Internet censorship in the United Kingdom
Encyclopedia
Internet censorship in the United Kingdom takes various forms, including blocking access to sites, and laws that criminalise publication or possession of certain material, particularly child pornography
, within the United Kingdom
.
The U.K. has a notable libertarian tradition, manifested by, among other things, solid guarantees of freedom of expression, freedom of information, and protection of privacy. Freedom of expression and protection of privacy over the Internet is guaranteed by law. Nonetheless, over the last few years there has been a shift toward increased surveillance and police measures. Combating terrorism and preventing child abuse have been widely used by state agencies and private commercial actors (e.g., Internet service providers) to justify the implementation of interception and direct filtering measures. Never the less in 2010 the OpenNet Initiative
found no evidence of technical filtering in the political, social, conflict/security, or Internet tools areas. However, the U.K. openly blocks child pornography Web sites, for which ONI does not test.
(IWF) compiles and maintains a blacklist, mainly of child pornography URLs, from which 98% of commercial Internet customers in the UK are filtered. A staff of four police-trained analysts are responsible for this work, and the director of the service has claimed that the analysts are capable of adding an average of 65-80 new URLs to the list each week, and act on reports received from the public rather than pursuing investigative research.
British Telecommunications
ISP passes Internet traffic through a service called Cleanfeed
which uses data provided by the IWF to identify pages believed to contain indecent photographs of children. When such a page is found, the system creates a "URL not found" error page rather than deliver the actual page or a warning page. Other ISPs use different systems such as WebMinder
http://www.webminder.net/.
Home Office
Minister Vernon Coaker
set a deadline of the end of 2007 for all ISPs to implement a “cleanfeed
”-style network level content blocking platform. Currently, the only websites ISPs are expected to block access to are sites the Internet Watch Foundation
has identified as containing images of child pornography
. However such a platform is capable of blocking access to any website added to the list (at least, to the extent that the implementation is effective), making it a simple matter to change this policy in future. The Home Office has previously indicated that it has considered requiring ISPs to block access to articles on the web deemed to be “glorifying terrorism”, within the meaning of the new Terrorism Act 2006
, saying "However, our legislation as drafted provides the flexibility to accommodate a change in Government policy should the need ever arise." The measures have been criticised for being inadequate as they only block accidental viewing and does not prevent content delivered through encrypted systems, file sharing, email and other systems.
In 2006, Home Office minister Alan Campbell
pledged that all ISPs would block access to child abuse websites by the end of 2007. By the middle of 2006 the government reported that 90% of domestic broadband connections were either currently blocking or had plans to by the end of the year. The target for 100% coverage was set for the end of 2007, however in the middle of 2008 it stood at 95%. In February 2009, the Government said that it is looking at ways to cover the final 5%.
told the Internet Service Providers Association
(ISPA) that the content carried by some of the newsgroup
s made available by them was illegal, that they considered the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) involved to be publishers of that material, and that they were therefore breaking the law. In August 1996, Chief Inspector Stephen French, of the Metropolitan Police Clubs & Vice Unit
, sent an open letter to the ISPA, requesting that they ban access to a list of 132 newsgroups, many of which were deemed to contain pornographic images or explicit text.
The list was arranged so that the first section consisted of unambiguously titled paedophile newsgroups, then continued with other kinds of groups which the police wanted to restrict access to, including alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.cheerleaders and alt.binaries.pictures.erotic.centerfolds.
Although this action had taken place without any prior debate in Parliament or elsewhere, the police, who appeared to be doing their best to create and not simply to enforce the law, were not acting entirely on their own initiative. Alan Travis, Home Affairs editor of the newspaper The Guardian
, explained in his book "Bound and Gagged" that Ian Taylor, the Conservative Science and Industry Minister at the time, had underlined an explicit threat to ISPs that if they did not stop carrying the newsgroups in question, the police would act against any company that provided their users with "pornographic or violent material". Taylor went on to make it clear that there would be
calls for legislation to regulate all aspects of the Internet unless service providers were seen to wholeheartedly "responsible self-regulation".
Demon Internet regarded the police request as "unacceptable censorship"; however, its attitude annoyed ISPA chairman Shez Hamill, who said:
Following this, a tabloid-style exposé of ISP Demon Internet appeared in the Observer
newspaper, which alleged that Clive Feather (a director of Demon) "provides paedophiles with access to thousands of photographs of children being sexually abused".
During the summer and autumn of 1996 the UK police made it known that they were planning to raid an ISP with the aim of launching a test case regarding the publication of obscene material over the Internet. The direct result of the campaign of threats and pressure was the establishment of the Internet Watch Foundation (initially known as the Safety Net Foundation) in September 1996.
After 3 years of operation, the IWF was reviewed for the DTI and the Home Office by consultants KPMG
and Denton Hall
. Their report was delivered in October 1999 and resulted in a number of changes being made to the role and structure of the organisation, and it was relaunched in early 2000, endorsed by the government and the DTI, which played a "facilitating role in its creation", according to a DTI spokesman.
At the time, Patricia Hewitt
, then Minister for E-Commerce, said: "The Internet Watch Foundation plays a vital role in combating criminal material on the Net." To counter accusations that the IWF was biased in favour of the ISPs, a new independent chairman was appointed, Roger Darlington, former head of research at the Communication Workers Union
.
, a man who said he had an obsession with Internet pornography
, the government announced plans to crack down on sites depicting rape, strangulation, torture and necrophilia. Liz Longhurst also campaigned to tighten laws regarding pornography on the Internet
. In August 2005, the Government announced that instead of targeting production or publication, it planned to criminalise private possession of what the Government has termed "extreme pornography" Such adult pornography is illegal to possess as of January 2009.
