FITUG e.V.
Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft
FITUG e.V.Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft |
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http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/observer/uk_news/story/0,3879,148489,00.html
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
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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