Canada kiddie porn blocks
p2pnet.net news view:- Few issues unite Internet users as much as their collective distaste for censorship. It was therefore unsurprising that many in the Internet community recoiled at last month’s announcement that a group of Canada’s largest Internet service providers, including Bell, MTS Allstream, Rogers, Shaw, Telus, and Videotron, had entered into an agreement with Cybertip.ca, an organization maintained by Child Find Manitoba, to voluntarily block access to child pornography websites.
The initiative, dubbed Project Cleanfeed Canada, is modeled after British Telecom’s Project Cleanfeed, which has blocked access to child pornography in the United Kingdom for the past two years. Under the plan, Cybertip.ca will identify a list of websites that contain child pornography and the ISPs will use filtering technology to block access to those sites. The block list will only contain foreign-based websites with all Canadian-based sites referred to law enforcement to pursue legal action.
Child pornography is unique in that the Criminal Code renders it illegal to create, distribute, and access such content. Other forms of controversial content such as hate speech or defamation may pose legal liability for the speaker, but are not unlawful to access. Canadian ISPs, who will not administer the block list nor maintain a list of subscribers who attempt to access blocked content, believe that they are on safe legal ground by stopping attempts to access child pornography.
While many have understandably applauded the effort to reduce access to child pornography, critics have voiced several concerns. These include skepticism about the transparency and accuracy of the block list, concerns about the accountability of Cybertip.ca, doubts about the effectiveness of the initiative, and fears that the blocking might eventually extend to other content.
Lianna McDonald, the initiative’s Executive Director, sought to address many of those concerns in an interview last week. She noted that Cybertip.ca has instituted several measures to reduce the likelihood that the block list will extend beyond clear cases of child pornography.
First, the block list will be limited to sites with images of pre-pubescent pornography (ie. images of children aged 12 and under). While that approach will leave some child pornography unblocked, it will also reduce the possibility of mistakenly tagging lawful content.
Second, experts will review the inclusion of all sites in consultation with law enforcement. Moreover, McDonald advised that the organization would be amenable to incorporating further judicial oversight into the process.
Third, an appeals process will be established to enable sites to challenge their presence on the block list. That process will include reviews from both Cybertip.ca and an independent examination from the National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre.
Cybertip.ca has also undertaken to address concerns regarding its own accountability. The organization features an independent board of directors and it answers to public and private funders who are anxious to limit the prospect of legal liability that could stem from overblocking (the federal government provides approximately 60 percent of its funding).
Furthermore, although the contents of the block list will understandably remain hidden out of fear that public distribution would provide a directory of child pornography, Cybertip.ca plans to release regular reports that will disclose the size of the list and the ISPs participating in Project Cleanfeed Canada.
Criticism regarding the effectiveness of the initiative may stem from a misunderstanding of its goals. While many experienced child pornographers may avoid using websites to disseminate their content, numerous anti-child pornography organizations confirm that there remain hundreds of child pornography sites that may be inadvertently accessed thousands of times each day by unsuspecting Internet users. Indeed, earlier this year British Telecom reported that it was blocking 35,000 child pornography hits per day.
The prospect that this initiative might be extended to other content is the most troubling concern. This summer Australia Senator Helen Coonan discussed the prospect of implementing an Australia Cleanfeed Project, yet lamented that the project was narrowly tailored toward child pornography. Several European countries have also been watching the UK Project Cleanfeed with an eye to establishing mandatory blocking requirements. Canadian law would currently prohibit extending the block list to other forms of content, however, ISPs and the Internet community must be vigilant to ensure that fears of a “slippery slope” do not come to fruition.
For the moment, Project Cleanfeed Canada deserves cautious support precisely because it is narrowly tailored to non-Canadian, clear cases of child pornography and has been voluntarily implemented with a handful of checks and balances. There are unquestionably some risks that require careful monitoring, but the project deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Michael Geist
[Geist is the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. He can be reached by email at mgeist[at]uottawa.ca and is on-line at www.michaelgeist.ca.]
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December 5th, 2006 at 5:32 am
From my point of view, Michael Geist has lost a lot of credibility with
his supporting Cleanfeed. He just doesn’t get it–this is going to be
the thin edge of the wedge. He states, correctly, that child pornography
is already illegal–so is hate literature–are hate literature sites
going to be blocked next?
On Michael’s site, Cory Doctorow and others have all eloquently outlined
their objections and fears with respect to this scheme; I will not
reiterate those here, except to say that I fully agree with them.