In 2004 in Scotland
, a committee of Members of the Scottish Parliament
backed a call to ban adult pornography as the Equal Opportunities
Committee supported a petition claiming links between porn and sexual crimes and violence against women and children. A spokeswoman said "While we have no plans to legislate we will, of course, continue to monitor the situation." In 2007, MSPs looked again at criminalising adult pornography, in response to a call from Scottish Women Against Pornography for pornography to be classified as a hate crime against women. This was opposed by Feminists Against Censorship
.
In September 2008, Scotland announced its own plans to criminalise possession of what it termed "extreme" adult pornography, but extending the law further, including depictions of rape imagery
.
that it described as "a chilling story detailing each singer's gory death in scenes that could be straight out of a horror movie", characterizing its author as "a vile internet psycho" and "a cyber-sicko". The news story said that The Daily Star had reported the content of the hosting website, "Kristen Archives" (a subsite of the ASSTR archive), to the IWF, and that the IWF had traced the site to the US. It also claimed that Interpol had been notified to help track down the site's operators and the writer of the story. An IWF spokesperson was reported as saying that since the site was hosted in the US, it fell outside the organization's remit, but that they were aware of the site. The spokesperson added that the site also contained "child abuse fantasy stories" and that they had passed on details of it to the British police.
Although the story, entitled "Girls (Scream) Aloud", had been published on a US website, British police carried out the investigation because the alleged author was identified as living in the UK. Although he had submitted the story under a pseudonym, he included an email address which was reportedly traced. Officers from Scotland Yard
’s Obscene Publications Unit decided to take action over the story after consulting the Crown Prosecution Service
(CPS), and on 25 September 2008 it was announced that the author, Darryn Walker, was to be prosecuted for the online publication of material that the police and the CPS believed was obscene. It was the first such prosecution for written material in nearly two decades, and was expected to have a significant impact on the future regulation of the Internet in the UK.
Walker appeared in court on 22 October 2008 to face charges of "publishing an obscene article contrary to Section 2(1) of the Obscene Publications Act 1959
". He was granted unconditional bail, and his case was set for trial on 16 March 2009. However, at a directions hearing in January, the defendant made it known that given the seriousness of the case he would be represented by a QC (Queen’s Counsel), following which the Crown Prosecution Service
gave notice of its intention to similarly employ a QC, and the trial date was put back to 29 June 2009.
He appeared at Newcastle Crown Court on 29 June 2009 but the case was abandoned on what was supposed to be the first day of the trial, following the introduction of evidence from an IT expert. The CPS said that it had originally charged Walker as it believed that the story in question could be "easily accessed" by young fans of Girls Aloud. However, the IT expert showed that the article could only be located by those specifically searching for such material. A spokesperson for the CPS said that the prosecution was unable to provide sufficient evidence to contradict this new evidence and therefore took the decision that there was no longer a realistic prospect of conviction. Judge Esmond Faulks, presiding, returned a formal verdict of not guilty to the charge of "publishing an obscene article".
introduced its Cleanfeed
technology which was then used by 80% of Internet service providers. BT spokesman Jon Carter described Cleanfeed's function as "to block access to illegal Web sites that are listed by the Internet Watch Foundation
", and described it as essentially a server hosting a filter that checked requested URLs for Web sites on the IWF list, and returning an error message of "Web site not found" for positive matches. Cleanfeed is a silent content filtering system, which means that Internet users cannot ascertain whether they are being regulated by Cleanfeed, facing connection failures, or the page really does not exist.
According to a small-sample survey conducted in 2008 by Nikolaos Koumartzis, an MA researcher at London College of Communication, the vast majority of UK based Internet users (90.21%) were unaware of the existence of Cleanfeed software. Moreover, 60.87% of the participants stated that they did not trust British Telecommunications and 65.22% of them did not trust IWF to be responsible for a silent censorship system in the UK.
album Virgin Killer
. A statement by the organisation's spokesman alleged that the album cover, displayed in the article, contained "a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18". Users of major ISPs, including Virgin Media, Be/O2/Telefonica, EasyNet/UK Online, Demon and Opal, were unable to access the content, despite the album cover being available unfiltered on other major sites including Amazon.co.uk, and available for sale in the UK. The system also started proxying users, who accessed any Wikipedia article, via a minimal number of servers, which resulted in site administrators having to block them from editing Wikipedia or creating accounts. On 9 December, the IWF removed the article from its blacklist, stating: "IWF's overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the Internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect."
websites, which provide a search service for UseNet
content, which includes movies and other pirated material. These High Court rulings at the request of Hollywood studios could set a precedent for widespread blocking of illegal filesharing websites in the UK. In response, NewzBin has simply distributed a special application that allows their customers to access the site as before.
In September 2011, in response to the initial court ruling and with encouragement from government, leading UK ISPs were reported to have privately agreed in principal to quickly restrict access to websites when presented with court orders.
’s inquiry into harmful content on the Internet and in video games, Minister Vernon Coaker
explained
that the Prime Minister’s Taskforce would be concerned not just with illegal content on the Internet, but also with "harmful and inappropriate content as well ... which may not be illegal but which cause all of us concern".
