So, David Cameron proposed Internet censorship last week, to cries of “won’t somebody think of the children?!” He and Claire Perry, his unofficial “Adviser on the Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Childhood”, have been talking with varying levels of technical illiteracy about the need to protect the nation’s children from naughty pictures on the Internet. Because, you know, before the Internet those pictures didn’t exist, and if we blocked them we’d have a nation of pure, innocent children who never wanted to look at porn again.
There are two problems with the notion that we should block adult content (what is proposed, undefined, yet far more than just pornography)- first and foremost, it’s Internet censorship on a nationwide scale, which goes against the principles that have made the Internet such a powerful tool, open to everyone to speak freely and access information easily. Secondly, the fact that these filters will never be effective in achieving their goal of blocking porn from children who want to see it, except perhaps by implementing a North Korean level of control over the content of a walled garden network - and then it’s not the Internet anymore.
The Open Rights Group have collated a list of filtering options service providers are likely to be required to provide, including all sorts of broad, undefined groups, including “web forums” and “esoteric content”. We know very little of the detail of what DC wants the ISPs to block, what process there will be to change and challenge filter listings, let alone what comeback will be open to sites who find their business negatively affected by a false positive blocking.
My primary concern though, is that a filter system at the network level which the government have set up, will be far too big a temptation to ignore, and the scope will increase and increase until our Internet connection resembles that of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, or even China/Iran. Worse yet, the prospect for GCHQ to be involved in legal traffic manipulation at the network level seems absolutely crazy after the PRISM/Tempora revelations which have been rolling on for the past few weeks. At least for the moment they are scared about us finding out the details because they know we won’t like it, if they have legal access though, where does it end?
You may trust this government, and you might not. Whichever camp you fall into, please consider this- even if the government’s motives are good, what will the next government do with it? And the one after that? Worse yet, remembering that no computer system is fully secure, what happens when someone hacks in to it, and starts to manipulate the block list for their own ends, or use the list of people who’ve opted out for blackmail? Systems like this should not exist because speech should absolutely be absolutely free, but also because people will abuse them to all of our detriment.
If you are a UK citizen or you live in the UK, please write to your MP and sign the petition against this filtering.