The great war against internet filth has begun. The Prime Minister has issued two straight ultimatums to the internet industry: eradicate all child abuse images from the internet and prevent children from accessing “legal pornography”, or else he’ll introduce laws forcing them to do so.
The Prime Minister laid out his case in an interview with Andrew Marr. “It is possible today to get absolutely vile images of child abuse that are illegal on the internet, and we need to do much, much more to stop it… Some people are putting simply appalling terms into the internet in order to find illegal images of child abuse, and remember every one of these pictures is a crime scene, and they’re getting results. I think it’s wrong that they should get results and we need to have very, very strong conversations with those companies… and if we don’t get what we need, we’ll have to look at legislation.”
Strong stuff…. and utterly misguided. Firstly, it’s a bit rich for a government that last year cut the budget of the police body (CEOP) that investigates online child abuse to point the finger of blame at Google et al for failing to tackle the problem. Especially when it’s that industry that’s funded the Internet Watch Foundation since its formation in 1996, a body that has – according to its About Us page – “virtually eradicated [illegal child abuse images] from UK networks”.
It’s roughly akin to calling for the NHS to cure cancer within a year, and threatening to make it illegal if it can’t
Now, I can’t tell you what pops up in the search results when you search Google for the “appalling terms” Cameron mentions, because I’d be laying myself open to prosecution. All I can tell you is what I’ve been told countless times by experts working in this field over the years: the majority of people seeking child abuse images aren’t discovering them in Google Images. They’re using newsgroups, peer-to-peer networking and other sites hidden in the “deep web”. They’re actively masking these sites from Google, because they don’t wish to be caught. If CEOP could hunt down paedophiles simply by typing keywords into Google, the government would have every right to cut the CEOP’s budget, its job would be much easier.
Yet, even if child abuse images can be found via a Google search, identifying and removing them is no simple matter. Paedophiles don’t tend to label their images with incriminating filenames/metadata for obvious reasons, and image matching is notoriously unreliable, as this Google Search against an official portrait of David Cameron proves:
Google is already working on a new digital watermark system that allows providers to remove copies of the same image once it’s already been identified, and other companies are doing likewise. Yet, Cameron calls for them to get their “great brains” together to crack this problem, threatening legislation if they don’t. It’s roughly akin to calling for the NHS to cure cancer within a year, and threatening to make it illegal if it can’t.
Legal pornography
And then we come to the matter of preventing children from accessing legal pornography. Here Cameron claims he’s speaking on behalf of the country’s parents, a concerned father of three who’s worried about his three young children getting access to adult content.
Yet, where are these concerned parents he claims to speak on behalf of? The government’s own consultation paper on parental controls, published only last December, stated: “There was no great appetite among parents for the introduction of default filtering of the internet by their ISP: only 35 per cent of the parents who responded favoured that approach.” Yet that’s precisely the approach Cameron is today attempting to foist upon ISPs.
That same consultation paper also highlighted the risks of having these filters switched on by default:
“It does not encourage parents to engage with the issues and learn about keeping their children safe online. There is a risk that parents might rely on default filtering to protect their children from all potential online harms and not think about how their children might want to use the internet, the kind of content that is appropriate for each child according to their own circumstances, and the risks and harms their children might face.”
Won’t somebody think of the children?