The Culture, Media and Sport Committee's report was published on 31 July 2008 and contained various recommendations among which were:
's March 2008 report, "Safer Children in a Digital World", saying that he thought people felt a "sense of risk and uncertainty about this world they are roaming". Burnham told journalists that he had an "open mind" about whether there was a need for a new Communications Act before the next General Election, indicating that his own preference was for smaller pieces of legislation as needed.
On 26 September 2008, Burnham delivered a keynote speech at the Royal Television Society
conference in London, in which he said that the government planned to crack down on the internet to "even up" the regulatory imbalance with television, saying that "a fear of the internet" had caused a loss of confidence that had robbed the TV industry of "innovation, risk-taking and talent sourcing" in programming. He enlarged on his remarks in an interview published the following day in the Daily Telegraph, in which he said: "If you look back at the people who created the Internet they talked very deliberately about it being a space that governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now ... There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical." The article also suggested that Burnham was planning to negotiate with the Barack Obama administration "to draw up new international rules for
English language websites" and that another idea being considered was "giving film-style ratings to individual websites".
Burnham's words were criticized by technology journalist Bill Thompson
, who pointed out that it was hard to reconcile his comments with the views of media regulator Ofcom
that TV-style regulation of the Internet is both undesirable and unworkable, as the Internet is a network rather than a medium.
On 29 September 2008 Children's Secretary Ed Balls
and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith
announced the launch of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety
(CCIS), which was supported by organisations including Google, Yahoo, BT, Microsoft, and Facebook, and which had an initial brief to deliver a "Child Internet Safety Strategy" to Prime Minister Gordon Brown in early 2009. The organisations were to work closely with government to deliver recommendations from Tanya Byron's March 2008 report, "Safer Children in a Digital World".
The group was also to look at ways of improving public awareness of child safety issues online, promote responsible online advertising to children and "provide specific measures to support vulnerable children and young people, such as taking down illegal internet sites that promote harmful behaviour." In addition they were also to investigate ways and means of "tackling problems around online bullying, safer search features, and violent video games." The CCIS was also to establish a voluntary code of practise for user-generated sites such as YouTube to agree a time limit for takedown of inappropriate content.
There have been concerns over the increasing amount of Internet regulation and fears that the Internet may become even more restricted in future.
http://btsupport.custhelp.com/app/answers/blank/a_id/12756
which states:
This uses a barring and filtering mechanism to restrict access to all WAP and Internet sites that are considered to have an 'over 18' status. To date, these include sites which contain information on any of the following categories:
Examples of such sites are dictionaries (e.g. http://www.urbandictionary.com/), proxy URLs.
, British Prime Minister David Cameron
said that Theresa May
, the Home secretary, would meet with executives of the Web companies Facebook
and Twitter
, as well as Research In Motion
, maker of the BlackBerry
smartphone, to discuss possible measures to prevent troublemakers from using social media
and other digital communications tools. During a special debate on the riots, Mr. Cameron told Parliament:
Critics say that the British government is considering policies similar to those it has criticized in totalitarian and one-party states. And in the immediate aftermath of the riots, Iran
, often criticized by the West for restricting the Internet and curbing free speech, offered to “send a human rights delegation to Britain to study human rights violations in the country".
On 25 August 2011 British officials and representatives of Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry met privately to discuss voluntary ways to limit or restrict the use of social media to combat crime and periods of civil unrest. The government is seeking ways to crack down on networks being used for criminal behavior, but is not seeking any additional powers and has no intention of restricting internet services. It was not clear what new measures, if any, would be taken as a result of the meeting.
. YouTube
, Facebook
and Twitter
are often filtered by certain schools. Many students often use proxy servers to bypass this.
Child pornography
Child pornography refers to images or films and, in some cases, writings depicting sexually explicit activities involving a child...
, within the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
.
The U.K. has a notable libertarian tradition, manifested by, among other things, solid guarantees of freedom of expression, freedom of information, and protection of privacy. Freedom of expression and protection of privacy over the Internet is guaranteed by law. Nonetheless, over the last few years there has been a shift toward increased surveillance and police measures. Combating terrorism and preventing child abuse have been widely used by state agencies and private commercial actors (e.g., Internet service providers) to justify the implementation of interception and direct filtering measures. Never the less in 2010 the OpenNet Initiative
OpenNet Initiative
The OpenNet Initiative is a joint project whose goal is to monitor and report on internet filtering and surveillance practices by nations. The project employs a number of technical means, as well as an international network of investigators, to determine the extent and nature of government-run...
found no evidence of technical filtering in the political, social, conflict/security, or Internet tools areas. However, the U.K. openly blocks child pornography Web sites, for which ONI does not test.
Filtering
The Internet Watch FoundationInternet Watch Foundation
The Internet Watch Foundation is a non-governmental charitable body based in the United Kingdom. It states that its remit is "to minimise the availability of 'potentially criminal' Internet content, specifically images of child sexual abuse hosted anywhere, and criminally obscene adult content in...
(IWF) compiles and maintains a blacklist, mainly of child pornography URLs, from which 98% of commercial Internet customers in the UK are filtered. A staff of four police-trained analysts are responsible for this work, and the director of the service has claimed that the analysts are capable of adding an average of 65-80 new URLs to the list each week, and act on reports received from the public rather than pursuing investigative research.
British Telecommunications
BT Group
BT Group plc is a global telecommunications services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is one of the largest telecommunications services companies in the world and has operations in more than 170 countries. Through its BT Global Services division it is a major supplier of...
