Internet Watch Foundation
Encyclopedia
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is a non-governmental charitable body
based in the United Kingdom
. It states that its remit is "to minimise the availability of 'potentially criminal' Internet
content, specifically images of child sexual abuse
hosted
anywhere, and criminally obscene adult content in the UK". The IWF clarifies on its website that potentially criminal activity is addressed, as content can be confirmed to be criminal only by a court of law. As part of its function, the IWF says that it it will "supply partners with an accurate and current URL list to enable blocking of child sexual abuse content". It has "an excellent and responsive national Hotline reporting service" for receiving reports from the public. Since 2010 blocking Internet users from accessing the content on this list is mandatory for all UK based ISPs that want to be eligible for contracts with government agencies and other public bodies.
The IWF operates in informal partnership with the police, government, public, and Internet service providers. Originally formed to police suspected child pornography
online, the IWF's remit was later expanded to cover criminally obscene material.
The IWF is an incorporated charity, limited by guarantee, and largely funded by voluntary contributions from UK communications service providers, including ISPs, mobile phone operators, Internet trade associations, search engines, hardware manufacturers, and software providers. It also receives funding from the Association for Payment Clearing Services and the European Union
.
The IWF is governed by a Board of Trustees which consists of an independent chair, six non-industry representatives, and three industry representatives. The Board monitors and reviews IWF's remit, strategy, policy and budget to enable the IWF to achieve its objectives. The IWF operates from offices in Oakington
, near Cambridge
.
told the Internet Service Providers Association
(ISPA) that the content carried by some of the newsgroup
s made available by them was illegal, that they considered the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) involved to be publishers of that material, and that they were therefore breaking the law. In August 1996, Chief Inspector Stephen French, of the Metropolitan Police Clubs & Vice Unit
, sent an open letter to the ISPA, requesting that they ban access to a list of 132 newsgroups, many of which were deemed to contain pornographic images or explicit text.
The list was arranged so that the first section consisted of unambiguously titled paedophile newsgroups, then continued with other kinds of groups which the police wanted to restrict access to, including alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.cheerleaders and alt.binaries.pictures.erotic.centerfolds.
Although this action had taken place without any prior debate in Parliament or elsewhere, the police, who appeared to be doing their best to create and not simply to enforce the law, were not acting entirely on their own initiative. Alan Travis, Home Affairs editor of the newspaper The Guardian
, explained in his book "Bound and Gagged" that Ian Taylor, the Conservative Science and Industry Minister at the time, had underlined an explicit threat to ISPs that if they did not stop carrying the newsgroups in question, the police would act against any company that provided their users with "pornographic or violent material". Taylor went on to make it clear that there would be
calls for legislation to regulate all aspects of the Internet unless service providers were seen to wholeheartedly "responsible self-regulation".
Demon Internet regarded the police request as "unacceptable censorship"; however, its attitude annoyed ISPA chairman Shez Hamill, who said:
Following this, a tabloid-style exposé of ISP Demon Internet appeared in the Observer
newspaper, which alleged that Clive Feather (a director of Demon) "provides paedophiles with access to thousands of photographs of children being sexually abused".
During the summer and autumn of 1996 the UK police made it known that they were planning to raid an ISP with the aim of launching a test case regarding the publication of obscene material over the Internet. The direct result of the campaign of threats and pressure was the establishment of the Internet Watch Foundation (initially known as the Safety Net Foundation) in September 1996.
, and a body called the "Safety Net Foundation" (formed by the Dawe Charitable Trust). This resulted in the "R3 Safety Net Agreement", where "R3" referred to the triple approach of rating, reporting, and responsibility. In September 1996, this agreement was made between the ISPA, LINX
, and the Safety Net Foundation, which was subsequently renamed the Internet Watch Foundation. The agreement set requirements for associated ISPs regarding identifiability and traceability of Internet users; ISPs had to cooperate with the IWF to identify providers of illegal content and facilitate easier traceability.
Demon Internet
was a driving force behind the IWF's creation, and one of its employees, Clive Feather, became the IWF's first chair of the Funding Board and solicitor Mark Stephens
the First Chair of the IWF's Policy Board. The Policy Board developed codes, guidance, operational oversight and a hotline for reporting content.
The Funding Board, made up of industry representatives and Chair of Policy Board, provided the wherewithall for the IWF's day to day activities as set down and required by the Policy Board.
After 3 years of operation, the IWF was reviewed for the DTI and the Home Office by consultants KPMG
and Denton Hall
. Their report was delivered in October 1999 and resulted in a number of changes being made to the role and structure of the organisation, and it was relaunched in early 2000, endorsed by the government and the DTI, which played a "facilitating role in its creation", according to a DTI spokesman.
At the time, Patricia Hewitt
, then Minister for E-Commerce, said: "The Internet Watch Foundation plays a vital role in combating criminal material on the Net." To counter accusations that the IWF was biased in favour of the ISPs, a new independent chairman was appointed, Roger Darlington, former head of research at the Communication Workers Union
.
(meaning that its analysts will not be prosecuted for looking at illegal content in the course of their duties). Reports can be submitted anonymously. According to the IWF MOU "If potentially illegal content is hosted in the UK the IWF will work with the relevant service provider and British police agency to have the content ‘taken down’ and assist as necessary to
have the offender(s) responsible for distributing the offending content detected." They include:
However, almost the whole of the IWF site is concerned with suspected child pornography with little mention of the rest of their remit (racial hatred, and other criminally obscene material). Images judged by the IWF to be child pornography are blocked, whilst other possibly illegal content is reported to the police for further action.
