1. I don't believe children will really be "saved" from viewing/reading harmful content - if they really want to see something, they will simply find a way around it, but also remember this is a *UK-only* thing!
2. I don't believe for a second that the security apparatus won't have unchecked access to the data
My primary concern isn't leaks or shaming. What I really have a problem with is the role of government here. Elections are not perfect, that's why we have separation of powers. But it's hard to see how any government imposed solution can be implemented without upsetting the balance and opening the door to government censorship/manipulation further down the road.
The responsibility to block this content should be with the parents and the free market. As a parent I can already purchase content filtering services. The UK government is meddling in an area it doesn't need to, with potentially disastrous consequences, presumably for PR purposes.
Preventing your children from seeing obscene content is fine.
Deciding that other people are too stupid to be able to do this, and thus those other people need a government mandated filter at the ISP to filter adult content is perhaps a bit authoritarian.
Don't forget that UK mobile providers already filter adult content (T-Mobile have something called "Content lock" - you need to go to the shop with ID to prove age to have it switched off. O2 and the others have something similar.)
And the UK has the Internet Watch Foundation - a quango that has the power to request that ISPs filter some pages and images.
I don't know what the answer to protecting people from extreme imagery is, but I do know a government filter isn't it.
Personally this is just reassurance that Brits are sensible people. That most understand filtering to be annoying and shamelessly opt out.
And I find it hard to ciriticise parents that leave the filtering active. It is perfectly reasonable to try and shelter a child from porn. This tech may not do that particularly well but that is a different issue.
And, to summarize the single most important point made there:
No, this is not the UK government's "porn filter", because (1) no such thing actually exists yet and (2) this isn't the same sort of thing as that would be if it did exist -- it's one ISP's opt-in whitelist offered to people who want a way to keep their children "safe".
(I am not defending such whitelists, by the way. But even if there is some day a Great UK Adult Content Filter, this is not what it will be.)
notable that this was strongly opposed by the UK government, which is using the child safety argument for the right of security and police services to access private messages
"Is the argument here that it will lead to blocking of more content in the future? If so this a slippery slope fallacy."
No it's not because U.K. ISPs have revealed that the filter will censor other content, as well.
"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." [1]
The bottom line is that if you don't want your children to be exposed to content that may be questionable, don't let them get on the Internet. Set a password on your computer. Install a filtering program which don't require any technical expertise to install whatsoever. Hell, Windows has a web filter build in now a days. Don't force your preposterous views on to me. The government has no place restricting legal content. I'm tired of these bullshit "Think of the children!" arguments.
I would go with that if it were opt in. But deliberately, its not. Have to ask why, and what that implies. The whole point is to humiliate people who want access to porn. It has nothing what so ever to do with protecting children. The UK gov is enforcing a morality on the UK people which frankly its rarely applies to its self.
Also, BT are going to or are blocking proxy and proxy info sites. Why would any one want to opt in to that? Clearly this the beginnings of mass censorship, which I see no logical end to.
All this coming from the party which claims to be about personal choice and responsibility.
It's always the "save the children" sort of thing, isn't it?
The problem I've got with it, is I have a very difficult time believing Cameron and gang are just so disgusted with "the bad parts of the internet" (including porn) that they felt so strongly and brought down law... "to save the children!".
Coupled with his latest tirade of banning all non-backdoorable encryption so that "we can save our children faster when they're kidnapped!"... it's just not genuine.
I believe in reality it's a blanket filter which can and will be used as regular government censorship under guise of "saving the children".
Websites that "accidentally" get blocked one day when they haven't been blocked before, etc.
Arguing against it only serves to make one look bad in the public eye, "He doesn't want to protect our children", "He's OK with his children stumbling across porn while online!"
> We don't provide a filtering service to restrict or limit access to anything on the Internet. When you take services from us you are opting out of any filtering services. The Internet has a lot of good and useful things, but it also has a lot of unpleasant and offensive things. Don't blame us for what you find on the Internet.[...]
