Don't Be* There

On December 7th, this article was posted on Slashdot. It seems that various UK ISPs who were subscribed to the IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) had blocked access to a certain page on Wikipedia. The page, the entry for the Scorpions' "Virgin Killer" album contained an image of a pre-pubescent girl and the IWF contacted the UK member ISPs and asked for the content to be censored.

There are so many issues with this that I find it hard to start in a coherent place. My ISP, Be*, is apparently a member of the IWF. I say apparently because it was not advertised or even disclosed by Be* in the small print. You would have thought that being a member of such an influencing government funded body would have been of relevance to members. Apparently not.

My next issue is the censorship itself. Obviously this is a much larger issue than one supposedly indecent image, but when did we as a country or as the Internet start to decide what was acceptable, and what was not? This is an incredibly slippery slope which has huge global ramifications.

Next seems to be the way in which the content was censored. Turns out that all customers were routed through something called a transparent proxy. To cut through the techno babble on this one, it simply meant that as far as Wikipedia was concerned, everyone was accessing the Internet from the same Internet address. Because of this, Wikipedia had to stop anonamous posting (because it could no longer be tracked) and new registrations for the same reason.

Then came the issue of the resulting message to customers which has been termed security through obscurity. The message was delivered in the form of a 404 message to customers. This would normally indicate that the page did not exist... which of course it did. Instead of at very least including information on the block and the reasons behind it, it was actually a completely fraudulent message... in effect a lie.

Onwards to the final insult, the fact that Be* did not communicate this issue to members in any official way. Random posts and ticket responses were included in the forums, but their response to this large-scale invasion of Internet user's rights went unmentioned.

Then yesterday afternoon, Slashdot reported on the IWF backing down on the issue. Apparently the IWF credited the Streisand effect for "opening their eyes". (The Steisand effect in a nutshell is when censored information is made super public, backfiring completely on the original censor.)

Their release stated that:

"...in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. ... IWF's overriding objective is to minimize the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect."

This of course does not negate the situation in any way. Indeed both the IWF and member ISPs will be left with very damaged reputations. This is extremely damaging for Be* becauase as many members point out, Be* is a ISP widely used by technical professionals, and it has failed to act in a communicative, fairhanded, neutral and frankly professional manner.

Be* users can review the pertenant discussion thread on the Be* member forums here.