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[FYI] UK: Newsgroups-Debatte
- To: debate@fitug.de
- Subject: [FYI] UK: Newsgroups-Debatte
- From: "Axel H Horns" <horns@t-online.de>
- Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2000 20:59:30 +0100
- Comment: This message comes from the debate mailing list.
- Organization: PA Axel H Horns
- Reply-to: horns@t-online.de
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http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/observer/uk_news/story/0,3879,148489,00
.html
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Exposed: where child porn lurks on the Net
Worries about child sex led to the creation of a watchdog by Internet
service providers. Demon is a member, so why can its subscribers
still find paedophile images?
Jamie Doward and Andrew Smith
Sunday March 19, 2000
[...]
Demon, one of the UK's largest ISPs with nearly 300,000 customers and
owned by telecoms giant Scottish Telecom, now called Thus, is a
strong supporter of an uncensored Internet and carries a number of
the newsgroups banned by most rivals. The newsgroups are often
explicitly named: several are described as pre-teens erotica. Others
hide behind impenetrable acronyms. Sources in the Internet world
suggest that there are up to 40 newsgroups carried by Demon that
promote paedophile material.
Newsgroups are stored on an ISP's own news server - a computer
database that records all the posted messages. If it were proved that
Demon was aware paedophile material had been placed on its server and
had failed to remove it, the ISP would be breaking the law. Demon
says it acts quickly to remove paedophilic material when it is drawn
to its attention.
Yesterday The Observer found scores of paedophilic material in
several newsgroups carried by Demon. Some showed young teenage girls
and boys; others were of young children performing sex acts on
adults. It is illegal to download such material, but this newspaper,
which has now destroyed the images, believes it was acting in the
public interest.
[...]
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http://www.iwf.org.uk/press/press.html
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[...]
The IWF policy on newsgroups has been regularly re-visited in both of
the former Boards, and will be again by the new one. As the article
quotes "It's an interesting balance between the protection of
children and civil liberties." The conclusion so far by both former
Boards of IWF and the Government review has been that the original
agreement got it about right. Nevertheless we have increased
surveillance of the suspect groups, which are now monitored
irrespective of whether the public reports them, and keep ISPs
informed of which groups are currently causing problems.
The number of newsgroups which regularly receive illegal articles is
much fewer than the original 130 named by the police, some of which
have never had an illegal article reported to us. It is also
considerably less than the 40 quoted in your article. (It would have
been a more responsible action for you to have reported those
articles to us, so that we could have had them removed from UK news
servers and checked the relevant groups.) It is also significant that
the offending groups are not static. Academic research has shown a
degree of organisation between correspondents in the relevant groups,
so it is quite feasible that an attempt to shut them down would lead
to migration of the illegal content to other groups. By the way, the
illegal articles appearing in these groups are in the minority.
Removing them would also remove a lot of legal content.
Shutting down newsgroups would not do much to protect the children
whose pictures are already on the Net. The work of the hotlines and
industry to help police in tracing and prosecuting originators does.
Your article concludes with the suggestion that we have got the
balance wrong. What if the UK industry had accepted the original
position of shutting down newsgroups nominated by the police? Might
we not have had an article today reflecting on the damage to freedom
of speech and the threat to democracy of a situation where the state
could dictate what is available on the Internet, irrespective of
whether it is legal or not? Interestingly when journalistic freedom
is at stake, your paper is quick to question the "national interest"
in Ian Hargreaves' piece on David Shayler in the same issue.
Yours faithfully
David Kerr
Chief Executive
Internet Watch Foundation
www.iwf.org.uk
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