Cognitive Conga: a blog

Censored

I stumbled across a news article today about Wikipedia content being blocked by ISPs. I had noticed that my connection to Wikipedia over the last couple of days had been flaky, so I decided to investigate. It turns out that one of the ISPs blocking Wikipedia content was the ISP I use at the moment, Virgin Media (hereafter “VM”).

I’m a big fan of Wikipedia and have been for a few years. Querying Wikipedia is like asking a group of interested and generally well-informed people a question. You often get to hear many points of view, and you almost invariably get good references to other sources of information. It’s also about as libre as media can get, which makes it an excellent resource for communities of people with shared interests.

I use Wikipedia regularly and it forms an important component of my reference library, so if my connection to it is censored, my opportunities for learning, and for sharing my knowledge, could potentially be severely curtailed: a grave concern for me.

After reading a few more news stories and checking that my connection was indeed being censored in the ways they described, I looked up the Internet Watch Foundation (“IWF”), and various reports on the matter from within the Wikipedia community. It was the IWF’s bizarre decision to blacklist a Wikipedia page bearing a long-published album cover by stadium rock band Scorpions that prompted ISPs to block Wikipedia content. It became clear to me that some consumer action – not to mention citizen action – was needed.

Technical support

I called VM’s technical support line to report that there was a problem with my internet connection: some pages from Wikipedia weren’t coming through properly and I’d like them to solve the problem, please, as it seemed that my internet connection was being censored by VM without my consent; could they perhaps fix my connection? This was at about 2030hrs GMT, 08 December 2008.

The first person I spoke to denied that Virgin Media blocks anything, and he suggested the problem may have been due to anti-malware software on my PC, or due to problems with Wikipedia’s servers. He refused to accept that the mainstream news articles about the issue – even the BBC one – were credible. He said that if VM was doing anything to block Wikipedia, the VM tech. support team of which he was a part would have been notified; so since it had not been notified, it was not possible that VM was responsible for the problem. I asked if I could speak to his supervisor, and he agreed.

The supervisor (title: Manager, Technical Support; name: Suman) was very helpful and courteous. He confirmed that the tech. support team had not been told about a block imposed by VM on any Wikipedia pages. He tried accessing the Virgin Killer page but could not (his connection, like mine, was routed via VM’s network), even though he and his colleagues were able to access other Wikipedia pages. He agreed to investigate this, and said he would have somebody call me with news within a day or two. He agreed that if VM was indeed imposing censorship, his team should have been briefed about it, and that if the VM network was blocking Wikipedia pages, it was a major problem.

Well, it was good to know that the technical support staff took the issue seriously, and I was glad that they were as aggreived as I was to have had censorship imposed without warning.

I reported the call to the Wikipedia article hosting responses to VM’s official statement. Next, I figured it was time to contact the IWF.

Internet Watch Foundation

The IWF’s contact page states, “For out of office hours media enquiries, please contact Sarah Robertson, Director of Communications on +44 (0) 7929 553 679,” so I did, at around 2200hrs GMT, also on 08 December 2008.

I wasn’t able to capture the call verbatim, but I did my best to type it up as we spoke, so what follows is a reasonably accurate transcript and, I hope, one correct in all important particulars.

I introduced myself as a blogger writing a piece about the IWF’s blacklisting of Wikipedia content, and started asking the questions that were bugging me and that I thought were most important with respect to civil liberties and policy.

Interview transcript:

I’d like to know whether it’s the IWF’s policy to blacklist content that has not been found to be illegal.

“No, absolutely not.”

In that case, why did the IWF go against policy in the case of the Wikipedia article that has been in the news today?

“We didn’t.”

So that must mean that the content was found to be illegal. Who found it to be illegal?

“The IWF found the image to be illegal.”

But under UK law, if I’m not mistaken, only a court can determine if something is illegal. Has a UK court found the image to be illegal to publish or transmit, etc.? Or, for that matter, has any other court you know of; a foreign court?

“We only use UK law. Look, we’re not judge and jury. We just blacklist child sexual abuse content on behalf of the UK internet industry.”

That doesn’t seem to be true either, because as far as I can tell, both the URL for the page and for the image have been blocked. Surely the text on the page doesn’t count as “child sexual abuse content”. Wouldn’t it have been possible for you to just blacklist Wikipedia’s image of the cover, instead of the whole article?

“We blacklist the URL where the abuse content was found.”

That doesn’t answer my question, because the image and the article each have their own URLs.

“We’ve blocked the image and the URL.”