The Government claimed that they would also be handling images of adult "extreme pornography
" which are now illegal for UK citizens to possess as of 26 January 2009. The IWF now includes "extreme pornography" as an example under "criminally obscene content", meaning that they will report material hosted in the UK, or uploaded by a British citizen, but has stated that it has no plans to block any such material, or handle sites hosted outside on the UK.
The IWF states that it works in partnership with UK Government departments such as the Home Office and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform
to influence initiatives and programmes developed to combat online abuse.
They are funded by the European Union and the online industry. This includes Internet service providers, mobile operators and manufacturers, content service providers, telecommunications and filtering companies, search providers and the financial sector as well as blue-chip and other organisations who support the IWF for corporate social responsibility
reasons.
Through their "Hotline" reporting system, the organisation helps ISPs to combat abuse of their services through a "notice and take down" service by alerting them to any potentially illegal content within their remit on their systems and simultaneously invites the police to investigate the publisher.
The IWF has connections with the Virtual Global Taskforce
, the Serious Organised Crime Agency
and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre
.
which in turn forwards it to Interpol
or the relevant foreign police authority. It now works with the Serious Organised Crime Agency
instead. The IWF does not, however, pass on notifications of other types of illegal content hosted outside the UK.
A staff of four police-trained analysts are responsible for this work, and the director of the service has claimed that the analysts are capable of adding an average of 65-80 new URLs to the list each week, and act on reports received from the public rather than pursuing investigative research.
Between 2004 and 2006, BT Group
introduced its Cleanfeed
technology which was then used by 80% of internet service providers. BT spokesman Jon Carter described Cleanfeed's function as "to block access to illegal Web sites that are listed by the Internet Watch Foundation", and described it as essentially a server hosting a filter that checked requested URLs for Web sites on the IWF list, and returning an error message of "Web site not found" for positive matches.
In 2006, Home Office minister Alan Campbell
pledged that all ISPs would block access to child abuse websites by the end of 2007. By the middle of 2006 the government reported that 90% of domestic broadband connections were either currently blocking or had plans to by the end of the year. The target for 100% coverage was set for the end of 2007, however in the middle of 2008 it stood at 95%. In February 2009, the Government said that it is looking at ways to cover the final 5%. In an interview in March 2009, a Home Office spokesperson mistakenly thought that the IWF deleted illegal content, and didn't look at the content they rate.
Although the IWF's blacklist causes content to be censored even if the content has not been found to be illegal by a court of law, IWF Director of Communications Sarah Robertson claimed, on 8 December 2008, that the IWF is opposed to the censorship of legal content. In the case of the IWF's blacklisting of cover art hosted on Wikipedia just a few days prior, she claimed that “The IWF found the image to be illegal”, despite the body not having any legal jurisdiction to do so.
In March 2009 a Home Office spokesperson said that ISPs were being pressured to sign up to the IWF's blacklist in order to block child pornography websites and said that there was no alternative to using the IWF's blacklist. One of the ISPs which refused to subscribe to the blacklist, Zen Internet
, has said that it has "concerns over its effectiveness".
As of 2009, the blacklist was said to contain about 450 URLs. A 2009 study by researcher Richard Clayton at the University of Cambridge
found that about a quarter of them were specific pages on otherwise legitimate free file hosting service
s, among them RapidShare
, Megaupload
, SendSpace
and Zshare.
that it described as "a chilling story detailing each singer's gory death in scenes that could be straight out of a horror movie", characterizing its author as "a vile internet psycho" and "a cyber-sicko". The news story said that The Daily Star had reported the content of the hosting website, "Kristen Archives" (a subsite of the ASSTR archive), to the IWF, and that the IWF had traced the site to the US. It also claimed that Interpol had been notified to help track down the site's operators and the writer of the story. An IWF spokesperson was reported as saying that since the site was hosted in the US, it fell outside the organization's remit, but that they were aware of the site. The spokesperson added that the site also contained "child abuse fantasy stories" and that they had passed on details of it to the British police.
Although the story, entitled "Girls (Scream) Aloud", had been published on a US website, British police carried out the investigation because the alleged author was identified as living in the UK. Although he had submitted the story under a pseudonym, he included an email address which was reportedly traced. Officers from Scotland Yard
’s Obscene Publications Unit decided to take action over the story after consulting the Crown Prosecution Service
(CPS), and on 25 September 2008 it was announced that the author, Darryn Walker, was to be prosecuted for the online publication of material that the police and the CPS believed was obscene. It was the first such prosecution for written material in nearly two decades, and was expected to have a significant impact on the future regulation of the Internet in the UK.
Walker appeared in court on 22 October 2008 to face charges of "publishing an obscene article contrary to Section 2(1) of the Obscene Publications Act 1959
". He was granted unconditional bail, and his case was initially set for trial on 16 March 2009. However, at a directions hearing in January, the defendant made it known that given the seriousness of the case he would be represented by a QC (Queen’s Counsel), following which the Crown Prosecution Service
gave notice of its intention to similarly employ a QC, and the trial was postponed to 29 June 2009. At the trial the defendant was found not guilty and cleared of all charges when the prosecution offered no evidence.
article covering the Scorpions
' 1976 album Virgin Killer
, and an image of its original LP cover art which appeared on that article. Users of some major ISPs, including BT
, Vodafone
, Virgin Media
/Tesco.net
, Be
/O2, EasyNet/UK Online
/Sky Broadband
, PlusNet
, Demon
, and TalkTalk (Opal Telecom), were unable to access the filtered content. Although controversial, the album and image are still available, both through Internet shopping sites and from physical shops. The image had been reported to the IWF by a reader, and the IWF determined that it could be seen as potentially illegal. The IWF estimated the block affected 95% of British residential users. The IWF has since rescinded the block, issuing the following statement:
Additionally, a large number of UK Internet users were unable to edit Wikipedia pages unless registered with Wikipedia. This is reported to be due to the single blacklisted article causing all Wikipedia traffic from ISPs using the system to be routed through a transparent proxy server. Wikipedia distinguishes unregistered users from each other by their IP address, so interpreted all unregistered users from a particular ISP as a single user editing massively from the proxy address, which triggered Wikipedia's anti-abuse mechanism, blocking them.
