Abstract
Securing the protection of children cannot be achieved through bad policy. It’s time for politicians to get educated, argues
There is no logical or unavoidable conflict between protecting freedom of speech and the protection of children online. Problems and conflicts arise when politicians respond with knee-jerk reactions to tabloid headlines or apply the policy of ‘let’s do something so we can say we did something’ to address the enormous complexity of the internet. This is irresponsible and potentially dangerous, resulting in policies that fail to protect children and undermine online freedom and rights in very fundamental ways.
The core of the problem is a mixture of two elements: the high priority society gives to the protection of children, which is entirely appropriate, and the constantly evolving nature of the online world. This creates an environment in which society is aware of, but unable to rationally process, ill-defined ‘threats’. The gutter press publishes sensationalist, misleading stories that titillate and horrify; at the same time, politicians, interest groups and industry players are in a position to exploit public fear to push through ill-conceived policies, either as an act of simple populism or driven by more sinister goals. Fear of the unknown has always been a favourite tool for populist politicians.
Web blocking is probably the best example of this. Politicians in various European countries, egged on by child protection groups, have lobbied extensively for blocking legislation aimed specifically at websites that depict child abuse or sexual images of people under 18, or have been accused of this by the police or a recognised organisation like the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation or Germany’s Jugendschutz.net. In several countries, most notably the UK, Denmark and Sweden, internet companies have been persuaded to introduce such blocking ‘voluntarily’, without a democratic process applied to either the policy as a whole or to the specific technologies and blacklists used to carry out the blocking. This sends the bizarre message that child protection is so important that any policy introduced is assumed to be proportionate to the problem it seeks to solve, yet so trivial that no public debate is needed or even permitted. The result is not just bad policies, but bad policies implemented badly.
Europe is losing credibility because ofits blocking policies
The Swedish ‘voluntary’ web blocking system is a perfect example of this. As absurd as it sounds, the purpose of the blocking was never discussed. Blocking is relatively easy to circumvent, so it seems unlikely that the policy was brought in to deal with deliberate access to illegal material pertaining to children. There was no research to suggest that a significant number of people had accidentally accessed websites featuring child abuse, so preventing accidental access appears not to have been the reason either. So what exactly was it for?
The actual implementation offers some hints. Swedish company Telia introduced blocking in 2005 as a result of significant media pressure. During bilateral discussions with my organisation, European Digital Rights, both the Swedish police and internet service providers (ISPs) confirmed that the list of blocked pages is updated on average approximately every 21 days (sometimes more). But recent reports by the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation tell us that such sites remain online for a short period, 12 days on average, and this figure is getting lower all the time. This means that, for approximately half of the time, there are no, or virtually no, live sites at all on the Swedish blocking list. Web blocking for the protection of children is implemented in such an incompetent way that the outcome cannot be the protection of children.
Wikipedia temporarily removed its Russian-language website to demonstrate against new legislation affecting online freedom
Credit: PA/AP
Where is the political outcry over this incompetence? Why have child protection organisations not staged protests? There has been no outcry and there have been no protests. Instead, child protection campaigners and internet providers claimed this ‘success’, added it to their annual reports and promptly forgot about it. The European Home Affairs Commissioner, Swedish Liberal Cecilia Malmström, has voiced no concern about the system’s effectiveness and proposed a directive to make blocking mandatory in all European Union Member States in 2010. Nobody has questioned the effectiveness of the Swedish model, nor have they queried the legitimacy of its legal oversight and framework or its method of measuring proportionality. Ultimately, the proposal was rejected by the European Parliament and Council because no persuasive account was presented demonstrating the effectiveness of the policy in protecting children.
One of the most compelling arguments used to support the Swedish model was that there are 50,000 ‘hits’ every day on the ‘blocking page’, which internet users are presented with when they attempt to access a blocked page. This statistic is quite remarkable and deserves a second look. The system has been in place for six years – and every day during this period, this number has been roughly the same. There are only two possible explanations for this: either there are a huge number of paedophiles who bounce off the blocking page every day before finding sites that are not blocked (which would, of course, mean that the whole system is pointless); or else, unbelievably, every single individual in Sweden either accidentally or intentionally attempts to access child abuse websites twice a year and is prevented from doing so by the system. Both explanations are highly implausible.