> We do not have, in our network, any equipment installed to filter access to any part of the public Internet for our customers as a whole. We aim to give 12 months notice if we ever add any such filtering.
In the past, they've spoken out more explicitly against the IWF:
> Not using IWF watch list
> The system deployed now is not effective. It blocks web sites that have been reported, and that is all. It causes side effects (see recent wikipedia incident). It does not block ftp access, email, secure web sites, usenet, irc, peer to peer file sharing, or any tunnelled IP to proxies outside the UK, or indeed any number or simple ways around it. The system does not even try to.[...]
> We feel sure anyone wanting access to child porn will have no trouble using the 95% of ISPs that use the IWF and there is no reason for them to come to us specially.[...]
> At the end of the day, we are no more of a policeman than a power company powering a counterfeit printing press. We provide a utility - we shift IP packets. Using us for anything illegal is a matter for the police to deal with and the criminals concerned, and not for those companies that provide power, water, gas, or internet that happen to allow those activities.
It's extremely poor judgement. The article also mentioned filtering content about drugs - since obviously, it's a bad idea to allow the public to educate themselves about the safe use of substances that are encountered on a daily basis in the UK.
Whilst the 'slippery slope' argument is generally a weak one, it seems to be inevitable once this machinery is put into place. First porn, then drugs, then suicide and eating disorders, then sites that are used for piracy, then sites that advocate civil disobedience, then fringe political groups like Occupy Wall Street or Stop the War Coalition.
You can disable it at any time, but what parent is going to remove the filter that protects their children from seeing porn? Having to 'opt in' to 'risky content' is tantamount to public shaming.
I have a young daughter and I live in the UK. I think this legislation is bloody stupid.
Yes, some people might reasonably not want their children to run across pornographic material on the internet. Here are some other things some people might reasonably not want their children to run across on the internet: Anti-religious material. Religious material. Depictions of violence. Any mention of prejudice against racial minorities, women, etc. Websites offering do-my-homework-for-me services. News about upsetting things like tens of thousands of children starving to death every day in poor parts of Africa.
I hope it's clear that the internet would not be improved by having opt-out filters for all those things. I think it's clear, in fact, that the internet would not be improved by having opt-out filters for any of those things.
Yes, I hope my daughter will learn about sex in better ways than by stumbling across porn on the internet. And I hope she'll learn about those other things in better ways than by stumbling across them on the internet, too. It is not the government's, or my ISP's, job to make that happen by making things harder to find online; it probably won't work, and it will probably break other things (as such filters always have in the past), and it's the wrong way to solve the "problem" anyway.
And I also hope that if in the fullness of time our daughter wants to find porn on the internet, she will be able to, and she won't be (or feel) obliged to disclose the fact to her parents, and doing so without telling us won't require her to seek out dubious illegal channels which are likely to be full of stuff much "worse" than she'd easily have found without all the censorship.
> In the UK, ISPs are legally forced to block certain types of websites, such as those hosting copyright-infringing or trademarked content. Some ISPs also block other sites at their discretion, such as those that show extremist content, adult images, and child pornography. These latter blocks are voluntary and are not the same across the UK, but most ISPs usually tend to block child abuse content.
It does give the lie to the "for the children" argument when blocking copyright infringement is mandatory and banning child porn is optional.
Asking or even forcing the ISP's to give a parental options to block porn would have been sufficient in that case.
Given they have gone a LONG way past that with a proposal of a default ISP block and opt-in requirement, we can safely be sure this has nothing to do with regulating children's access.
Inline with other new legislation, the real reason this legislation is being proposed is that it forces ISP's to pay to upgrade their infrastructure for real-time surveillance. In other words, it is the infrastructure angle that the government wants private companies to pay for. After all, how effectively can you censor if you do not eventually do it in real time.