(Wayback Machine) had been blocked, in spite of the fact that the IWF's policy is to try to only censor the exact webpage in question and not the whole domain. According to IWF chief executive Peter Robbins this happened due to a "technical hitch". Because the Internet Archive's web site contained URLs on the IWF's blacklist, requests sent there from the ISP Demon Internet
carried a particular header, which clashed with the Internet Archive's internal mechanism to convert web links when serving archived versions of web pages. The actual blocked URL which had caused the incident never became publicly known.
website which restricts free-of-charge usage by enforcing a delay of typically 30 minutes between downloads, any attempt to download is interpreted as originating from the ISP's proxy rather than the user. The consequence is that if any user of that ISP has downloaded any file from the site in the last half-hour (which is very likely for a large ISP), the download is not allowed. This is an unintended consequence
of ISP's use of proxy servers, not IWF filtering. File sharing sites distribute files of all types; for example Linux
distribution files, which are very large. The use of proxy servers is also reported to have caused the problem with editing Wikipedia (but not the blocking of the actual offending web page) reported above.
, in which he pointed out that "regulating the worst of the internet" was "not really a charitable purpose", and that the IWF existed mainly to serve the interests of ISPs subscribing to it rather than the public. An IWF spokesperson said that the IWF had attained charitable status in 2004 "in order to subject itself to more robust governance requirements and the higher levels of scrutiny and accountability which charity law, alongside company law, brings with it". The IWF is listed by fakecharities.org, "a directory of those so-called charities that receive substantial funding from either the UK or EU governments". It has also been termed a quango
by critics, implying poor management and lack of accountability.
stated that the incident had raised serious free-speech issues, and that it was alarming that one non-governmental organisation was ultimately acting as the "morality police" for about 95% of UK's Internet users. Frank Fisher of The Guardian
criticized the IWF for secretiveness and lack of legal authority, among other things, and noted that the blacklist could contain anything and that the visitor of a blocked address may not know if their browsing is being censored.
"file not found" errors rather than a more appropriate HTTP 403
"forbidden" message; it should be noted, however, that the exact method of censorship is completely reliant on the implementing ISP; BT, for example, return 404 pages, whereas Demon return a message stating that the page is censored, and why.
Quango
Quango or qango is an acronym used notably in the United Kingdom, Ireland and elsewhere to label an organisation to which government has devolved power...
based in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
. It states that its remit is "to minimise the availability of 'potentially criminal' Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
content, specifically images of child sexual abuse
Child sexual abuse
Child sexual abuse is a form of child abuse in which an adult or older adolescent uses a child for sexual stimulation. Forms of child sexual abuse include asking or pressuring a child to engage in sexual activities , indecent exposure with intent to gratify their own sexual desires or to...
hosted
Internet hosting service
An Internet hosting service is a service that runs Internet servers, allowing organizations and individuals to serve content to the Internet. There are various levels of service and various kinds of services offered....
anywhere, and criminally obscene adult content in the UK". The IWF clarifies on its website that potentially criminal activity is addressed, as content can be confirmed to be criminal only by a court of law. As part of its function, the IWF says that it it will "supply partners with an accurate and current URL list to enable blocking of child sexual abuse content". It has "an excellent and responsive national Hotline reporting service" for receiving reports from the public. Since 2010 blocking Internet users from accessing the content on this list is mandatory for all UK based ISPs that want to be eligible for contracts with government agencies and other public bodies.
The IWF operates in informal partnership with the police, government, public, and Internet service providers. Originally formed to police suspected child pornography
Child pornography
Child pornography refers to images or films and, in some cases, writings depicting sexually explicit activities involving a child...
online, the IWF's remit was later expanded to cover criminally obscene material.
The IWF is an incorporated charity, limited by guarantee, and largely funded by voluntary contributions from UK communications service providers, including ISPs, mobile phone operators, Internet trade associations, search engines, hardware manufacturers, and software providers. It also receives funding from the Association for Payment Clearing Services and the European Union
European Union
The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 independent member states which are located primarily in Europe. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community , formed by six countries in 1958...
.
The IWF is governed by a Board of Trustees which consists of an independent chair, six non-industry representatives, and three industry representatives. The Board monitors and reviews IWF's remit, strategy, policy and budget to enable the IWF to achieve its objectives. The IWF operates from offices in Oakington
Oakington
Oakington is a small village 4 miles north-west of Cambridge in Cambridgeshire in England, and belongs to the administrative district of South Cambridgeshire. The village falls into the parish of Oakington and Westwick.-History:...
, near Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
.
Background
During 1996 the Metropolitan PoliceMetropolitan police
Metropolitan Police is a generic title for the municipal police force for a major metropolitan area, and it may be part of the official title of the force...
told the Internet Service Providers Association
Internet Service Providers Association
The Internet Service Providers Association, or ISPA, is a British body representing providers of Internet Services.-History:ISPA was established in 1995 as the first trade association for ISPs, promoting competition, self-regulation and progress within the Internet industry...
(ISPA) that the content carried by some of the newsgroup
Newsgroup
A usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on...
s made available by them was illegal, that they considered the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) involved to be publishers of that material, and that they were therefore breaking the law. In August 1996, Chief Inspector Stephen French, of the Metropolitan Police Clubs & Vice Unit
Metropolitan Police Clubs & Vice Unit
The Clubs & Vice Unit is an Operational Command Unit of London's Metropolitan Police which provides advice and practical support to other units in the Metropolitan Police around the policing of nightclubs, vice and obscene publications.-History:...
