementing these measures'.
His first problem with the measures is that the police are looking to the ISPs to do the work of the legal system. His belief is that 'censorship and the restriction of speech may only lawfully be performed by parliament or by a court'.
What is more, he feels that the Met's letter contains a clear indication that if they think the ISPs have got it wrong, they will bring 'what can only be construed as a malicious prosecution'.
The central problem of this issue is the responsibility that ISPs have for the material that is displayed. As people who have used the Internet understand, the providers do not have the same relation to the material that appears in newsgroups as a publisher (or even a newsagent/librarian). Publishers consider material and make a conscious decision to distribute. Librarians and newsagents, while they are likely to be making many more transactions than publishers, are still making a positive decision to purchase.
The role of an ISP is to make an area of space available for people to use for communication. To give them the problem of policing this space creates the obvious ethical difficulties but it throws up more practical problems too.
First of all there is the simple time factor. With hundreds of postings being made every day, asking a provider to read every mail message to check for something offensive is like expecting a library assistant on a returns counter to look through every book to make sure no latter day Orton or Halliwell has defaced any of the pictures or altered any of the text.
Then there are dodges the pornographers can adopt. It is possible for example to encrypt an the image to make it look to the naked eye like a picture of Queen Victoria.
The news server can be configured to refuse a request to look at articles in certain newsgroups, but you need to know the name of a newsgroup in order to block it.
'You can usually use a wildcard match', says Tim, 'but the more specific the match the more likely you are to miss something, and the more general the match, the more likely you are to catch things you shouldn't. If I were to put a block on *sex*, the inhabitants of Sussex could be denied local newsgroups. If I blocked *erot* (hoping to get all the "erotica", as well as various of its misspellings in group names), those wishing to follow 'alt.politics.ross-perot' would become justifiably upset with me. If I block anything containing the word "sexual", I also forbid all the support and self-help groups relating to sexual matters.'
The SexNet project, an artists' online project run by four Regional Arts Boards would also be blocked.
One of the most controversial groups on the Met's list 'alt.sex.paedophilia', was, Tim points out, formed as a forum for the discussion of methods of identifying, treating and helping paedophiles and their victims.
'It was created', he points out, 'because the topic was over-running the alt.sex group.'
Obviously there are sick individuals out there, and the name of the group attracted the sort of material that even the most radical anti-censorship Nettie would like to see tracked down and eradicated. But closing the group down means admitting that the serious purpose it was formed for has been defeated.
Worse than that, it doesn't mean those sick individuals have gone away. No one but the most determined liberal believes that line about 'surely these things are best kept in the realms of fantasy' (for a start those are real human beings in that picture)
But if they're not posting in more explicitly-named groups, what's to stop them posting where the (relatively) innocent congregate, somewhere like the games discussions for example.
Banning words is no solution, as anyone who knows their semiology would understand.
'One of the non-Internet providers tried that', Tim points out. 'People wishing to discuss topics deemed 'offensive' began to use agreed-upon euphemisms instead. Not only did this increase the chance that someone would stumble on these groups by accident by rather a large amount, but now that provider's 'banned' list includes an increasing number of perfectly innocuous words, simply because they had begun to be used with non-dictionary meanings.'
Just because a provider blocks newsgroups doesn't mean that its subscriber can not get access to them. There are a number of World Wide Web subscription services which allow subscribers to browse. The possibility of additional income from selling advertising space makes this a commercially viable option.
Which brings us to the next problem in Internet censorship. Although it is an international means of communication, obscenity laws still respect national boundaries. In other words even if it was possible to prevent any of the providers in the United Kingdom or the United States from handling offensive material, anyone could set up a server in a country where censorship laws are more lenient.
Attempting to cast the censorship net so wide also makes the operation vulnerable to counter-attack.
'You figure out what the system is checking for', says Tim Smith, 'and originate traffic designed to trigger those checks.'
It is apparently common practice to include the word 'Scunthorpe' in a signature to make things difficult for subscribers to America Online, whose server scans for certain words.
'Generally the machine doing the checking will build an archive of the items that trigger it for future perusal', Tim continues. If you figure out what it considers to be 'signal' you can then swamp it in 'noise', give it so many nonsense references that weeding out the genuine article becomes an impossibly time-consuming task. And the machine runs out of disk space real fast.'
The vast majority of people agree that there is some material on the Internet that is undesirable. So what can be done about it?
According to Tim Smith the approach would be to concentrate on the individuals who are posting illegal material. 'It can be traced', he says.
Certainly the Internet casts a light on certain sections of society that some of us may prefer not to see. This is, it seems a global city, after all, not a neatly manicured village. Like a city the diversity of its inhabitants lends it much of its sense of adventure and creative fusion. As with the corporeal world the issue is surely to distinguish between the genuinely criminal and the simply squalid.
The advice to parents from the Internet community is 'make sure you know what you're kids are up to'. Their advice to the police is an equally familiar refrain of 'go and catch some criminals'.
Last updated: 1 October 1996
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