Sometime on over the weekend the Internet Watch Foundation decided to add a Wikipedia article to its “blacklist”, which is blocked by ISPs in the UK. the decision was reversed on Tuesday, but has kicked off a bit of discussion on the state of online censorship in Britain.
I’m not particularly fond of the IWF. Not because of their aim to reduce access to child abuse, but because they are unaccountable to the public and have the ability to reduce access to any document online. Frank Fisher summed it up quite nicely in an article in January.
As of December 31 [2007], all UK ISPs duly agreed to adopt the system. You’re now viewing a state-mandated subset of the internet. How do you feel about that? Like to vote against it? You can’t. Like your MP to sit on a committee to oversee implementation? He can’t. Like to know if the Google results you’re seeing are a full representation of Google’s actual results? You can’t. Censorship at this level – above even ISPs, is all but invisible to the end user. It’s a secret that they’re keeping these secrets from you.
I’m still out in Australia so I can only go by reactions on the Internet, but I’m quite pleased with the outcome.
Firstly, I was surprised to see the number of comments suggesting that the poster had no idea that the IWF and “Cleanfeed” even existed. If the exposure this received on television news was anything like the online exposure, hopefully it’ll lead to more people questioning the wisdom of allowing an unaccountable body to control what we can access online.
Second, the censored article was about a 1970’s heavy metal album, and it was unblocked after a few days. If it’s ever discovered that the IWF or the Home Office have added something “important” (politically or otherwise) to the secret list, this leads me to believe there will be an even stronger reaction against them.
The problem though is that the list is secret. We can’t be sure that there aren’t politically sensitive documents on the “blacklist”, and as the system returns a “404 – Page not found” error instead of a “This URL is censored” type message, we can’t be sure that we are being censored at all.