, sent an open letter to the ISPA, requesting that they ban access to a list of 132 newsgroups, many of which were deemed to contain pornographic images or explicit text.
The list was arranged so that the first section consisted of unambiguously titled paedophile newsgroups, then continued with other kinds of groups which the police wanted to restrict access to, including alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.cheerleaders and alt.binaries.pictures.erotic.centerfolds.
Although this action had taken place without any prior debate in Parliament or elsewhere, the police, who appeared to be doing their best to create and not simply to enforce the law, were not acting entirely on their own initiative. Alan Travis, Home Affairs editor of the newspaper The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, explained in his book "Bound and Gagged" that Ian Taylor, the Conservative Science and Industry Minister at the time, had underlined an explicit threat to ISPs that if they did not stop carrying the newsgroups in question, the police would act against any company that provided their users with "pornographic or violent material". Taylor went on to make it clear that there would be
calls for legislation to regulate all aspects of the Internet unless service providers were seen to wholeheartedly "responsible self-regulation".
Demon Internet regarded the police request as "unacceptable censorship"; however, its attitude annoyed ISPA chairman Shez Hamill, who said:
Following this, a tabloid-style exposé of ISP Demon Internet appeared in the Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
newspaper, which alleged that Clive Feather (a director of Demon) "provides paedophiles with access to thousands of photographs of children being sexually abused".
During the summer and autumn of 1996 the UK police made it known that they were planning to raid an ISP with the aim of launching a test case regarding the publication of obscene material over the Internet. The direct result of the campaign of threats and pressure was the establishment of the Internet Watch Foundation (initially known as the Safety Net Foundation) in September 1996.
Foundation of IWF
Facilitated by the Department of Trade & Industry (DTI), discussions were held between certain ISPs, the Metropolitan Police, the Home OfficeHome Office
The Home Office is the United Kingdom government department responsible for immigration control, security, and order. As such it is responsible for the police, UK Border Agency, and the Security Service . It is also in charge of government policy on security-related issues such as drugs,...
, and a body called the "Safety Net Foundation" (formed by the Dawe Charitable Trust). This resulted in the "R3 Safety Net Agreement", where "R3" referred to the triple approach of rating, reporting, and responsibility. In September 1996, this agreement was made between the ISPA, LINX
Linx
Linx AB was a railway company which operated inter-Scandinavian passenger trains between 2001 and 2004. Established as a joint venture between the Norwegian State Railways and the Swedish state-owned SJ, Linx operated the routes from Oslo, Norway, to Stockholm, Sweden, and from Oslo via...
, and the Safety Net Foundation, which was subsequently renamed the Internet Watch Foundation. The agreement set requirements for associated ISPs regarding identifiability and traceability of Internet users; ISPs had to cooperate with the IWF to identify providers of illegal content and facilitate easier traceability.
Demon Internet
Demon Internet
Demon Internet is a British Internet Service Provider. It was one of the UK's earliest ISPs, especially targeting the "dialup" audience. It started on 1 June 1992 from an idea posted on CIX by Cliff Stanford of Demon Systems Ltd. The branch in the Netherlands started in 1996, and was sold to KPN...
was a driving force behind the IWF's creation, and one of its employees, Clive Feather, became the IWF's first chair of the Funding Board and solicitor Mark Stephens
Mark Stephens (solicitor)
Mark Howard Stephens CBE is a British solicitor specialising in media law, intellectual property rights and human rights with the firm Finers Stephens Innocent...
the First Chair of the IWF's Policy Board. The Policy Board developed codes, guidance, operational oversight and a hotline for reporting content.
The Funding Board, made up of industry representatives and Chair of Policy Board, provided the wherewithall for the IWF's day to day activities as set down and required by the Policy Board.
After 3 years of operation, the IWF was reviewed for the DTI and the Home Office by consultants KPMG
KPMG
KPMG is one of the largest professional services networks in the world and one of the Big Four auditors, along with Deloitte, Ernst & Young and PwC. Its global headquarters is located in Amstelveen, Netherlands....
and Denton Hall
Denton Wilde Sapte
Denton Wilde Sapte LLP was an international law firm headquartered in London, United Kingdom. On 26 May 2010, the firm announced that it had reached agreement to merge with the U.S.-based law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal...
. Their report was delivered in October 1999 and resulted in a number of changes being made to the role and structure of the organisation, and it was relaunched in early 2000, endorsed by the government and the DTI, which played a "facilitating role in its creation", according to a DTI spokesman.
At the time, Patricia Hewitt
Patricia Hewitt
Patricia Hope Hewitt is an Australian-born British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament for Leicester West from 1997 until 2010. She served in the Cabinet until 2007, most recently as Health Secretary....
, then Minister for E-Commerce, said: "The Internet Watch Foundation plays a vital role in combating criminal material on the Net." To counter accusations that the IWF was biased in favour of the ISPs, a new independent chairman was appointed, Roger Darlington, former head of research at the Communication Workers Union
Communication Workers Union (UK)
The Communication Workers Union is the main trade union in the United Kingdom for people working for telephone, cable, DSL and postal delivery companies, with 215,000 members....
.
The website
The IWF's website offers a web-based government-endorsed method for reporting suspect online content and remains the only such operation in the United Kingdom. It acts as a Relevant Authority in accordance with the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) concerning Section 46 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003Sexual Offences Act 2003
The Sexual Offences Act 2003 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland that was passed in 2003 and became law on 1 May 2004.It replaced older sexual offences laws with more specific and explicit wording...
