UK telcos chuck another £1m at online child abuse watchdog

Britain's largest ISPs have agreed to contribute a further £1m to the Internet Watch Foundation, following a meeting with Culture Secretary Maria Miller about child sex abuse images and videos found online. BT, BSkyB, Virgin Media and TalkTalk will collectively stump up the extra cash over the next four years. Each telco thus …

[Anonymous Coward]

"The ISPs have agreed to work with the IWF to review its activities and see if its work of blocking images of child sex abuse can be even more effective."

Even more effective? How would we know?

And now they are to seek out child abuse images. What kind of people work at IWF?

[Gordon 10]

"And now they are to seek out child abuse images. What kind of people work at IWF?"

I think the Govt and the Daily Fail have already answered that one for us. PREVERTS and PAEDIATRICS.

<---- Burn them all.

but seriously - do IWF workers have to do CRB checks or is that still just limited to Saturday morning Ref's and School book readers?

[Andy Fletcher]

illegal for anyone to actively seek child pornography

Presumably not everybody. If you want to spend all day looking at it presumably the IWF would be your employer of choice.

And when did pron become illegal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: illegal for anyone to actively seek child pornography

When I was studying Computer Forensics this did come up, and it is illegal to search for or save child pornography, even for the investigators. However no-one investigating has never been convicted as it is not in the publics interest.

[MrMur]

Re: illegal for anyone to actively seek child pornography

IWF have a memorandum of understanding from ACPO or somewhere like that basically says they can look at this stuff without fear of prosecution. Presumably that will be extended to allow them to hunt out this stuff without fear of prosecution.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: illegal for anyone to actively seek child pornography

> And when did pron become illegal?

In 2009, when after a long tabloid campaign following a similar murderer-has-internet-porn collection case, the Lab Govt commissioned a report from 3 feminists who gave the Home Office a shopping list which the coppers rubber stamped. A Home Office minister at the time said it was fine to criminalise material just because it was grossly offensive, and there was no need to prove harm. The coppers went on to prosecute (unsuccessfully) a man for having a joke clip of the Frosties tiger on his phone. Did it stop sex crimes? No. As predicted at the time the usual suspects are now back with a longer shopping list.

Seen the "Brit Porn" cutaway on Family Guy? That's where it'll stop.

[Fibbles]

The IWF maintains a list of urls that most ISPs in the UK use to censor online content. The list is supposed to be for child pornography but also includes 'criminally obscene' content, a category that the government seems intent on ever widening. The IWF has no external auditing of its list.

Previously the IWF could only add things to its secret list that the public had reported. It was a flimsy form of control as it only took one report to get something blocked but it was at least something. Now the IWF is free to search the internet for things it doesn't like and block them without any form of oversight.

What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep

Remember Stephen Conroy's the "Great Aussie Firewall" and all the chaos that ensured with all sorts of innocent parties that ended up getting blocked.

Never mind Made in China, it will be like living in China soon.

[Tom 38]

The one positive thing that is coming out of this is that the IWF will no longer be allowed to silently block content any more. If a resource is blocked, your ISP should now insert an error page indicating the IWF have restricted the content, instead of just giving a 404.

PS: I have Blind Faith on my spotify playlists, does this make me a paedo? When I play the album, some geezer in Sweden sends a picture banned by IWF (on wikipedia) to my phone.

[andreas koch]

I feel so much safer now.

. . . like in the old days, when our vicar looked after me. He had a very special way to make sure that I would not sin that I must never tell anyone about.

So there's another non-government agency that has been elevated to stand above the law.

Don't get me wrong, I think that child abuse, snuff clips and other sick stuff shouldn't be on the web. But if this needs to be actively hunted down (and I think it should), then this should be the task of an executive arm of the law, like a police force.

I think a foundation or workshop or whatever with this amount of power and no need to answer the state for it is just wrong.

Just imagine Emily Snorple-Frumpington of the IWF not agreeing with your choice of garden plants. She might find some snuff movies on your computer. Whether that is true, leads to something, or is fabricated doesn't help you after your name is wrecked. And whereas a PC's wrongdoing will be investigated into, a private agency does not really have to answer to the law . . .

Wheelclampers?

[pewpie]

Cosmic.

So basically, through the even further inflated telco charges that will result - we are all personally going to fund an ongoing game of whack-a-mole for a bunch of professionals pervs.

[Christoph]

The Internet Witch Hunt Foundation have already cost me considerable time trying to find out why I couldn't get through to Wikipedia, when they decided that the entire site should be censored due to a single image they didn't like.

Now they have lots more funding to save us from ourselves.

Still I suppose it cuts down on the spare time they have to peer through their neighbours' windows to try to find something they can complain about having to see.

Anyone want to lay bets on how long before the mission creep starts and we get blocked from anything the government thinks it's better that we don't know?

[Steve Davies 3]

Who watches the IWF?

Just asking you know?

They seem to be a bunch of self appointed unaccountable <redacted>.

What happens when they decided that even Teletubbies is far too racy for us to watch? What then?

Black Choppers naturally. you can't have anyone write a crit on the IWF now can you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Who watches the IWF?

That'll be the IWWF

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea what child pornography is anymore...

The term has been watered down so much it more or less means anything now.

Same with terrorism.

[Graham Marsden]

The answer is, of course, "I can't tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it..."

[Old Handle]

No doubt that's why they have switched the more emotionally charged "child abuse images" label, hoping you won't notice that this actually says even less about what they're blocking.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if anyone read this article recently.

