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Censorship United Kingdom Communications EU Government Network Networking The Internet News Technology Your Rights Online

UK Risks Over-Blocking Content Online, Warns Human Rights Watchdog (arstechnica.co.uk) 68

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The UK is at serious risk of over-blocking web content, the Council of Europe has warned in a scathing report. "Governments have an obligation to combat the promotion of terrorism, child abuse material, hate speech and other illegal content online. However, I am concerned that some states are not clearly defining what constitutes illegal content. Decisions are often delegated to authorities who are given a wide margin for interpreting content, potentially to the detriment of freedom of expression," said CoE secretary general, Thorbjorn Jagland. The 32-page report also concluded that some British practices may be in breach of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, and that the current framework seems more concerned with protecting ISPs from liability, than the general public's freedom of expression. The study singled out the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) whose job it is to police online child abuse material. The IWF has existed in some form since 1996, but is not a government body or law enforcement agency, but instead, a registered charity, funded by the European Union and the wider online industry, including big players such as Google and Microsoft. Although the report noted that "the IWF has taken a number of steps to better ensure that its operations are transparent and proportionate, in the absence of legal safeguards against over-blocking, the threshold for the kind of material which may be subjected to removal is therefore much lower than that which might otherwise be set out in law."
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UK Risks Over-Blocking Content Online, Warns Human Rights Watchdog

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  • Any blocking is over blocking.

    • Re:Nah (Score:5, Insightful)

      by zrobotics ( 760688 ) on Saturday June 04, 2016 @02:43AM (#52247463)
      Well, I appreciate the fact that I'm unlikely to run into child porn with a casual Google search. I think that the Web will migrate to separate levels: Facebook crap for unimportant things and tor for anything important. The way I see it, increased restrictions on something the average person views as a free-for-all will only encourage end-to-end encryption. The tighter they grip, the more subnets slip through their fingers. Bastards like child pornographers may escape the net, but there is always a price to be paid for civil liberties. Increasing the restrictions on online expression is a little late; the cat is out of the bag. However, the average person isn't prepared for civil disobedience, so the UK will likely be successful here. Sad.
      • Re:Nah (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Saturday June 04, 2016 @06:04AM (#52247701)

        When have you ever run into child porn? I've been moving through the various levels of the internet now for about 20 years, and I cannot say that I ever stumbled upon anything that could remotely be considered child porn. Maybe because they do not WANT to be stumbled upon? If you did something illegal, would you want someone "innocent" to just happen to stumble in? That has little if anything to do with some entity blocking content.

        • There are an awful lot of amateur images out there of girls that very likely could be under 18, which is technically child porn although not of the elementary school age child porn variety.

          I don't know how you would block for it, because the age is entirely ambiguous.

        • by castus ( 4552487 )
          I must have been about 12 when I first stubled upon child porn. It definitely felt wrong, but I don't think it was emotionally scarring. I still remember it though (down to the domain in the filename).
          You quickly learn not to touch the stove after getting burnt.
          • by Anonymous Coward

            If you were 12 it wasn't real child porn then was it? To you it was just porn. They were your age.

            • In out society, I wouldn't consider it far fetched that a 12 year old rubbing one out thinking of a classmate is considered a pedo.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Due to spying and mass invasion of privacy, I and many of my friends already use a VPN for daily browsing. Such VPNs rarely bother with the IWF blacklist, and of course ignore court mandated blocking of torrent/streaming sites by the BPI and co. because the orders don't apply to them.

        I'd be happy to have certain stuff, like child pornography, blocked, if there was accountability and transparency. Clearly that is going to be extremely difficult when dealing with illegal imagery. So, the only reasonable way t

      • I don't object to blocking all child porn (that involves actual children) because its production involves the commission of a crime. I am also happy with systems that prevent people from inadvertently stumbling on content that a significant number of people would find offensive, or that is inappropriate for children.

        Where I do not agree with current policies is in blocking any political speech. I don't care if that speech encourages jihad, racism, etc. There have been too many cases in history where topic

        • A lot of social revolutions that are now acknowledged to be great advancements in society had their roots in direct illegal actions.

          Would Rosa Parks have sat in the front of the bus without supporters calling on her to violate the law?

    • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 04, 2016 @02:58AM (#52247479)

      ... Any blocking is over blocking ...

      Nope, you can't be more wrong !!

      When China blocks their internet it is known as Censorship but when it is England, or France, or any of the Western so-called 'democracies' the Net-blockage is called 'protection'

    • by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      We live in a Max Headroom [maxheadroom.com] world already, so I'm not even surprised.

  • by Shadow of Eternity ( 795165 ) on Saturday June 04, 2016 @02:11AM (#52247399)

    Governments know they can't ever hope to effectively block all of those things. They also know they can very effectively use them as an excuse to block things that are politically inconvenient.

  • Classic PR trick (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "Governments have an obligation to combat the promotion of terrorism, child abuse material, hate speech and other illegal content online. However..."

    No they don't. This is a classic fake "opponent" trick, who "opposes" while actually setting the baseline of an argument. In this case setting a bunch of things Govenments are OBLIGATED to censor. And that baseline is so broad they didn't even enumerate it: "other illegal content".