(meaning that its analysts will not be prosecuted for looking at illegal content in the course of their duties). Reports can be submitted anonymously. According to the IWF MOU "If potentially illegal content is hosted in the UK the IWF will work with the relevant service provider and British police agency to have the content ‘taken down’ and assist as necessary to
have the offender(s) responsible for distributing the offending content detected." They include:
- Indecent images of under-18sProtection of Children Act 1978The Protection of Children Act 1978 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.The Protection of Children Bill was put before Parliament as a Private Member's Bill by Cyril Townsend in the 1977-1978 session of Parliament....
hosted anywhere in the world; - criminally obsceneObscenityAn obscenity is any statement or act which strongly offends the prevalent morality of the time, is a profanity, or is otherwise taboo, indecent, abhorrent, or disgusting, or is especially inauspicious...
content hosted in the UK, or anywhere in the world if uploaded by a British citizen (under the Obscene Publications Acts); - incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK
However, almost the whole of the IWF site is concerned with suspected child pornography with little mention of the rest of their remit (racial hatred, and other criminally obscene material). Images judged by the IWF to be child pornography are blocked, whilst other possibly illegal content is reported to the police for further action.
The Government claimed that they would also be handling images of adult "extreme pornography
Extreme pornography
Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 is a piece of legislation in the United Kingdom that criminalises possession of what it refers to as "extreme pornographic images". The law was enacted from 26 January 2009...
" which are now illegal for UK citizens to possess as of 26 January 2009. The IWF now includes "extreme pornography" as an example under "criminally obscene content", meaning that they will report material hosted in the UK, or uploaded by a British citizen, but has stated that it has no plans to block any such material, or handle sites hosted outside on the UK.
The IWF states that it works in partnership with UK Government departments such as the Home Office and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform
Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform
The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform was a United Kingdom government department. The department was created on 28 June 2007 on the disbanding of the Department of Trade and Industry , and was itself disbanded on 6 June 2009 on the creation of the Department for Business,...
to influence initiatives and programmes developed to combat online abuse.
They are funded by the European Union and the online industry. This includes Internet service providers, mobile operators and manufacturers, content service providers, telecommunications and filtering companies, search providers and the financial sector as well as blue-chip and other organisations who support the IWF for corporate social responsibility
Corporate social responsibility
Corporate social responsibility is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model...
reasons.
Through their "Hotline" reporting system, the organisation helps ISPs to combat abuse of their services through a "notice and take down" service by alerting them to any potentially illegal content within their remit on their systems and simultaneously invites the police to investigate the publisher.
The IWF has connections with the Virtual Global Taskforce
Virtual Global Taskforce
Virtual Global Taskforce is a group of law enforcement agencies from around the world working together to fight child pornography online. The aim of the VGT is to build an effective, international partnership of law enforcement agencies that helps to protect children from online child abuse.The...
, the Serious Organised Crime Agency
Serious Organised Crime Agency
The Serious Organised Crime Agency is a non-departmental public body of the Government of the United Kingdom under Home Office sponsorship...
and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre
Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre , formed in April 2006, is a UK cross agency and cross business department of the Serious Organised Crime Agency, which is tasked to work both nationally and internationally to bring online child sex offenders, including those involved in the...
.
Management
:- Peter Robbins OBE, QPM was IWF Chief Executive
- Sarah Robertson was IWF Director of Communications
- Fred Langford was IWF Director of Technology and Content
Cross-border aspects
Previously, the IWF passed on notifications of suspected child pornography hosted on non-UK servers to the UK National Criminal Intelligence ServiceNational Criminal Intelligence Service
The National Criminal Intelligence Service was a United Kingdom policing agency set up as a separate body in April 1992 to centralise the gathering and distribution of intelligence on serious and organised criminal matters. NCIS was formed out of the National Drugs Intelligence Unit in the Home...
which in turn forwards it to Interpol
Interpol
Interpol, whose full name is the International Criminal Police Organization – INTERPOL, is an organization facilitating international police cooperation...
or the relevant foreign police authority. It now works with the Serious Organised Crime Agency
Serious Organised Crime Agency
The Serious Organised Crime Agency is a non-departmental public body of the Government of the United Kingdom under Home Office sponsorship...
instead. The IWF does not, however, pass on notifications of other types of illegal content hosted outside the UK.
Blacklist
The IWF compiles and maintains a list of URLs for individual webpages with child sexual abuse content. A whole website will only be included on the list if that whole domain is dedicated to the distribution of child sexual abuse images. It says "every URL on the list depicts indecent images of children, advertisements for or links to such content, on a publicly available website. The list typically contains 500 - 800 URLs at any one time and is updated twice a day to ensure all entries are still live". Offending UK URLs are not listed as they are taken down very quickly; URLs elsewhere are listed only until they are removed. The list is applied by the ISPs of 95% of commercial Internet customers in the UK. According to the IWF website, blocking applies only to potentially criminal URLs related to child sexual abuse content on publicly available websites; the distribution of images through other channels such as peer-to-peer is a matter for "our police partners", and IWF has no plans to extend the type of content included on the list.A staff of four police-trained analysts are responsible for this work, and the director of the service has claimed that the analysts are capable of adding an average of 65-80 new URLs to the list each week, and act on reports received from the public rather than pursuing investigative research.