ISP passes Internet traffic through a service called Cleanfeed
Cleanfeed (content blocking system)
Cleanfeed is the name given to privately administered ISP level content filtering systems operating in the United Kingdom and Canada. It is also the name of a proposed mandatory Australian ISP level content filtering system which is undergoing testing...
which uses data provided by the IWF to identify pages believed to contain indecent photographs of children. When such a page is found, the system creates a "URL not found" error page rather than deliver the actual page or a warning page. Other ISPs use different systems such as WebMinder
WebMinder
WebMinder was a content blocking system implemented in the UK by Brightview Internet Services and used on their ISPs such as Madasafish, Global Internet and Waitrose.Com. It was similar in purpose to Cleanfeed, BT's blocking system and used a list from the Internet Watch Foundation...
http://www.webminder.net/.
Home Office
Home Office
The Home Office is the United Kingdom government department responsible for immigration control, security, and order. As such it is responsible for the police, UK Border Agency, and the Security Service . It is also in charge of government policy on security-related issues such as drugs,...
Minister Vernon Coaker
Vernon Coaker
Vernon Rodney Coaker is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament for Gedling since 1997; Coaker was appointed Minister of State for Schools and Learners in June 2009, a post he held until Gordon Brown resigned as Prime Minister on 11 May 2010...
set a deadline of the end of 2007 for all ISPs to implement a “cleanfeed
Cleanfeed (content blocking system)
Cleanfeed is the name given to privately administered ISP level content filtering systems operating in the United Kingdom and Canada. It is also the name of a proposed mandatory Australian ISP level content filtering system which is undergoing testing...
”-style network level content blocking platform. Currently, the only websites ISPs are expected to block access to are sites the Internet Watch Foundation
Internet Watch Foundation
The Internet Watch Foundation is a non-governmental charitable body based in the United Kingdom. It states that its remit is "to minimise the availability of 'potentially criminal' Internet content, specifically images of child sexual abuse hosted anywhere, and criminally obscene adult content in...
has identified as containing images of child pornography
Child pornography
Child pornography refers to images or films and, in some cases, writings depicting sexually explicit activities involving a child...
. However such a platform is capable of blocking access to any website added to the list (at least, to the extent that the implementation is effective), making it a simple matter to change this policy in future. The Home Office has previously indicated that it has considered requiring ISPs to block access to articles on the web deemed to be “glorifying terrorism”, within the meaning of the new Terrorism Act 2006
Terrorism Act 2006
The Terrorism Act 2006 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that received Royal Assent on 30 March 2006, after being introduced on 12 October 2005. The Act creates new offences related to terrorism, and amends existing ones. The Act was drafted in the aftermath of the 7 July 2005...
, saying "However, our legislation as drafted provides the flexibility to accommodate a change in Government policy should the need ever arise." The measures have been criticised for being inadequate as they only block accidental viewing and does not prevent content delivered through encrypted systems, file sharing, email and other systems.
In 2006, Home Office minister Alan Campbell
Alan Campbell (politician)
Alan Campbell is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament for Tynemouth since 1997. He served as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office from 2008 until 2010, when the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats came to power...
pledged that all ISPs would block access to child abuse websites by the end of 2007. By the middle of 2006 the government reported that 90% of domestic broadband connections were either currently blocking or had plans to by the end of the year. The target for 100% coverage was set for the end of 2007, however in the middle of 2008 it stood at 95%. In February 2009, the Government said that it is looking at ways to cover the final 5%.
ISPs pressured to ban newsgroups deemed to contain pornographic material
During 1996 the Metropolitan PoliceMetropolitan police
Metropolitan Police is a generic title for the municipal police force for a major metropolitan area, and it may be part of the official title of the force...
told the Internet Service Providers Association
Internet Service Providers Association
The Internet Service Providers Association, or ISPA, is a British body representing providers of Internet Services.-History:ISPA was established in 1995 as the first trade association for ISPs, promoting competition, self-regulation and progress within the Internet industry...
(ISPA) that the content carried by some of the newsgroup
Newsgroup
A usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on...
s made available by them was illegal, that they considered the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) involved to be publishers of that material, and that they were therefore breaking the law. In August 1996, Chief Inspector Stephen French, of the Metropolitan Police Clubs & Vice Unit
Metropolitan Police Clubs & Vice Unit
The Clubs & Vice Unit is an Operational Command Unit of London's Metropolitan Police which provides advice and practical support to other units in the Metropolitan Police around the policing of nightclubs, vice and obscene publications.-History:...
, sent an open letter to the ISPA, requesting that they ban access to a list of 132 newsgroups, many of which were deemed to contain pornographic images or explicit text.
The list was arranged so that the first section consisted of unambiguously titled paedophile newsgroups, then continued with other kinds of groups which the police wanted to restrict access to, including alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.cheerleaders and alt.binaries.pictures.erotic.centerfolds.
Although this action had taken place without any prior debate in Parliament or elsewhere, the police, who appeared to be doing their best to create and not simply to enforce the law, were not acting entirely on their own initiative. Alan Travis, Home Affairs editor of the newspaper The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, explained in his book "Bound and Gagged" that Ian Taylor, the Conservative Science and Industry Minister at the time, had underlined an explicit threat to ISPs that if they did not stop carrying the newsgroups in question, the police would act against any company that provided their users with "pornographic or violent material". Taylor went on to make it clear that there would be
calls for legislation to regulate all aspects of the Internet unless service providers were seen to wholeheartedly "responsible self-regulation".
Demon Internet regarded the police request as "unacceptable censorship"; however, its attitude annoyed ISPA chairman Shez Hamill, who said:
Following this, a tabloid-style exposé of ISP Demon Internet appeared in the Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
newspaper, which alleged that Clive Feather (a director of Demon) "provides paedophiles with access to thousands of photographs of children being sexually abused".