But both the page and the image have URLs. What I’m asking is, why did you blacklist the URL for the page, as well as the one for the image? If all you wanted to do was prevent the image from being shown on the page, wouldn’t you only have had to blacklist the URL for the image?

“The internet industry asks for pages to be blacklisted rather than images, because this is more effective at stopping child pornography rings from being able to publish.”

Going back to my earlier question, you said you found the image to be illegal. I agree that illegal content should be taken down, but it’s not clear to me that the Scorpions cover was illegal. Since the IWF is not a court, what did you mean that you “found the image to be illegal”?

“We do our job on behalf of the industry. We have the support of law enforcement agencies, and a memorandum of understanding with the Crown Prosecution Service and ICPO. We pass all our leads on to Interpol. The industry trusts the IWF to assess the potential illegality of content.”

Surely any content is “potentially illegal”, though. I’m opposed to censorship of content that is not illegal, so…

“So are we.”

Well, then either you could request prosecution of illegal content and blacklist it if it is found to be illegal, which seems sensible to me, or else you could do what you’re doing, which is to help censor content that hasn’t been found to be illegal. You can’t have it both ways, can you?

“Our law enforcement partners agreee that the Scorpions cover was illegal, and we have absolutely no doubt that we made the right decision. We’ll be updating our official statement tomorrow.”

If you’re sure you made the right decision about the Wikipedia page, then will you also be blacklisting other URLs where images of the Virgin Killers album cover are hosted? Amazon hosts one, and so do many dozens of other music sites. Are you going to blacklist them all?

“We don’t work proactively. A member of the public reported the URL concerned [i.e. the Wikipedia one], and we responded to that. We haven’t made a decision about any other sites.”

OK. I still don’t see how you can be opposed to censorship of legal content and yet be helping to block content that hasn’t been found to be illegal by a court. Could you explain that to me a bit more clearly?

“I don’t think you’re going to get the clarity you’re looking for; I think I’ve said as much as I need to say.”

Thank you for your time.

“Thank you.”

Considerations

It is my opinion that:

1. Sarah Robertson is not competent in her role as Director of Communications of the Internet Watch Foundation. Clearly, she does not understand terribly well how the internet works, as evidenced by her confusion between pages and URLs. Without prompting from me, I doubt she would have drawn the distinction. Yet URLs are crucial for the functioning of many internet communications, and an understanding of them is an important component of understanding the internet. Surely, if your organistion was founded to “watch” the internet and act upon what it sees, its Director of Communications ought to have a good understanding of internet communications. Additionally, Robertson’s words to the effect that I would not “get the clarity I was looking for” from her suggest that she may not even be competent to communicate the position of the IWF on matters fundamentally important to its activities, like why it acted the way it did if it is opposed to censorship. Surely, as Director of Communications, she is responsibile for communicating the IWF’s reasons for acting; yet she has not only failed in that responsibility, she has discarded it.
2. The Internet Watch Foundation has been granted unwarranted, and perhaps illegal, power of censorship. The fact that ISPs may be required by law to block content blacklisted by the IWF means that IWF is acting as an official censor. However, an official censor must be publicly accountable; yet the IWF is not.
3. The Internet Watch Foundation should not have blacklisted the Wikipedia article that displayed the album cover image. No credible evidence I am aware of suggests that the text of that article fell under the IWF’s remit. Roberton’s suggestion that blocking the page was justified because page-blocking is effective against child pornography rings makes no sense in the context of the Wikipedia article in question, because the article was not the product of a child pornography ring but, rather, the product of a community of editors creating a general purpose encyclopedia: an encyclopedia incorporating articles about notable popular music albums (the album in question was voted “LP of the Year” in Scorpions‘ native Germany).
4. The Internet Watch Foundation should not have blacklisted the image of the album cover hosted by Wikipedia. Without a court finding that the image is illegal to own, transmit, etc, within the UK, all UK citizens have the right to view it for purposes of criticism, comment and education; in short, for the sorts of purposes Wikipedia hosted it.
5. Reform is needed. The IWF ought to review its employment practices, in the light of the questionable competence of its director of communications and its flawed decision to blacklist legal content. Legal reform is needed to hold the IWF publicly accountable, or else to relieve the ISPs of a need to block content on the IWF’s blacklist. At the moment, I’m inclined to favour a solution whereby the IWF is:
   1. permitted only to blacklist content that has been found, by a court in the UK, to be illegal to access online; and
   2. either part of government, and accountable to it, with a binding blacklist; or else a public body with a non-binding blacklist.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 2:26 am and is filed under Life is language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.