Between 2004 and 2006, BT Group
BT Group
BT Group plc is a global telecommunications services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is one of the largest telecommunications services companies in the world and has operations in more than 170 countries. Through its BT Global Services division it is a major supplier of...
introduced its Cleanfeed
Cleanfeed (content blocking system)
Cleanfeed is the name given to privately administered ISP level content filtering systems operating in the United Kingdom and Canada. It is also the name of a proposed mandatory Australian ISP level content filtering system which is undergoing testing...
technology which was then used by 80% of internet service providers. BT spokesman Jon Carter described Cleanfeed's function as "to block access to illegal Web sites that are listed by the Internet Watch Foundation", and described it as essentially a server hosting a filter that checked requested URLs for Web sites on the IWF list, and returning an error message of "Web site not found" for positive matches.
In 2006, Home Office minister Alan Campbell
Alan Campbell (politician)
Alan Campbell is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament for Tynemouth since 1997. He served as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office from 2008 until 2010, when the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats came to power...
pledged that all ISPs would block access to child abuse websites by the end of 2007. By the middle of 2006 the government reported that 90% of domestic broadband connections were either currently blocking or had plans to by the end of the year. The target for 100% coverage was set for the end of 2007, however in the middle of 2008 it stood at 95%. In February 2009, the Government said that it is looking at ways to cover the final 5%. In an interview in March 2009, a Home Office spokesperson mistakenly thought that the IWF deleted illegal content, and didn't look at the content they rate.
Although the IWF's blacklist causes content to be censored even if the content has not been found to be illegal by a court of law, IWF Director of Communications Sarah Robertson claimed, on 8 December 2008, that the IWF is opposed to the censorship of legal content. In the case of the IWF's blacklisting of cover art hosted on Wikipedia just a few days prior, she claimed that “The IWF found the image to be illegal”, despite the body not having any legal jurisdiction to do so.
In March 2009 a Home Office spokesperson said that ISPs were being pressured to sign up to the IWF's blacklist in order to block child pornography websites and said that there was no alternative to using the IWF's blacklist. One of the ISPs which refused to subscribe to the blacklist, Zen Internet
Zen Internet
Zen Internet is an Internet Service Provider based in Rochdale in Greater Manchester, England.-History:Founded in 1995 by Managing Director Richard Tang after a now famous drink in the pub, Zen Internet was one of the first Internet Service Providers in the UK. Zen began by providing Internet...
, has said that it has "concerns over its effectiveness".
As of 2009, the blacklist was said to contain about 450 URLs. A 2009 study by researcher Richard Clayton at the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
found that about a quarter of them were specific pages on otherwise legitimate free file hosting service
File hosting service
A file hosting service, online file storage provider, or cyberlocker is an Internet hosting service specifically designed to host user files. Typically they allow HTTP and FTP access. Related services are content-displaying hosting services A file hosting service, online file storage provider, or...
s, among them RapidShare
RapidShare
RapidShare is a one-click hosting service that offers both free and commercial services. Operating from Switzerland, it is financed by the subscriptions of paying users...
, Megaupload
Megaupload
Megaupload is an online Hong Kong-based company established in 2005 for the use of uploading and downloading files. It includes a video browsing section in the site Megavideo, MegaLive, MegaPix and Megabox as well as a sister company called Megaporn which hosts user uploaded pornographic content...
, SendSpace
SendSpace
SendSpace is a file hosting website. It offers temporary file hosting to enable users to send and receive large files that are too big for email attachments...
and Zshare.
Sex stories
On 26 July 2007, UK tabloid newspaper The Daily Star reported that it had discovered an online text story about British (adult) pop group Girls AloudGirls Aloud
Girls Aloud are a British and Irish pop girl group based in London. They were created through the ITV1 talent show Popstars The Rivals in 2002. The group consists of Cheryl Cole , Nadine Coyle, Sarah Harding, Nicola Roberts and Kimberley Walsh. They are signed to Fascination Records, a Polydor...
that it described as "a chilling story detailing each singer's gory death in scenes that could be straight out of a horror movie", characterizing its author as "a vile internet psycho" and "a cyber-sicko". The news story said that The Daily Star had reported the content of the hosting website, "Kristen Archives" (a subsite of the ASSTR archive), to the IWF, and that the IWF had traced the site to the US. It also claimed that Interpol had been notified to help track down the site's operators and the writer of the story. An IWF spokesperson was reported as saying that since the site was hosted in the US, it fell outside the organization's remit, but that they were aware of the site. The spokesperson added that the site also contained "child abuse fantasy stories" and that they had passed on details of it to the British police.
Although the story, entitled "Girls (Scream) Aloud", had been published on a US website, British police carried out the investigation because the alleged author was identified as living in the UK. Although he had submitted the story under a pseudonym, he included an email address which was reportedly traced. Officers from Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK. It derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became...
’s Obscene Publications Unit decided to take action over the story after consulting the Crown Prosecution Service
Crown Prosecution Service
The Crown Prosecution Service, or CPS, is a non-ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom responsible for public prosecutions of people charged with criminal offences in England and Wales. Its role is similar to that of the longer-established Crown Office in Scotland, and the...
(CPS), and on 25 September 2008 it was announced that the author, Darryn Walker, was to be prosecuted for the online publication of material that the police and the CPS believed was obscene. It was the first such prosecution for written material in nearly two decades, and was expected to have a significant impact on the future regulation of the Internet in the UK.
Walker appeared in court on 22 October 2008 to face charges of "publishing an obscene article contrary to Section 2(1) of the Obscene Publications Act 1959
Obscene Publications Act 1959
The Obscene Publications Act 1959 is an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom Parliament that significantly reformed the law related to obscenity. Prior to the passage of the Act, the law on publishing obscene materials was governed by the common law case of R v Hicklin, which had no exceptions...
