A couple of days ago, I blogged about the fact that my internet connection was being censored. A spokeswoman of the Internet Watch Foundation, which was, along with my ISP, responsible for the censorship, claimed that on the 9 December, it would update its official statement. That date has been and gone, so what of the update, and what of the censorship?
First, the good news. The update
was made, and it says that despite having concluded that the image was
possibly illegal,
the IWF's board has
considered [its] findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case and, 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.
I can confirm that both the censored article and the controversial image it featured are
now visible to me over my internet connection, and I can once again edit Wikipedia without logging in if I wish to. In short, my internet
connection to Wikipedia is working again, and I am glad about this not only because I
believe the censorship was illegal and unwarranted, nor simply because I pay my ISP for
that connection and wasn't being provided with it, but for both these reasons and also
because I like some of the Scorpions' music and do occasionally look up
their discography on Wikipedia to learn about the tracks that I'm listening to.
Unfortunately, other parts of the IWF's statement still leave huge room for concern, in
particular the phrase,
Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted in the UK will be assessed in line with IWF procedures.
Given that:
- the IWF has already concluded that the image is
possibly illegal
, and - the IWF blacklists all content it concludes to be
possibly illegal
(except the Wikipedia page and image, as noted above), and - my ISP and many others block access to content blacklisted by the IWF, under a well-meaning but ultimately inadequate government initiative that appears to have little or no provision (that I can find) for addressing the IWF's ability to abuse its all-powerful blacklist,
this amounts to the IWF saying,
If you put that image online in the UK, you will be censored.
So, the image is legal to have on display in shops and at home (e.g. in your record collection), but you cannot use it on your online record shop, or your music blog, or indeed on the web generally, if you are hosting it in the UK, without risking censorship (and, as the Wikipedia incident demonstrated, probably cack-handed censorship that will destroy much of the rest of your site's functionality and, if it is an e-tailing site, maybe even ruin your business). And this, even though no UK court has decreed that the image cannot be hosted or transmitted online within the UK.
That is oppressive, and a deep infringment of the freedom of the press and of citizens.
It imposes a guilty until proven innocent
burden on people who have not been -
and may well never be - charged with any crime.
§
One effect of this intimidatory behaviour by the IWF is that Amazon no longer displays the album cover artwork in question, although it had
previously hosted it without undue consequence. I noticed this yesterday, when I checked
to see if the album was still on sale through Amazon, and found that Amazon.co.uk pages
which had previously shown the image showed a dishonest
No image available
placeholder instead. I hope this does not mark the beginning
of a return within our society to the state of which George Orwell said,
The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.
However, although a Google image search for the album still shows that a great many sites host the image, I could not, as of yesterday, spot among those results, a single one from a .co.uk domain. It is implausible that all sites hosting the image in the UK could have voluntarily removed it from their servers at such short notice (and indeed, they haven't), which makes me think that more sites may have been censored in the UK for hosting this image than Wikipedia alone; or else Google's image search is being censored in some way, or both. This is sinister enough.
§
Elsewhere on the web, I've just noticed that Ethan Zuckerman has written about the issue as eloquently as ever (Seth Finkelstein's comment on Zuckerman's post is especially enlightening), and that The Register also has some good coverage, with a devil's advocate opinion piece arguing that the block was justified and a more standard article discussing the issue and its wider implications.
The devil's advocate piece contained several factual errors, leaving the credibility of a
view favouring the block severely undermined - hardly surprising, in my view. The other
article in much better, and I have, so far, only one quibble with it. That quibble is
this: the article states, It [the IWF] does not determine the legality of sites,
which is true; but the IWF's director of communications suggested in my
interview with her that the IWF could and did determine the content it
blacklisted on Wikipedia to be illegal
(The IWF found the image to be illegal. … [We] have absolutely no doubt that we made the right decision.
).
I would have been happier if the Register piece had mentioned this, and
pointed out that the IWF itself seems not to be consistent in communicating what its
limits are.
As The Register says of the IWF,
Gone is its record for 100 per cent undisputed blocking. Gone, too, is its reputation for being the undisputed good guy.
And you know what? I think that in some ways, this sums up the greatest pity: that the IWF, which was founded with such laudable intentions, should have been set up in a way that allows it to abuse its power, that it did so, and that it is claiming the right to do so in the future. That's damaging for freedom, and it's damaging for the IWF's credibility, which in turn is damaging for attempts to stem the transmission and publicaton of images of real child abuse online.
Let's hope the needed reforms emerge. But if they don't, how should we prompt them to? Should we report to the IWF the fact that Nirvana's Nevermind album, which also features a naked child on the cover (but with genitals exposed OMG genitals it must be a case of abuse! unlike the child on the Scorpions cover) is widely available in UK web shops and is also visible on Wikipedia? I used to enjoy running under the garden sprinkler with no clothes on when I was little, and my parents took a couple of photos because they thought that a child enraptured by the pleasure of basking in the warmth of the sun and trying to touch the rainbows its light produced as it passed through the droplets was a beautiful, free, joyous sight to behold. Should I, for this, take my parents to a police station and claim they are pornographers who abused me? In short, can we the public, or Wikimedia UK, or Liberty, or Reporters Without Borders, or the EFF, or indeed any group active in the UK with an interest in freedom of information make a test case that will likely result in a ruling binding on bodies like the IWF and the ISPs who implement its blacklist, whose over-zealous approach to protecting the rights of children to grow up free of abuse now exceeds the prevention of that abuse and has extended into a violation of other basic human rights?