    They HAVE an obligation to permit free speech. Everything below that is a BAD thi

    • Why do you get to decide what governments are obligated to do? If I say they have an obligation to eliminate cats does that make it true?

      It's up their constituents to decide. Different people have different priorities to you. Get over it.

      • They should eliminate cats. They carry toxoplasma gondii, a rather nasty parasite that easily infects humans and does bad things to the brain. Subtle bad things, usually too slight to notice, but enough to have influence on a population level - infection is a risk factor for suicide.

    • by Calydor ( 739835 )

      Not necessarily.

      Governments have an obligation to keep their citizens safe AS WELL as protecting free speech. It becomes a very difficult balancing act when you look at things like whether to permit or block encouragements to go bomb the local town hall.

      Are governments doing the right thing all the time? Of course they aren't. They never will, they can't - they are ultimately made up of humans and humans are prone to make mistakes. But would you rather have a government that learns about plans to bomb half

      • Re:Classic PR trick (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Saturday June 04, 2016 @06:57AM (#52247805) Homepage

        Governments have an obligation to keep their citizens safe AS WELL as protecting free speech. (...) But would you rather have a government that learns about plans to bomb half the country and go "Meh, better not stop them from doing that, they have a right to say they're going to."?

        This is the position of Bush and the NSA, either you support us or you support the terrorists. No, the government has no obligation to keep their citizens safe because that would imply that every time a crime is committed the government has failed. If I walk out the door and punch the nearest person I see, that's a failure. If I find a rock and throw it through a window, that's a failure. Sure I expect crime to be investigated, prosecuted and the guilty convicted but pretending the government could or should have the power to prevent all crime is folly. In that case, we'd all be locked in padded rooms.

        In fact, the consequences of even trying are so wide open for abuse that they in the Bill of Rights made an explicit amendment so the government can't just search through anything they want for no reason, like opening all the letters or in modern day terms listening in to all the phone calls. But in a beautiful end-run around the constitution they've found that if you run a secret program nobody knows their rights are being violated and if you're exposed you can use national security to prevent any evidence from seeing the light of day. So with no standing and no evidence, the cases will be dismissed.

        Snowden, Facebook, "the Cloud", Windows 10... it's pretty clear the frog is already cooked and couldn't jump out if it wanted to. Unless you want to be a modern-day Amish stuck in the 20th century your life will be tracked and monitored. Last century we saw great advances in democracy and freedom, the last decade has been ambivalent with the Democracy index [wikipedia.org] flat. The way technology is going, I expect this to be the century of the authoritarian regimes. All this massive surveillance has given governments the power to stomp out any resistance in its infancy.

        • Yeah, this is a late reply.
          I looked at the Wiki page and the "index", ohh scare quotes, isn't really useful at all.
          It doesn't list like 30 countries, including Somalia.
          It also even mentions on it's 'methodology' section many of the problems.

          I noticed your frog part.
          Don't insult frogs, they aren't as bad as people.
          They actually will jump out at some temperature, unlike humans who wouldn't and do agree with the analogy.

  • but we saw clear signs back in 2013, as reported here: http://bsdly.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-uk-porn-filter-blocks-kids-access.html (also slashdotted at the time, I think. Running a blacklist requires quite some care, and even transparency. Unfortunately at least the transparency part is sometimes sadly lacking. And yes, in other columns I have talked at length about these concerns (just follow the link, then browse).

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday June 04, 2016 @05:27AM (#52247675)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • The UK didn't warn anyone!
  • I can certainly confirm this. I activated sky broadband shield, in the hope of blocking porn (kids using internet). A few weeks later I followed a link from slashdot to some "climate change is bunk" website, only to have it blocked as "hate speech". Thanks big brother.

    • But you actually had to turn it on. The way Slashdotters are commenting you'd think it was something which you could do nothing about but that is not the case. New subscribers are taken to a page when they first connect where they can disable it. That was my experience on both BT and Sky, the country's two largest ISPs. Pretty much all ISPs other than the top 5-10 don't implement any filtering of any kind.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • This is the sort of thing that Europe does right. The IWF's reaction is interesting. There is the first, knee-jerk "Nonsense! Britain has the finest tradition of free speech in the world!" speech. This is followed by a gradual retraction, and policy change. Nothing dramatic, but enough to do the job.

    Some say the UK should get out of Europe for the sake of the economy. There are people who could make savings if we did not have Europe's about laws, anti-pollution regulations, employment law, human rights r

    • by jez9999 ( 618189 )

      Does right? Just the other day the EU teamed up with Twitter, Google, and Facebook to ban "illegal" hate speech online. They have an appalling disregard for people's free speech.

  • Calling the Council of Europe a Human Right Watchdog sounds odd

    The later term is usually used for Non Governmental Organizations, and Council of Europe is an International Organization, which stems from an international treaty the UK has signed.

    That makes me wonder whether brexit is only about exiting European Union, or if Council of Europe and its Europe Human Rights Court is also in the balance.

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