During the summer and autumn of 1996 the UK police made it known that they were planning to raid an ISP with the aim of launching a test case regarding the publication of obscene material over the Internet. The direct result of the campaign of threats and pressure was the establishment of the Internet Watch Foundation (initially known as the Safety Net Foundation) in September 1996.
Internet Watch Foundation
Demon Internet was a driving force behind the IWF's creation, and one of its directors, Clive Feather, became the IWF's first chairman.After 3 years of operation, the IWF was reviewed for the DTI and the Home Office by consultants KPMG
KPMG
KPMG is one of the largest professional services networks in the world and one of the Big Four auditors, along with Deloitte, Ernst & Young and PwC. Its global headquarters is located in Amstelveen, Netherlands....
and Denton Hall
Denton Wilde Sapte
Denton Wilde Sapte LLP was an international law firm headquartered in London, United Kingdom. On 26 May 2010, the firm announced that it had reached agreement to merge with the U.S.-based law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal...
. Their report was delivered in October 1999 and resulted in a number of changes being made to the role and structure of the organisation, and it was relaunched in early 2000, endorsed by the government and the DTI, which played a "facilitating role in its creation", according to a DTI spokesman.
At the time, Patricia Hewitt
Patricia Hewitt
Patricia Hope Hewitt is an Australian-born British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament for Leicester West from 1997 until 2010. She served in the Cabinet until 2007, most recently as Health Secretary....
, then Minister for E-Commerce, said: "The Internet Watch Foundation plays a vital role in combating criminal material on the Net." To counter accusations that the IWF was biased in favour of the ISPs, a new independent chairman was appointed, Roger Darlington, former head of research at the Communication Workers Union
Communication Workers Union (UK)
The Communication Workers Union is the main trade union in the United Kingdom for people working for telephone, cable, DSL and postal delivery companies, with 215,000 members....
.
"Extreme" pornography
In 2003, after the murder of Jane Longhurst by Graham CouttsGraham Coutts
Graham Coutts is the man convicted of murdering school teacher Jane Longhurst on 14 March 2003. At the time, he was a guitarist and part-time salesman living in Brighton, UK. Coutts claimed that Longhurst had died accidentally during consensual erotic asphyxiation, although the prosecution...
, a man who said he had an obsession with Internet pornography
Internet pornography
Internet pornography is pornography that is distributed by means of various sectors of the Internet, primarily via websites, peer-to-peer file sharing, or Usenet newsgroups...
, the government announced plans to crack down on sites depicting rape, strangulation, torture and necrophilia. Liz Longhurst also campaigned to tighten laws regarding pornography on the Internet
Legal status of Internet pornography
Due to the international nature of the Internet, Internet pornography carries with it special issues with regard to the law. There is no one set of laws that apply to the distribution, purchase, or possession of Internet pornography. Only the laws of one's home nation apply with regard to...
. In August 2005, the Government announced that instead of targeting production or publication, it planned to criminalise private possession of what the Government has termed "extreme pornography" Such adult pornography is illegal to possess as of January 2009.
In 2004 in Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
, a committee of Members of the Scottish Parliament
Member of the Scottish Parliament
Member of the Scottish Parliament is the title given to any one of the 129 individuals elected to serve in the Scottish Parliament.-Methods of Election:MSPs are elected in one of two ways:...
backed a call to ban adult pornography as the Equal Opportunities
Equal opportunity
Equal opportunity, or equality of opportunity, is a controversial political concept; and an important informal decision-making standard without a precise definition involving fair choices within the public sphere...
Committee supported a petition claiming links between porn and sexual crimes and violence against women and children. A spokeswoman said "While we have no plans to legislate we will, of course, continue to monitor the situation." In 2007, MSPs looked again at criminalising adult pornography, in response to a call from Scottish Women Against Pornography for pornography to be classified as a hate crime against women. This was opposed by Feminists Against Censorship
Feminists Against Censorship
Feminists Against Censorship is a large network of women founded in 1989 to present the feminist arguments against censorship, particularly of sexual materials, and to defend individual sexual expression....
.
In September 2008, Scotland announced its own plans to criminalise possession of what it termed "extreme" adult pornography, but extending the law further, including depictions of rape imagery
Rape pornography
Rape pornography is a genre of pornography involving the depiction of rape.There is debate over if this form of pornography encourages men to commit rape. The pairing of sex with violence distinguishes the issue of rape pornography from that of pornography in general...
.
"Girls (Scream) Aloud"
On 26 July 2007, UK tabloid newspaper The Daily Star reported that it had discovered an online text story about British pop group Girls AloudGirls Aloud
Girls Aloud are a British and Irish pop girl group based in London. They were created through the ITV1 talent show Popstars The Rivals in 2002. The group consists of Cheryl Cole , Nadine Coyle, Sarah Harding, Nicola Roberts and Kimberley Walsh. They are signed to Fascination Records, a Polydor...
that it described as "a chilling story detailing each singer's gory death in scenes that could be straight out of a horror movie", characterizing its author as "a vile internet psycho" and "a cyber-sicko". The news story said that The Daily Star had reported the content of the hosting website, "Kristen Archives" (a subsite of the ASSTR archive), to the IWF, and that the IWF had traced the site to the US. It also claimed that Interpol had been notified to help track down the site's operators and the writer of the story. An IWF spokesperson was reported as saying that since the site was hosted in the US, it fell outside the organization's remit, but that they were aware of the site. The spokesperson added that the site also contained "child abuse fantasy stories" and that they had passed on details of it to the British police.
