U.K. Turns to Censorship to Save the Children

Last week, prime minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron announced that the government would be cracking down on porn by instituting opt-in filters with service providers. Basically, if you live in the U.K., you will be forced to give voice to whether you want access to the “corroding influence” of adult content.

Cameron stated:

And, in a really big step forward, all the ISPs have rewired their technology so that once your filters are installed they will cover any device connected to your home internet account; no more hassle of downloading filters for every device, just one click protection. One click to protect your whole home and to keep your children safe.

Now, once those filters are installed it should not be the case that technically literate children can just flick the filters off at the click of the mouse without anyone knowing, and this, if you’ve got children, is absolutely vital. So, we’ve agreed with industry that those filters can only be changed by the account holder, who has to be an adult. So an adult has to be engaged in the decisions.

All people seeking internet service in the U.K. will have to explicitly tell their providers they don’t want the filters. Service providers will also be contacting their 19 million existing customers to make the choice about their service.

Cameron also stated that “extreme pornography” will be outlawed. He said:

There are certain types of pornography that can only be described as extreme; I am talking particularly about pornography that is violent and that depicts simulated rape. These images normalize sexual violence against women and they’re quite simply poisonous to the young people who see them.

The legal situation is, although it’s been a crime to publish pornographic portrayals of rape for decades, existing legislation does not cover possession of this material, at least in England and Wales. Possession of such material is already an offence in Scotland, but because of a loophole in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 it is not an offence south of the border. But I can tell you today, we are changing that: we are closing the loophole, making it a criminal offence to possess internet pornography that depicts rape.

And we’re going to do something else to make sure that the same rules apply online as they do offline. There are examples of extreme pornography that are so bad you can’t even buy this material in a licensed sex shop, and today I can announce we’ll be legislating so that videos streamed online in the UK are subject to the same rules as those sold in shops. Put simply: what you can’t get in a shop, you shouldn’t be able to get online.

A couple of days later, the BBC reported that the inspiration behind Cameron’s amazing proposed filters is the Chinese company Huawei, noting, “Politicians in both the UK and US have raised concerns about alleged close ties between Huawei and the Chinese government.”

Huawei recently came up in an Intelligence and Security Committee report which questioned whether the company’s expansion in the United Kingdom was simply commercial in interest. The links between Huawei and the Chinese State, however, continue to escape concrete evidence.

Critics worry that giving a single company power over blacklists was a terrible idea. Martyn Thomas, chair of the IT policy panel at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, told the BBC that such an entity should be accountable to the minister so it can be challenged in parliament.

“There’s certainly a concern about the process of how a web address gets added to a blacklist — who knows about it, and who has an opportunity to appeal against it,” Thomas said.

And that’s not the only issue. As anyone who has been online longer than a minute knows, censorship is like tweezing when you’re 13. Once you start plucking, it’s hard to stop. Even after you’ve lost half an eyebrow. Just as we saw on Tumblr, filters are never just about porn. Over at Wired, Duncan Geere writes about information obtained by the Open Rights Group (ORG), U.K.-based group a defending freedom of expression, privacy, innovation, creativity and consumer rights on the Internet. Geere says:

As well as pornography, users may automatically be opted in to blocks on “violent material”, “extremist related content”, “anorexia and eating disorder websites” and “suicide related websites”, “alcohol” and “smoking”. But the list doesn’t stop there. It even extends to blocking “web forums” and “esoteric material”, whatever that is. “Web blocking circumvention tools” is also included, of course.

The ORG’s Jim Killock says: “What’s clear here is that David Cameron wants people to sleepwalk into censorship. We know that people stick with defaults: this is part of the idea behind ‘nudge theory’ and ‘choice architecture’ that is popular with Cameron.”

Killock’s suggestion to the BBC as reported on the Independent is in line with ours: “it would be better to increase funding for policing of the criminals responsible for the production and distribution of images of child abuse, and to crack down on the methods used to pay for them.”

Sadly, the logic is lost on Cameron and the hysteria is spreading across the Atlantic. Not long after he made his speech, Joy Smith of Winnipeg, a Conservative member of parliament, said that all internet pornography should be preemptively blocked in Canada as well, with similar option to opt in.

Canada is not standing silently by. A CBC News Network poll found 82 percent of their readers disagreed with the notion of filters. A commenter on the post wrote: “its not really about porn. A filter gives the opportunity to filter other things too. If allowed it is the end of freedom to use the internet as an unfiltered source directly accessing the world. What a shame it will be when the folks who control the filter can tell us what sites to see or not.”

Our thoughts exactly.

Header image by Michael Coghlan.