Want child porn blocked? Meet the IWF

Whenever something bad happens, the powers that be look to an easy scapegoat, and more often than not these days, that’s the internet.

After the horrific murder of Lee Rigby, Home Secretary Theresa May and others called for the return of the so-called Snoopers Charter, though as of yet there’s no evidence to suggest that seeing the sender and recipient of every email sent by Britons — but not the content — would have prevented that poor man’s death.

Today, after the sentencing of Mark Bridger for murdering five-year-old April Jones, it’s happening again. This time, politicians and lobbyists are calling for some combination of porn, violent porn, and child porn to be stripped from Google or otherwise blocked from the web.

There’s a lot of misinformation on this emotive subject — not least because many images of child sexual abuse are already stripped from Google and blocked from the web.

In case you — like the major newspapers in this country — aren’t aware, there’s a body in the UK called the Internet Watch Foundation. The IWF works with ISPs and web giants (ie, Google, one of its funders), getting child abuse content taken down and blocked — you may remember it once had Wikipedia blocked over an image of a naked girl on a Scorpion’s album cover.

Here’s what IWF aims to remove or block: images of child sexual abuse hosted in the UK and around the world and “criminally obscene” images hosted in the UK.

The shrill cries that we must do something fail to realise something is already being done. The Telegraph, The Guardian and others have weighed in with calls to action — The Times, for example, wants child pornography to be taken off British servers and, if hosted by non-British servers, to be blocked. Of course, that’s what the IWF does — and you’d think the Times would known that, given it name-checks the organisation earlier in the column.

By all means, argue that the IWF should do better, or receive more funding, or that the police should hire more technical experts to better track down posters of this illegal content, or that international agencies should work better together to crack down on child porn. Certainly, it should do a better job of advertising its own efforts.

But for everyone calling for Google to block child porn wholesale, it already blocks exactly what we, via the IWF, tell it to.

As Scott Rubin, the director of communications and public affairs at Google, said: “Google has a zero-tolerance policy on child sexual abuse content. We are members and joint funders of the Internet Watch Foundation, an independent body that searches the web for child abuse imagery and then sends us links, which we remove from our search index. When we discover child abuse imagery or are made aware of it, we respond quickly to remove and report it to the appropriate law enforcement authorities.”

That tactic works pretty well: the IWF claims that “as a result of this approach the content we deal with has been virtually eradicated from UK networks”.

IWF not enough?

Others don’t think that’s enough. John Carr used to sit on the board of the IWF, and is now the government’s adviser on internet safety and involved with a children’s charities coalition. While he acknowledged to the BBC that Google already blocks child porn content that’s reported to it, he thinks the web giant should go further and be more “proactive”.

He’s not calling for Googlers to search out and block child porn — that’s what the IWF does, forwarding the links to Google to take out of its search index.

No, he’s calling for the web giant to automatically apply Safe Search to all of its results pages, only allowing access to adult content if we adults sign in to Google, prove our age to Google, and then register with Google on a “yes, I’d like to see porn, thanks” database.

If there’s anything that’ll make me move to Bing for my search, it’s that — but Carr thinks that hurdle will stop access to illegal images.

“Putting any types of barriers to things like that would in my opinion, and the opinion of many others, help reduce the numbers of guys who got involved with this stuff in the first place, and that would be a big step forward,” he said.

The causality of any of this aside — because it’s frankly not clear that porn leads to child abuse and murder — Carr is calling for Google to default to a level appropriate for children. This is essentially an extension of MP Claire Perry’s call for a UK-wide, opt-out network-level porn filter, but passing it off to Google — an American corporation — instead. That campaign failed after the government ran a consultation that asked Britons if they wanted a UK-wide porn ban — and overwhelmingly they don’t.

There’s much that’s technically wrong with automated filters — they can’t work perfectly — but at its core there’s one main fact: politicians and lobbyists need to stop treating everyone online as though we’re potential criminals. The internet is simply a reflection of what’s happening — very sadly, in these cases — in the offline world.

Indeed, news reports suggest Bridger was fascinated by a rape and murder scene in a horror film. Not one that he uncovered surreptitiously online, but a widely released movie, Last House on the Left,  that he recorded from broadcast television — and which The Times only gave two stars out of five in its review.