not nice
Devotees of the Soapbox will know that I don’t easily or knowingly go along with anything that Mr Cameron has to say, but as far as the recent discussion re online pornography is concerned I can’t find much to fault. To my (admittedly simple) mind it’s quite obvious: make illegal child porn as difficult as possible to find and all other porn accessible on an intentional ‘opt in’ basis. Who exactly, in their right mind, is going to argue anything to the contrary? If you want ‘normal’ porn you can have it. If you want ‘illegal and depraved’ porn you can’t. Unless you try really, really hard to get it, and kinda prove yourself guilty in the process. Your choice. So there.
Within the UK, responsibility for removing images of child sexual abuse from t’internet has been outsourced by the large multinational ISPs to the tiny, little-known charity, Internet Watch Foundation, with a staff of less than 20. The charity’s work is, quite rightly, funded by the ISPs but it is shocking that Google had to be recently named and shamed before committing to a paltry £1m donation. Two specific figures highlight both the need and relative success of the IWF: in the past 12 months there has been a 40% rise in reports made of potential illegal content and since 1996 the percentage of child abuse images hosted in the UK has fallen from 18% to less than 1%. Having said that, it would be interesting to know, and reassuring to be told, that in real terms this number is also lower. They do a great job but with proper funding could do oh so much more.
Apparently, websites used by paedophiles circulate codewords and passwords which include jumbled letters and numbers to enable access the sites. The IWF consequently then sends out daily lists of these passwords to the ISPs to help them alter the search results. A bit ‘cat & mouse’ me-thinks. The charity does not investigate the people who post these images because its remit is simply to remove them. The police department responsible for any subsequent investigation, the Child Sexual Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), estimates there are tens of millions of such images in circulation on the internet. And growing daily.
Surely the provision and implementation of either technical guidelines or full-blown prevention isn’t beyond the capabilities of the whizz kids and visionaries at Google, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and the like? Unless they want to try really, really hard to avoid answering the most basic of questions. This isn’t about freedom of speech, this is about protecting the young and vulnerable. Your choice. So there.
