Proposed UK Bill Appears To Improve Access To Child Porn

Legal Issues

from the trying-to-figure-this-out dept

Once again, it looks like politicians are proposing laws based on how they appear, rather than what they’ll actually do. For example, in the UK, one politician is proposing a bill that would force ISPs to declare whether or not they’re blocking certain sites that contain child porn. There are a number of issues here. First, it’s unclear how this does any good in the fight against child porn. If anything, it simply tells potential child porn seekers which ISPs to avoid — in many ways leading to the opposite result of what the law intends to do. It helps them find which ISPs to use. Meanwhile, of course, as an AOL spokesperson says in the story, most ISPs that have filters already advertise it — as it’s a selling point. Why is a law needed to force ISPs to do that? However, much more importantly, this is sweeping the issue under the rug. It’s putting the responsibility on ISPs (and, opens them up to charges of blocking the wrong sites or perfectly innocent sites on the same shared server, as happened in Pennsylvania) rather than those really responsible for the child porn in question. If these companies really can create a valid list of child porn websites — which are obviously illegal — then why don’t they use that list to work with law enforcement to shut the sites down and arrest those responsible, rather than just convincing a few ISPs to block them? Update: Here’s another article that has more on efforts by police in the UK to be allowed to do things like take down child porn and terrorist websites with denial of service attacks — again, opening up questions about how they choose these sites, and what sort of collateral damage it will inflict (especially on shared servers). It seems that, again, this is taking the wrong action. These sites should be used as information sources by the police to catch those responsible. Simply blocking the sites just leads those responsible to set up new sites elsewhere.