". He was granted unconditional bail, and his case was initially set for trial on 16 March 2009. However, at a directions hearing in January, the defendant made it known that given the seriousness of the case he would be represented by a QC (Queen’s Counsel), following which the Crown Prosecution Service
Crown Prosecution Service
The Crown Prosecution Service, or CPS, is a non-ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom responsible for public prosecutions of people charged with criminal offences in England and Wales. Its role is similar to that of the longer-established Crown Office in Scotland, and the...
gave notice of its intention to similarly employ a QC, and the trial was postponed to 29 June 2009. At the trial the defendant was found not guilty and cleared of all charges when the prosecution offered no evidence.
Wikipedia
On 5 December 2008, the IWF system started blacklisting a WikipediaWikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
article covering the Scorpions
Scorpions (band)
Scorpions are a heavy metal/hard rock band from Hannover, Germany, formed in 1965 by guitarist Rudolf Schenker, who is the band's only constant member. They are known for their 1980s rock anthem "Rock You Like a Hurricane" and many singles, such as "No One Like You", "Send Me an Angel", "Still...
' 1976 album Virgin Killer
Virgin Killer
Virgin Killer is the fourth studio album by the German heavy metal band Scorpions. It was released in 1976 and was the first album of the band to attract attention outside Europe. The title is described as being a reference to time as the killer of innocence. The original cover featured a nude...
, and an image of its original LP cover art which appeared on that article. Users of some major ISPs, including BT
BT Group
BT Group plc is a global telecommunications services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is one of the largest telecommunications services companies in the world and has operations in more than 170 countries. Through its BT Global Services division it is a major supplier of...
, Vodafone
Vodafone
Vodafone Group Plc is a global telecommunications company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the world's largest mobile telecommunications company measured by revenues and the world's second-largest measured by subscribers , with around 341 million proportionate subscribers as of...
, Virgin Media
Virgin Media
Virgin Media Inc. is a company which provides fixed and mobile telephone, television and broadband internet services to businesses and consumers in the United Kingdom...
/Tesco.net
Tesco
Tesco plc is a global grocery and general merchandise retailer headquartered in Cheshunt, United Kingdom. It is the third-largest retailer in the world measured by revenues and the second-largest measured by profits...
, Be
Be Unlimited
BE Un Limited is an Internet service provider in the United Kingdom with the trading names "Be There", BE Unlimited or simply BE. It is part of Spanish group Telefónica Europe, who also own O2....
/O2, EasyNet/UK Online
UK Online
UK Online was a consumer Internet service provider that operated within the UK, and began as a dial-up provider in 1994. Network provider Easynet acquired the company in 1996....
/Sky Broadband
Sky Broadband
Sky Broadband is an internet service provider for Sky customers.As of March 2008 Sky claims to have reached 1.428 million customers, and unbundled 1,179 exchanges, covering 70% of the United Kingdom. In October 2007, Sky reached the 1 million mark in terms of customer numbers, and claim to be...
, PlusNet
PlusNet
Plusnet is an Internet Service Provider based in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. Plusnet was floated on the Alternative Investment Market in July 2004, making them a Public limited company . It has been owned since 30 January 2007 by BT Group, but operates as a separate business...
, Demon
Demon Internet
Demon Internet is a British Internet Service Provider. It was one of the UK's earliest ISPs, especially targeting the "dialup" audience. It started on 1 June 1992 from an idea posted on CIX by Cliff Stanford of Demon Systems Ltd. The branch in the Netherlands started in 1996, and was sold to KPN...
, and TalkTalk (Opal Telecom), were unable to access the filtered content. Although controversial, the album and image are still available, both through Internet shopping sites and from physical shops. The image had been reported to the IWF by a reader, and the IWF determined that it could be seen as potentially illegal. The IWF estimated the block affected 95% of British residential users. The IWF has since rescinded the block, issuing the following statement:
Additionally, a large number of UK Internet users were unable to edit Wikipedia pages unless registered with Wikipedia. This is reported to be due to the single blacklisted article causing all Wikipedia traffic from ISPs using the system to be routed through a transparent proxy server. Wikipedia distinguishes unregistered users from each other by their IP address, so interpreted all unregistered users from a particular ISP as a single user editing massively from the proxy address, which triggered Wikipedia's anti-abuse mechanism, blocking them.
Wayback Machine
On 14 January 2009 some UK users reported that all of the 85 billion pages of the Internet ArchiveInternet Archive
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
(Wayback Machine) had been blocked, in spite of the fact that the IWF's policy is to try to only censor the exact webpage in question and not the whole domain. According to IWF chief executive Peter Robbins this happened due to a "technical hitch". Because the Internet Archive's web site contained URLs on the IWF's blacklist, requests sent there from the ISP Demon Internet
Demon Internet
Demon Internet is a British Internet Service Provider. It was one of the UK's earliest ISPs, especially targeting the "dialup" audience. It started on 1 June 1992 from an idea posted on CIX by Cliff Stanford of Demon Systems Ltd. The branch in the Netherlands started in 1996, and was sold to KPN...
carried a particular header, which clashed with the Internet Archive's internal mechanism to convert web links when serving archived versions of web pages. The actual blocked URL which had caused the incident never became publicly known.
Of proxy server used by ISPs
Many ISPs implement IWF filtering by using a transparent proxy server of their own, unconnected with IWF. If a request is for a page hosted by a server used also to host a page on the IWF list, the request is diverted to a proxy server. The server itself is not listed, the problem is due to requesting a page from a server which also hosts a listed page. This has the unintended side effect, quite independent of IWF filtering, of appearing to websites connected to as originating from the proxy IP instead of the user's real IP. Some sites detect the user's IP and adjust their behaviour accordingly. For example, if trying to download files from a file distributionFile sharing
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multimedia , documents, or electronic books. It may be implemented through a variety of ways...
website which restricts free-of-charge usage by enforcing a delay of typically 30 minutes between downloads, any attempt to download is interpreted as originating from the ISP's proxy rather than the user. The consequence is that if any user of that ISP has downloaded any file from the site in the last half-hour (which is very likely for a large ISP), the download is not allowed. This is an unintended consequence
Unintended consequence
In the social sciences, unintended consequences are outcomes that are not the outcomes intended by a purposeful action. The concept has long existed but was named and popularised in the 20th century by American sociologist Robert K. Merton...
of ISP's use of proxy servers, not IWF filtering. File sharing sites distribute files of all types; for example Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
distribution files, which are very large. The use of proxy servers is also reported to have caused the problem with editing Wikipedia (but not the blocking of the actual offending web page) reported above.