Although the story, entitled "Girls (Scream) Aloud", had been published on a US website, British police carried out the investigation because the alleged author was identified as living in the UK. Although he had submitted the story under a pseudonym, he included an email address which was reportedly traced. Officers from Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK. It derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became...
’s Obscene Publications Unit decided to take action over the story after consulting the Crown Prosecution Service
Crown Prosecution Service
The Crown Prosecution Service, or CPS, is a non-ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom responsible for public prosecutions of people charged with criminal offences in England and Wales. Its role is similar to that of the longer-established Crown Office in Scotland, and the...
(CPS), and on 25 September 2008 it was announced that the author, Darryn Walker, was to be prosecuted for the online publication of material that the police and the CPS believed was obscene. It was the first such prosecution for written material in nearly two decades, and was expected to have a significant impact on the future regulation of the Internet in the UK.
Walker appeared in court on 22 October 2008 to face charges of "publishing an obscene article contrary to Section 2(1) of the Obscene Publications Act 1959
Obscene Publications Act 1959
The Obscene Publications Act 1959 is an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom Parliament that significantly reformed the law related to obscenity. Prior to the passage of the Act, the law on publishing obscene materials was governed by the common law case of R v Hicklin, which had no exceptions...
". He was granted unconditional bail, and his case was set for trial on 16 March 2009. However, at a directions hearing in January, the defendant made it known that given the seriousness of the case he would be represented by a QC (Queen’s Counsel), following which the Crown Prosecution Service
Crown Prosecution Service
The Crown Prosecution Service, or CPS, is a non-ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom responsible for public prosecutions of people charged with criminal offences in England and Wales. Its role is similar to that of the longer-established Crown Office in Scotland, and the...
gave notice of its intention to similarly employ a QC, and the trial date was put back to 29 June 2009.
He appeared at Newcastle Crown Court on 29 June 2009 but the case was abandoned on what was supposed to be the first day of the trial, following the introduction of evidence from an IT expert. The CPS said that it had originally charged Walker as it believed that the story in question could be "easily accessed" by young fans of Girls Aloud. However, the IT expert showed that the article could only be located by those specifically searching for such material. A spokesperson for the CPS said that the prosecution was unable to provide sufficient evidence to contradict this new evidence and therefore took the decision that there was no longer a realistic prospect of conviction. Judge Esmond Faulks, presiding, returned a formal verdict of not guilty to the charge of "publishing an obscene article".
Introduction of Cleanfeed
Between 2004 and 2006, BT GroupBT Group
BT Group plc is a global telecommunications services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is one of the largest telecommunications services companies in the world and has operations in more than 170 countries. Through its BT Global Services division it is a major supplier of...
introduced its Cleanfeed
Cleanfeed (content blocking system)
Cleanfeed is the name given to privately administered ISP level content filtering systems operating in the United Kingdom and Canada. It is also the name of a proposed mandatory Australian ISP level content filtering system which is undergoing testing...
technology which was then used by 80% of Internet service providers. BT spokesman Jon Carter described Cleanfeed's function as "to block access to illegal Web sites that are listed by the Internet Watch Foundation
Internet Watch Foundation
The Internet Watch Foundation is a non-governmental charitable body based in the United Kingdom. It states that its remit is "to minimise the availability of 'potentially criminal' Internet content, specifically images of child sexual abuse hosted anywhere, and criminally obscene adult content in...
", and described it as essentially a server hosting a filter that checked requested URLs for Web sites on the IWF list, and returning an error message of "Web site not found" for positive matches. Cleanfeed is a silent content filtering system, which means that Internet users cannot ascertain whether they are being regulated by Cleanfeed, facing connection failures, or the page really does not exist.
According to a small-sample survey conducted in 2008 by Nikolaos Koumartzis, an MA researcher at London College of Communication, the vast majority of UK based Internet users (90.21%) were unaware of the existence of Cleanfeed software. Moreover, 60.87% of the participants stated that they did not trust British Telecommunications and 65.22% of them did not trust IWF to be responsible for a silent censorship system in the UK.
IWF/Wikipedia controversy
On 5 December 2008 the IWF system blacklisted a Wikipedia article on the ScorpionsScorpions (band)
Scorpions are a heavy metal/hard rock band from Hannover, Germany, formed in 1965 by guitarist Rudolf Schenker, who is the band's only constant member. They are known for their 1980s rock anthem "Rock You Like a Hurricane" and many singles, such as "No One Like You", "Send Me an Angel", "Still...
album Virgin Killer
Virgin Killer
Virgin Killer is the fourth studio album by the German heavy metal band Scorpions. It was released in 1976 and was the first album of the band to attract attention outside Europe. The title is described as being a reference to time as the killer of innocence. The original cover featured a nude...
. A statement by the organisation's spokesman alleged that the album cover, displayed in the article, contained "a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18". Users of major ISPs, including Virgin Media, Be/O2/Telefonica, EasyNet/UK Online, Demon and Opal, were unable to access the content, despite the album cover being available unfiltered on other major sites including Amazon.co.uk, and available for sale in the UK. The system also started proxying users, who accessed any Wikipedia article, via a minimal number of servers, which resulted in site administrators having to block them from editing Wikipedia or creating accounts. On 9 December, the IWF removed the article from its blacklist, stating: "IWF's overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the Internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect."