Furthermore, it would appear that the statistic has stayed the same even though the number of sites on the blacklist has been more than halved over the past few years. The lack of fluctuation in the number of hits is more likely to be due to the deeply flawed way the Swedish blocking system has been implemented – the ‘statistics’ simply don’t mean anything. It’s also worth adding that the Swedish company Netclean is one of Europe’s leading web blocking technology providers. Could this be the reason the Swedish European Commissioner has promoted web blocking with such zeal?
And yet the Swedish model is now being promoted internationally precisely because of its alleged effectiveness – Commissioner Malmström referred to blocking being ‘an effective way to reduce sexual child abuse across the world’, for example. At a recent international conference in Tokyo on the commercial sexual exploitation of children, co-hosted by the Swedish embassy, the Japan Committee for UNICEF, the Swedish child protection organisation ECPAT, and Yahoo! Japan, senior Swedish representatives, including Queen Silvia and Christian Sjöberg, CEO of filtering company NetClean Technologies Sweden AB, sought to persuade Japan to introduce similar blocking there.
It has now been introduced across EU Member States to cover issues as diverse as gambling and copyright protection. In the case of gambling, blocking has even been extended to websites that are legal in their country of origin – British gambling websites are blocked ‘voluntarily’ by Belgian internet providers, for example. In some EU Member States, ISPs naively believe that, having introduced blocking for one purpose, they would never be asked to block any other kind of content. British ISPs, having originally ‘volunteered’ to block child abuse websites, were ordered to refuse access to copyright infringing websites, before some started taking the law into their own hands and anticipating what they might be asked to block. And Danish ISPs were shocked to see the existence of their child abuse blocking service being used to ‘prove’ that the extension of the system to cover copyright was a proportionate measure. The argument was that, as the system had already been set up, blocking a few extra sites required minimal effort. The result is an ever-increasing list of examples of collateral damage to free speech. Take the example of web blocking in the UK. In May 2008, Yahoo!’s Flickr service was disrupted for nearly a week because ISPs were unable to block one file and so blocked the entire service. In November 2011, the Fileserve service was blocked because one link was thought to lead to child abuse material. In December 2011, Vodafone’s child protection filter blocked retailers’ websites because they sold underwear. And in January 2012, T-Mobile UK, O2 UK and T-Mobile USA blocked torproject.org, a website that supports a technology developed to help activists protect themselves in repressive regimes.
The European approach of implementing simplistic online child protection policy that can also be used – whether deliberately or accidentally – to clamp down on free speech is slowly gaining popularity elsewhere. By adopting seemingly hardline approaches, governments implement policies that appear to have laudable aims but, in reality, create significant dangers for the openness of the internet. In reality, the measures are, at best, superficial, while governments secure more power for themselves without accepting responsibility for how their actions restrict online speech. Whether these policies are originally simply well-intentioned but incompetent, populist or conspiratorial is of little importance. The result is that real child protection is neglected, while fundamental rights continue to be eroded.
Among web and technology experts, Europe is losing credibility at an alarming rate because it has allowed this approach to highjack the agenda. Increasingly, governments around the world that want to restrict internet freedom are paying attention. Recently, the Russian government adopted an amendment to its information law, a change ostensibly to protect children from ‘harmful’ online content. This included the development of a ‘blacklist’ the Russian authorities regarded as dangerous. The proposal is for a unified blacklist to be managed by a nominated government agency, covering issues as diverse as pornography, content promoting drug use, suicide or extremist ideas and content harmful to children, with sites being given 48 hours to remove the content before being blocked. Already, a blog service with almost one million active users has been blocked in parts of Russia – ostensibly because one of the blogs hosted on the site was said to contain illegal material. The blog, incidentally, is critical of the new blocking legislation. The Turkish government is following a similar approach.
For many years, Europe has championed the right to free expression. But now, through its attempts to protect children, it has created an environment where free speech is choked and access to information is severely hampered. Power without responsibility is corrosive and corrupt. In their attempts to protect children, European governments must equip themselves with knowledge, education and effective, well-researched methods for dealing with illegal online content. Without this, fundamental rights will be under threat – and children will not be any safer.