Ineffectiveness
IWF filtering has been criticised as interfering with legitimate Internet activity while being ineffective against anyone intending to access objectionable content. One carefully argued discussion, while opposing such things as child pornography and terrorism, points out that filtering has side effects, as discussed in this section, and would not stop access to material such as child porn as it would not stop email, ftp, https, p2p, usenet, irc, or many other ways to access the same content. As there are simple encryptions systems, it never can stop it - at best it just drives it underground and harder to assess and track.Charity status
In February 2009 a Yorkshire-based software developer lodged a formal complaint regarding the IWF status as a charity with the Charity CommissionCharity Commission
The Charity Commission for England and Wales is the non-ministerial government department that regulates registered charities in England and Wales....
, in which he pointed out that "regulating the worst of the internet" was "not really a charitable purpose", and that the IWF existed mainly to serve the interests of ISPs subscribing to it rather than the public. An IWF spokesperson said that the IWF had attained charitable status in 2004 "in order to subject itself to more robust governance requirements and the higher levels of scrutiny and accountability which charity law, alongside company law, brings with it". The IWF is listed by fakecharities.org, "a directory of those so-called charities that receive substantial funding from either the UK or EU governments". It has also been termed a quango
Quango
Quango or qango is an acronym used notably in the United Kingdom, Ireland and elsewhere to label an organisation to which government has devolved power...
by critics, implying poor management and lack of accountability.
False positives
Following the IWF's blacklisting of the Wikipedia article, the organisation's operating habits came under scrutiny. J.R. Raphael of PC WorldPC World (magazine)
PC World is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal-technology products and services...
stated that the incident had raised serious free-speech issues, and that it was alarming that one non-governmental organisation was ultimately acting as the "morality police" for about 95% of UK's Internet users. Frank Fisher of The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
criticized the IWF for secretiveness and lack of legal authority, among other things, and noted that the blacklist could contain anything and that the visitor of a blocked address may not know if their browsing is being censored.
Forced adoption
The government believes that a self-regulatory system is the best solution, and the Metropolitan Police also believe that working with ISPs, rather than trying to force them via legislation, is the way forward. The IWF has a blacklist of URLs which is available to ISPs, but ISPs are not forced to subscribe to it. However, ISPs may feel inclined or even forced to join (and contribute) to the IWF's activities as a failure to do so may harm their reputation as responsible providers. Subscribing to the IWF may also be seen as a marketing tool by ISPs.Legality
As a "self-appointed, self-regulated internet watchdog, which views user-submitted content and compiles a list of websites that it deems to contain illegal images" there have been questions raised regarding the legality of their viewing content that would normally constitute a criminal offense.Secrecy
The IWF has been criticized for blacklisting legal content and for not telling websites that they are being blocked and also for not making their blocked website list public.Technical issues
In addition to introducing performance problems, the blacklisting of sites may be concealed by generic HTTP 404HTTP 404
The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested. A 404 error should not be confused with "server not found" or similar errors, in which a connection to the...
"file not found" errors rather than a more appropriate HTTP 403
HTTP 403
In the HTTP protocol used on the World Wide Web, 403 Forbidden is an HTTP status code returned by a web server when a user requests a web page or media that the server does not allow them to. In other words, the server can be reached, but the server declined to allow access to the page. This...
"forbidden" message; it should be noted, however, that the exact method of censorship is completely reliant on the implementing ISP; BT, for example, return 404 pages, whereas Demon return a message stating that the page is censored, and why.
See also
- CleanfeedCleanfeed (content blocking system)Cleanfeed is the name given to privately administered ISP level content filtering systems operating in the United Kingdom and Canada. It is also the name of a proposed mandatory Australian ISP level content filtering system which is undergoing testing...
- Graham CouttsGraham CouttsGraham Coutts is the man convicted of murdering school teacher Jane Longhurst on 14 March 2003. At the time, he was a guitarist and part-time salesman living in Brighton, UK. Coutts claimed that Longhurst had died accidentally during consensual erotic asphyxiation, although the prosecution...
- Internet censorship in the United KingdomInternet censorship in the United KingdomInternet censorship in the United Kingdom takes various forms, including blocking access to sites, and laws that criminalise publication or possession of certain material, particularly child pornography, within the United Kingdom.The U.K...
- NSPCCNSPCCThe National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children is a United Kingdom charity campaigning and working in child protection.-History:...
- QuangoQuangoQuango or qango is an acronym used notably in the United Kingdom, Ireland and elsewhere to label an organisation to which government has devolved power...
- Virtual Global TaskforceVirtual Global TaskforceVirtual Global Taskforce is a group of law enforcement agencies from around the world working together to fight child pornography online. The aim of the VGT is to build an effective, international partnership of law enforcement agencies that helps to protect children from online child abuse.The...
External links
- Internet Watch Foundation
- List of IWF subscriber ISPs who agree to public listing
- Police advertisements
- IWF Interview, April 2009 In depth interview with Sarah Robertson, IWF Director of Communications
- Chairing the IWF essay by Roger Darlington
- Fakecharities.org IWF listing