>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/isps-to-include-porn-filters-as-standard-in-uk-by-2014/

>New and existing customers will have to opt out of filtering program.

For a country that criticizes China's Internet censorship, they do an excellent job of being hypocrites.

[Anonymous Coward]

And none of it will achieve anything

As TOR, freenet, WASTE etc still exist.

I suppose it filters out the 'casual' child-abuse-image searcher, which can only be a good thing, but beyond that nothing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: And none of it will achieve anything

Couldn't have put it better myself.

The TOR links page alone make me want to facepalm these recent 'efforts'.

[This Side Up]

Re: And none of it will achieve anything

Of course it won't achieve anything. It's not meant to. It's politics. It's "something must be done". It's meant to give the impression that the government is doing something and not sitting on its hands.

Of course the real effect will be to get paedophiles clamouring to join IWF!

[Old Handle]

Re: And none of it will achieve anything

Ah-ha, clever! So now all we have to do is arrest everybody who works for IWF.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maximum permitted aperture

"ISPA helped found the Internet Watch Foundation to tackle images of child abuse and criminally obscene adult content, and works with law enforcement and industry to block and remove child abuse content."

Does it work to block and remove the criminally obscene adult content* too? This sentence is ambiguous. If so, are they all qualified lawyers?

[Anonymous Coward]

* see eg The Spanner Trust's work

[Colin Millar]

Mary Whitehouse would be spinning in her grave

Not knowing whether the web should be shut down completely or kept going for the opportunities it presents for know-it-all do-gooders with an unhealthy interest in what other people do with their genitals.

What with this and credit card fraud it seems that the police are not willing to become involved in any crime types invented after about 1970.

Big Brother doesn't understand all this new-fangled robbery that doesn't use shotguns and tights over the head so he's delegated it to the religious fanatics those with a strong sense of community responsibility.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Mary Whitehouse would be spinning in her grave

One alleged side effect of this in Australia is that porn must now involve massive breasts.

Any pictures of ladies with a more svelt physique now risk tagging as being underage - or appearing underage, (apparently a grandma in a school uniform is considered child porn).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Mary Whitehouse would be spinning in her grave

>> One alleged side effect of this in Australia is that porn must now involve massive breasts.

That never went through.

As ridiculous as it was, it was just the ranting of one (South?) Australian moron politician and never passed into law.

[Graham Marsden]

"opt out of viewing smut"

You mean as opposed to the requirement that some people want that you would have to contact your broadband provider and actively opt-in by saying "yes, please let me view the smut"?

[spiny norman]

One hand, other hand

CEOP's 2011-12 annual plan had a budget of £6.38m in Home Office "grant in aid" funding, and in the previous year they also had £2.6m in income from "partnerships" with businesses and charities, which they hoped would continue. They expected the government portion to reduce by 10% by 2014-15.

However, their grant in aid budget for 2013-14 is £6.45m and there's no mention in the plan of future cuts.

The actual amount of money involved should make it difficult for Cameron, May and Miller to claim this is a top priority, but it doesn't look like "slashed by 10%" to me.

Search "CEOP review" for the numbers.

[Anonymous Coward]

The rocky road to IMP

The idea is to force people to register to look at porn by having to contact the ISP and opt out of filtering.

This creates a handy list based on the wimmins aid/daily mail list of rapist/peado traits which requires two key elements:

1: Being male

2: Access to porn

Between this and the use of DPI to run the network level filtering and it all adds up to a nicely segregated database of online activity all packaged up and ready to send to the government.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now it all makes sense....

The States have the NSA to check on what people have been doing, and the UK with GCHQ and IWF work on an easy-to-maintain web filter. I can see how they make a good team together. Child pornography now, violence tomorrow, then whatever they like or don't like. And as law enforcement is no longer required, apparently, they will go ahead without asking anybody.

Don't you dare bypass it by any means! You'll only improve your ranking on NSA's suspects lists...

Starting to learn Chinese and Russian now. For whatever it's worth.

(Don't get me wrong. Child pornography is an issue and those involved in it should burn in hell! A web filter doesn't help at all, though. That's the job of police and courts; but looking at very recent rulings against serial child abusers I doubt that they even understand the problem.)

[John Smith 19]

Maria Miller says she's a mother and wants "every one's children to be safe online"

Why don't you f**king try parenting your children instead.

[Anonymous Coward]

If people are really worried about their children seeing porn or pedophiles/child molesters then maybe they shouldn't have any kids.

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it done?

I suspect that these "experts" will just be corrupting the DNS record. In which case, you just need to find an alternative DNS provider. Just be aware that if they are in the USA, you can get spied on by them instead!

[IT Hack]

Eeeeek!

REDS UNDER THE BED!

Fucks sake.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone would think

that before the internet, there were no terrorists or paedophiles...

[richardparker07]

UK Minister Claims Progress , What If these ISP make More tighten

UK Minister claimed the progress In tackling with Child Pornography, after major ISP like virgin talk talk have come with huge fund in support for the new proactive approach and to assist in dealing with the online creation and distribution of child sexual abuse material.

http://media.cbronline.com/news/uk-minister-claims-progress-in-tackling-online-child-pornography-190613

What If these ISP make More tighten

Well it's not gonna affect the internet, but it might affect how we access the internet. Already, ISPs are required to store everything we do for 7 years. Their filtering system for CP sites is already overbearing, and if they expand its reach much more it'll start impacting sites people use on quite a regular basis (search engines, social networks, etc)