Watching the Internet watchers

THE INTERNET WATCH Foundation announced rather invisibly this week a change of policy: "We will now recommend to UK ISPs that they do not carry newsgroups which IWF identifies as regularly hosting child pornography. We will use statistics from our own monitoring to identify the groups that fall into this category." Board member Malcolm Hutty promptly resigned. He was the only civil liberties activist they had; he is general director of the Campaign Against Censorship of the Internet in Britain (http://www.liberty.org.uk/cacib/). Also gone, earlier, over this sort of issue are Demon Internet's Clive Feather, an ISP representative, and deputy chief executive Ruth Dixon. Here are some of the newsgroups he says will be removed if the IWF gets its way: alt.binaries.pictures.gill-anderson; alt.binaries.pictures.teen-idols.princewilliam; alt.binaries.pictures.spice-girls; alt.binaries.pictures.kids; alt.penthouse.sex.girls; alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.teen; alt.activism.children.whatisa-pedophile.

This list raises the suspicion that what's operating here is a typically computerish blunt-instrument approach - the kind of thing that had residents of Scunthorpe unable to register with the prudish AOL when it first opened up in the UK.

The IWF started as a back-of-an-envelope idea scribbled by Pipex founder Peter Dawe on the eve of a September 1996 meeting on Internet safety. The meeting itself was a slightly acrimonious affair: it had been set off in part by media pressure in the form of a tabloidly horrid Observer article sledge-hammering two wholly innocent well-known Net figures as the "key links in the international paedophile chain." In addition, police had recently circulated a list of 133 newsgroups they wanted banned outright

Although the police present at the meeting insisted they had never intended their list of 133 newsgroups circulated to ISPs as a guide to the location of illegal material (essentially, child pornography) as a threat, the undertone, as I wrote in the now-defunct Netizen at the time, was one of "you do something about it, or we'll do something about it. The IWF, adopted as government policy two weeks later, was that something.

It was supposed to be a hotline for reporting material of concern, with a team following up those reports and advising ISPs to remove the material if it in fact was illegal. It talked about ratings, and including illegally duplicated copyrighted material in its remit, and even sell cleaned-up Usenet feeds to ISPs that wanted them. It never got around to most of that, though it has made noises occasionally which ensured that worried Net activists kept an eye on it.

Over time, however, the IWF seemed to become mostly harmless. For one thing, the climate has changed. While pedophiles are still the bogeymen of the hour, the focus is much less on the Net as the source of the problem. Most people have some familiarity with email and the Web now, and while concerns about Internet safety continue, they are ebbing, as the dark panics about schoolchildren exchanging pornography on floppy disks in playgrounds did before them. For another, the growth of filtering software and the Web have changed the equation somewhat.

Usenet is a minority interest now, albeit one I happen to share, and cleaning up Usenet feeds matters less if the mainstream problem is access to Web sites with built-in images and chatrooms that are hosted overseas. As the Internet has become mainstream, the truth of what Netheads said all along has become plain to more people: the real, heinous problem is child abuse, which happens in the physical world. Whatever happens to a child in the virtual world pales by comparison.

Maybe this is why the IWF suddenly feels the need to become more active - it was feeling neglected. What's disturbing is the secrecy the IWF apparently intends to apply to its method for choosing what to ban. Blocking software has long operated this way in constructing its filtering databases, but at least you can reverse-engineer software and test it to find out what it's doing, as Bennett Haselton has for five years now (http://www.peacefire.org). The only way you can reverse-engineer a board is to get a mole on it. The IWF's composition now seems to be almost wholly either police (present or former, such as Jim Reynolds, a consultant on pedophilia), specialists in child protection issues (Nigel Williams, Childnet International (http://www.childnet-int.org), and John Carr, NCH Action for Children), or representatives of the council of ISPs that fund the organisation.

Roger Darlington, the IWF's chair, is the exception: he is head of research for the National Communications Union.

What's worse, though, is that the IWF was set up precisely to avoid the kind of policy it's now proposing to enact. The IWF is supposed to deal with illegal material. It is not supposed to be in the business of protecting children, turning the Internet into a children's playground, or deciding that the Spice Girls are bad (however much we might be inclined to agree with them). What its policy means is throwing out whole tracts of legal material because some illegal material may be embedded in them.

In 1996, I wrote, "They came for child pornography at 3pm on September 23, 1996, and no one put up a hand in protest," though the line was cut in production (http://hotwired.lycos.com/netizen/96/39/index4a.html). Well, they came for pictures of Gillian Anderson on February 13, 2002. Anybody?

Previous Columns
Big Brothers
The Sound of Money
Battle of the titans
By any other name
Creative Accounting
Dumber people can run Windows
2001 in review
Care in the community
Remembrance of postings past
BT's Stupid Patent Tricks
Preserving our freedoms
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Net is the mother of re-invention
Save the Cookie
Digital rights and the new era of world terrorism

Wendy M. Grossman, whose Web site is pelicancross ing.net, is author of From Anarchy to Power: the Net Comes of Age (NYU Press, 2001), net.wars (NYU Press, 1998), and the Daily Telegraph A-Z Guide to the Internet (Macmillan, 2001). She can be reached at this email address.

Copyright on all articles published in the INQUIRER is hers.