BT blocks Kiddie Porn sites
p2pnet.net News:- In the first mass censorship of the web in a Western democracy, British Telecom is blocking, “all illegal child pornography websites in a crackdown on abuse online,” says the UK’s Observer here.
Are there legal child pornography websites?
“The move, previously thought to be at the limits of technical possibilities of the internet and prohibitively expensive, was given the personal backing of BT chairman Sir Christopher Bland at a board meeting last month after intense pressure from children’s charities,” says the report.
And, “Other major players in the internet market, such as Energis and Thus, which owns rival Demon Internet, are said to be preparing to block banned sites,” says the story.
Until now, the censorship of websites has been confined to oppressive regimes such as Iran and China.
But, “many in the field of child protection believe that the explosion of paedophile sites justifies the crackdown,” says the Observer, attributing the move to John Carr, internet adviser to children’s charity NCH, “who wrote to Home Office Minister Paul Goggins last July urging action on paedophile websites after a successful campaign to block internet newsgroups (electronic message boards which paedophiles used to share images of children)”.
The Observer says the project, named Cleanfeed and was developed in consultation with the Home Office, will go live by the end of the June when BT subscribers who try to access ‘illegal’ sites will receive an error message as if the page was unavailable.
“BT will register the number of attempts but will not be able to record details of those accessing the sites,” states the Observer.
Pierre Danon, chief executive of BT Retail, is quoted as saying, “You are always caught between the desire to tackle child pornography and freedom of information. But I was fed up with not acting on this and always being told that it was techically impossible.”
June 7th, 2004 at 1:35 am
Re: BT blocks Kiddie Porn sites
How do they know where the “illegal” sites are ?
If they know, will they not report them ?
Then will not the “illegal” sites be shut down ?
Why block sites that do not exist ?
Maybe, what they want is a way to block sites
they to not want people to read. So if they
declare a site to be “illegal”, and it is not,
how will we know ?
BTW, I am not an “Anonymous Coward”.
I am simply too busy to log into your site.
But thanks for prejudgeing me anyway.
June 7th, 2004 at 9:39 am
Cleanfeed is not a BT product. It was developed by a company called Legend Internet a couple of years ago and is widely used all over the country in particular by schools.
It’s a shame that BT have to steal products from other companies and pretend that it’s their own.
You can find out more about Cleanfeed at http://www.cleanfeed.co.uk
June 7th, 2004 at 11:38 am
Many such sites are in countries like the ex-USSR where either the law hasn’t caught up or the law enforcement people have more urgent things to worry about. That’s the sort of site that they are going to be blocking.
June 7th, 2004 at 11:39 am
I bet the name is a coincidence and nobody thought to check.
June 7th, 2004 at 2:13 pm
How will this cope with P2P traffic and anonymous services like Freenet? If it’s just blocking websites, then I don’t think it will have the desired effect (unless it was just designed as a PR stunt that is).
June 8th, 2004 at 10:40 pm
So what you are saying is that people in Russia are
allowed to learn about things the USA and Canada does
not want people to know about ?
Also, if you say something on a web site the Status Quo
does not like, for instance “John Ashcroft Sucks !”, they
can now block it simply by claiming it is an illegal site.
Well hello, Big Brother !
Is it 1984 already ?