I suspect that within the next 5-10 years, we are going to see a ‘perfect
storm’ of sorts with respect to censorship; we’ll have Cleanfeed and the
MITA (Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act).
In essence, everything one does on the Net will be scrutinized, for fear
that someone, somewhere might be breaking the law.
Sophisticated users will find ways to circumvent these restrictions
(crypto); the flow of visible child porn may slow, but it will never
come to a complete stop. All that will happen is that it will move
further underground, where the authorities will be unable to detect
and/or suppress it.
Prohibition doesn’t work! It didn’t work with alcohol, it doesn’t work
with drugs. If it doesn’t (and hasn’t) worked with tangible goods like
drugs and alcohol, how do they expect to be able to control the flow of
bits down a wire or through the air?
Mark my words… it may /start/ with child porngraphy, but it most
certainly won’t end there. We’ll end up no better off than the users in
China or Saudi Arabia.
Baal
“Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?” — “Who will watch the Watchmen?”
— Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347. circa 128 AD
Who would have thought that lessening of national [sovereignty] would be
more a threat to the rights of the individual. IMHO it shows that the
bigger the tent of a government (World, National, provincial, county,
local) the more the monied interests and the police can control the
process and the less responsive it must be to voters.
Whatever rights we give up in the name of security will only allow
our government to do more, not do better. We will invariably get more
of the same, and while our feeling of increased safety will be illusory
and fading, our loss of rights will be real and permanent.
— Facekhan, Ars Technica
December 5th, 2006 at 8:38 am
It *ALWAYS* starts with children.
Child protectionism is the key to the undoing of any modern society. It worked on the German people and it’s working on us now. It takes a “real man” to think about the bigger picture and realize that EVERY SINGLE CHILD PROTECTION MEASURE IS ENDANGERING CHILDREN MORE.
Sex offender registration and restrictions prevent offenders from re-integration into society, and offenders being able to make their life right is how they get past their offense and become productive members of society. What happens when offenders can’t get housing, jobs, or even food and clothing legally? They’re going to commit more crime. Adopt a “why the hell not?” attitude. They might even rape AND MURDER YOUR CHILD, just because they see no future and figure they might as well end it with a bang.
(I don’t know if you’re aware of this or not, but there actually IS NOT a sex offender behind every tree, waiting to brutally rape, beat, kidnap, and dismember your kid. Just something notable.)
Forcing the Internet to be open to anti-child-porn or anti-terrorist monitoring, from E-mail to IRC to FTP, will put “unspoken limits” on freedom of speech, which means less peer review of ideas and less sharing of information for fear of being mis-identified as a terrorist or child pornography distributor, among other things. Blocklists have time and time again proven ineffective as far as prevention of this stuff from getting to a computer in the first place. If you cannot be an informed citizen, how can you keep your children safe in the first place? Mass media will get away with saying all kinds of things, but bloggers will be silenced by the fear of being “investigated” and slapped with a “gag order.”
Mandatory Internet filtration software in libraries and schools? False sense of security. When I was 16, I was bypassing the Cyber Patrol Proxy at my school easily, all by using a “bouncer” that takes a URL in a URL and proxy-loads it. That’s it! Didn’t take anything more and I had insta-porn at school, yayyyyy. A false sense of security is far worse than a true sense of insecurity. If anything, your child will want to bypass it to reach the forbidden fruit, and that pretty much negates what you were trying to do in the first place.
30 years ago, you rarely would see high schoolers arrested for a fight. Now, if you get in a fight at school, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get CRIMINALLY CHARGED. Same if you steal ten packs of candy from someone and they find out. I know–they almost charged me for stealing candy when someone else did it. They threatened, but they ultimately left me alone. Children do stupid ass things and make big mistakes, but now we scar them for a long, long time for being kids.
Oh yeah, in some places, teachers are told what they are allowed to explain to children about sex in sex ed. Someone in my class asked about anal sex. The teacher said “I’m not allowed to talk about that.” The child WILL find out about it one way or another…you see what I’m getting at. Couldn’t even tell the child the dangers and give precautions in case they decided to do it, and anal sex can be extremely dangerous if done very badly (think perforating your intestines).
The next time you hear the word “children” in any sentence about law, politics, policies, and so on, think about the big picture. Don’t let the loaded gun that is the word “children” blind you to common sense, logic, and facts.