2011 Court order to block websites linking to copyright infringing materials
In July and again in October 2011, the UK High Court ruled that British Telecom must block access to the NewzBinNewzBin
Newzbin is a British Usenet indexing website, intended to facilitate access to content on Usenet. The site has caused controversy over its stance on copyrighted material...
websites, which provide a search service for UseNet
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
content, which includes movies and other pirated material. These High Court rulings at the request of Hollywood studios could set a precedent for widespread blocking of illegal filesharing websites in the UK. In response, NewzBin has simply distributed a special application that allows their customers to access the site as before.
In September 2011, in response to the initial court ruling and with encouragement from government, leading UK ISPs were reported to have privately agreed in principal to quickly restrict access to websites when presented with court orders.
Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee Report
On 14 May 2008, in his oral evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Select CommitteeCulture, Media and Sport Select Committee
The Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee is one of the Select Committees of the British House of Commons, established in 1997. It oversees the operations of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport which replaced the Department for National Heritage....
’s inquiry into harmful content on the Internet and in video games, Minister Vernon Coaker
Vernon Coaker
Vernon Rodney Coaker is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament for Gedling since 1997; Coaker was appointed Minister of State for Schools and Learners in June 2009, a post he held until Gordon Brown resigned as Prime Minister on 11 May 2010...
explained
that the Prime Minister’s Taskforce would be concerned not just with illegal content on the Internet, but also with "harmful and inappropriate content as well ... which may not be illegal but which cause all of us concern".
The Culture, Media and Sport Committee's report was published on 31 July 2008 and contained various recommendations among which were:
- That any approach to the protection of children from online dangers should be based on the probability of risk. We believe that incontrovertible evidence of harm is not necessarily required in order to justify a restriction of access to certain types of content in any medium.
- That the structure and funding of the Home Office Task Force on Child Internet Safety should be formalised.
- That terms and conditions which guide consumers on the types of content which are acceptable on a site should be prominent. It should be made more difficult for users to avoid seeing and reading the conditions of use: as a consequence, it would become more difficult for users to claim ignorance of terms and conditions if they upload inappropriate content.
- That the UK Council on Child Internet Safety should work with Internet-based industries to develop a consistent and transparent policy on take-down procedures with clear maximum times within which inappropriate material will be removed. This should be subject to independent verification and publication.
Culture Secretary
In June 2008 it was reported that Culture Secretary Andy Burnham had suggested the government should have a role in ensuring that content on the Internet met the same standards as that on television as "the boundaries between the two media blur". Burnham also raised the idea of warnings being applied to certain content on websites such as YouTube to help people "better navigate the internet". He referred to the Byron ReviewByron Review
The Byron Review was a report delivered on the 27 March 2008 to the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families. It was authored and overseen by Dr Tanya Byron....
's March 2008 report, "Safer Children in a Digital World", saying that he thought people felt a "sense of risk and uncertainty about this world they are roaming". Burnham told journalists that he had an "open mind" about whether there was a need for a new Communications Act before the next General Election, indicating that his own preference was for smaller pieces of legislation as needed.
On 26 September 2008, Burnham delivered a keynote speech at the Royal Television Society
Royal Television Society
The Royal Television Society is a British-based educational charity for the discussion, and analysis of television in all its forms, past, present and future. It is the oldest television society in the world...
conference in London, in which he said that the government planned to crack down on the internet to "even up" the regulatory imbalance with television, saying that "a fear of the internet" had caused a loss of confidence that had robbed the TV industry of "innovation, risk-taking and talent sourcing" in programming. He enlarged on his remarks in an interview published the following day in the Daily Telegraph, in which he said: "If you look back at the people who created the Internet they talked very deliberately about it being a space that governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now ... There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical." The article also suggested that Burnham was planning to negotiate with the Barack Obama administration "to draw up new international rules for
English language websites" and that another idea being considered was "giving film-style ratings to individual websites".
Burnham's words were criticized by technology journalist Bill Thompson
Bill Thompson (technology writer)
Bill Thompson is an English technology writer, best known for his weekly column in the Technology section of BBC News Online and his appearances on Click, a radio show on the BBC World Service. He is also an Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at City University London .Born in Jarrow, Thompson grew...
, who pointed out that it was hard to reconcile his comments with the views of media regulator Ofcom
Ofcom
Ofcom is the government-approved regulatory authority for the broadcasting and telecommunications industries in the United Kingdom. Ofcom was initially established by the Office of Communications Act 2002. It received its full authority from the Communications Act 2003...
that TV-style regulation of the Internet is both undesirable and unworkable, as the Internet is a network rather than a medium.
On 29 September 2008 Children's Secretary Ed Balls
Ed Balls
Edward Michael Balls, known as Ed Balls, is a British Labour politician, who has been a Member of Parliament since 2005, currently for Morley and Outwood, and is the current Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer....
and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith
Jacqui Smith
Jacqueline Jill "Jacqui" Smith is a member of the British Labour Party. She served as the Member of Parliament for Redditch from 1997 until 2010 and was the first ever female Home Secretary, thus making her the third woman to hold one of the Great Offices of State — after Margaret Thatcher and...
announced the launch of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety
UK Council for Child Internet Safety
The UK Council for Child Internet Safety was set up in 2008 under New Labour charged with bringing together government departments, law enforcement agencies, academia, private industry and third-sector representatives such as charities and voluntary groups to collaborate on strategies to ensure...