You can think of it as "the last mile" for the Intelligence Services, a part of the the "Going Dark" problem as technology and information rapidly expands along vectors that were not available to private entities in the past. By fair means or foul, the UK government will get what it needs - either directly from its first direct real-time proposal or via these types of censoring proposals to apply pressure on ISPs.
The "for the children" argument has nothing to do with anything since at most merely forcing the ISPs to give a parental options to block porn would have been sufficient against young children. No block of any kind (ISP or not) would ever work against older children, obviously, since many of them tend to be the most sophisticated technology and even socially-connected users in the household.
On one hand, I do think we need to do something about the content children have access to online, but I don't understand why the government believe this is their problem.
What content children get exposed to has always been the responsibility of parents. Assuming this bill has honest intentions (I don't believe it does) the issue here is more that parents are giving their children unrestricted access to the internet.
What we need to be doing (if anything) is giving parents more ability to regulate what content their kids have access to rather than simply putting that responsibility on the government and service providers.
ISPs should be making it much easier to for parents to add global content filters and device-specific filters. Both could easily be managed from an app and in my opinion this should be what the government should be focused on.
That said, what this seems to actually be is an attempt to crack down on content and speech the government (and perhaps the public generally) doesn't like.
The UK is an extremely authoritarian place, not because people here are generally authoritarian in nature in that we seek to control the behaviours of others, but because we're excessively conformist and polite. This bill exploits this aspect of our nature because few people in the UK are going to stick their necks out in defence online encryption or adult content.
For context for those who live the in US, in the UK if you're doing something impolite you're generally breaking the law...
Swearing in public? That's a public order offence. Saying something mean online? That's hate speech. Protesting fossil fuels? That's disruptive. And so on...
Corey Doctrow, who incidentally happens to live in London, begs to differ regarding the UK filter's utility in "helping protect children from adult content":
This begs the question of there being a "scourge" of child porn and terrorist propaganda. You're also assuming the UK's attack on encryption would do anything at all to combat either thing let alone end the presumed "scourge".
Strong encryption is the foundation of pretty much all online commerce. Without it little else is practical online. It's not up to the EFF to come up with solutions to made up or exaggerated issues.
Minor nit wrt. the first paragraph: the UK's mandatory "family-friendly filters" only apply to consumer internet accounts. It's possible to get a BT Infinity business account without any company letterhead or ID -- it just costs a bit more (and a provides a better quality of service, with no net nanny in the way because your IT department is supposed to do that for you). And there are ISPs (Andrews and Arnold -- http://www.aa.net.uk/ -- spring to mind) whose approach to government-mandated family-friendly filtering is robust and principled:
(I'll probably be moving there when my BT contract is up).
(Also, Tunnelbear is my friend.)
However: regardless of whether porn harms children (disclosure: everything I've read, from the Meese Commission report onwards, says that it doesn't), the problem with the net.nanny filters is that they're indiscriminate and over-block important material that is not the ostensible target of the block. Want to find out about breast cancer? Good luck with that -- breasts are of course only ever of interest in an erotic context. Teenagers wanting to explore non-mainstream aspects of their sexuality are SOL; LGBT content is commonly blocked. And so on. This shouldn't be a problem for sensible parents -- who will opt out, and discuss the issues face-to-face with their kids -- but is storing up lots of trouble down the line. Not to mention providing a temptation for politicians who might want to follow that nice Mr Erdogan's example and censor viewpoints hostile to them.
And meanwhile, Page Three of the Sun remains on display in every newsagent and supermarket in the UK.
> The culture secretary, Nicky Morgan, told parliament the policy would be abandoned. Instead, the government would instead focus on measures to protect children in the much broader online harms white paper. This is expected to introduce a new internet regulator, which will impose a duty of care on all websites and social media outlets – not just pornography sites.
.. which is almost a satire of every “think of the children” and “beware of terrorists” manifesto ever written. It’s a long document but I couldn’t find a single mention of the balance between safety and governmental overreach.. I would be surprised if e2e encryption were compatible with this white paper.
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