(CCIS), which was supported by organisations including Google, Yahoo, BT, Microsoft, and Facebook, and which had an initial brief to deliver a "Child Internet Safety Strategy" to Prime Minister Gordon Brown in early 2009. The organisations were to work closely with government to deliver recommendations from Tanya Byron's March 2008 report, "Safer Children in a Digital World".
The group was also to look at ways of improving public awareness of child safety issues online, promote responsible online advertising to children and "provide specific measures to support vulnerable children and young people, such as taking down illegal internet sites that promote harmful behaviour." In addition they were also to investigate ways and means of "tackling problems around online bullying, safer search features, and violent video games." The CCIS was also to establish a voluntary code of practise for user-generated sites such as YouTube to agree a time limit for takedown of inappropriate content.
There have been concerns over the increasing amount of Internet regulation and fears that the Internet may become even more restricted in future.
Libel laws
In a 27 December 2008 newspaper interview, UK Culture Minister Andy Burnham said that the Government was considering changing the UK's libel laws to give people access to cheap low-cost legal recourse if they were defamed online. He said that the legal proposals were being drawn up by the Ministry of Justice.New default censorship proposals
In December 2010, UK Culture Minister Ed Vaizey revealed new government proposals regarding web sites with pornographic content. Under these proposals all ISPs will be expected to block such web sites by default."UK code of practice for the self-regulation of new forms of content on mobiles"
Numerous British ISPs, including BT, block many innocent sites, redirecting the user tohttp://btsupport.custhelp.com/app/answers/blank/a_id/12756
which states:
- Content blocked
- In compliance with a new UK voluntary code of practice you are not able to access this site and have been redirected by the BT Content Administrator Service
This uses a barring and filtering mechanism to restrict access to all WAP and Internet sites that are considered to have an 'over 18' status. To date, these include sites which contain information on any of the following categories:
- Adult / sexually explicit
- Chat
- Criminal skills
- Drugs, alcohol and tobacco
- Gambling
- Hacking
- Hate
- Personal and dating
- Violence
- Weapons
Examples of such sites are dictionaries (e.g. http://www.urbandictionary.com/), proxy URLs.
Proposals to limit social media, following August 2011 riots
On 11 August 2011, following widespread rioting and looting2011 England riots
Between 6 and 10 August 2011, several London boroughs and districts of cities and towns across England suffered widespread rioting, looting and arson....
, British Prime Minister David Cameron
David Cameron
David William Donald Cameron is the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service and Leader of the Conservative Party. Cameron represents Witney as its Member of Parliament ....
said that Theresa May
Theresa May
Theresa Mary May is a British Conservative politician who is Home Secretary in the Conservative – Liberal Democrat Coalition government. She was elected to Parliament in 1997 as the Member of Parliament for Maidenhead, and served as the Chairman of the Conservative Party, 2003–04...
, the Home secretary, would meet with executives of the Web companies Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
and Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
, as well as Research In Motion
Research In Motion
Research In Motion Limited or RIM is a Canadian multinational telecommunications company headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada that designs, manufactures and markets wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market...
, maker of the BlackBerry
BlackBerry
BlackBerry is a line of mobile email and smartphone devices developed and designed by Canadian company Research In Motion since 1999.BlackBerry devices are smartphones, designed to function as personal digital assistants, portable media players, internet browsers, gaming devices, and much more...
smartphone, to discuss possible measures to prevent troublemakers from using social media
Social media
The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...
and other digital communications tools. During a special debate on the riots, Mr. Cameron told Parliament:
Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organized via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these Web sites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality”.
Critics say that the British government is considering policies similar to those it has criticized in totalitarian and one-party states. And in the immediate aftermath of the riots, Iran
Iran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
, often criticized by the West for restricting the Internet and curbing free speech, offered to “send a human rights delegation to Britain to study human rights violations in the country".
On 25 August 2011 British officials and representatives of Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry met privately to discuss voluntary ways to limit or restrict the use of social media to combat crime and periods of civil unrest. The government is seeking ways to crack down on networks being used for criminal behavior, but is not seeking any additional powers and has no intention of restricting internet services. It was not clear what new measures, if any, would be taken as a result of the meeting.
Educational Institutions
The majority of Schools, Colleges and Universities use internet filters to block access to sites which contain Adult material, Gambling and site which contain malwareMalware
Malware, short for malicious software, consists of programming that is designed to disrupt or deny operation, gather information that leads to loss of privacy or exploitation, or gain unauthorized access to system resources, or that otherwise exhibits abusive behavior...
. YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
and Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
are often filtered by certain schools. Many students often use proxy servers to bypass this.
See also
- Censorship in the United KingdomCensorship in the United KingdomCensorship in the United Kingdom has a long history with variously stringent and lax laws in place at different times. Censorship of motion pictures, video games and Internet sites hosted in the United Kingdom are considered to be among the strictest in the European Union, the strictest being...
- Illegal file sharing in the United KingdomIllegal file sharing in the United KingdomFile sharing in the United Kingdom relates to the distribution of digital media in that country. As of 2010, there are over 18.3 million households connected to the internet in the United Kingdom, with 63% of these having a broadband connection...
- Internet Watch Foundation and WikipediaInternet Watch Foundation and WikipediaOn 5 December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation , a British watchdog group, blacklisted content on the English version of the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia related to Scorpions' 1976 studio album Virgin Killer, due to the presence of its controversial cover artwork, depicting a young girl posing...
External links
- BT's CleanFeed and Online Censorship in UK: Improvements for a more secure and ethically correct system", Nikolaos Koumartzis, Master of Arts thesis, January 2009, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.