The Kiddy Porn Angle

Maybe this is what whatzisname over at the Post meant when he was blathering on about shutting down the Internet:

Canada's biggest Internet service providers have agreed to block hundreds of offending websites in an effort to stamp out child pornography.

Telecom companies such as Bell Canada, Rogers, Shaw, SaskTel, Telus, Videotron and MTS Allstream are partnering with Cybertip.ca to launch "Project Cleanfeed Canada" that will block between 500 and 800 offending websites.

Cybertip.ca, a national child sexual exploitation hotline, will provide the names of sites to be blocked. The hotline relies mostly on tips from the public.


The list of websites will be updated daily and will prevent both intentional and accidental viewing of the sites, according to Lianna McDonald, executive director of Cybertip.ca.

Details of how the automated technical system will work and help filter the sites can't be described for security reasons.

This bothers me. Not the "anti-kiddy porn" aspect, which I imagine most non-NAMBLA types would support, but the underlying philosophy. Canada has had, in its past, some rather draconian laws about erotica; booksellers in Toronto who specialize in the gay market still complain about their shipments being interdicted at the border by over-enthusiastic Moral Guardians. The Internet has been a welcome countering influence to that kind of nonsense, yet I can definitely see it being the next direction that such things go in.

(Not that the US is that much different, as this comparative piece shows, although the US focuses more on prosecution.)

My real concern, though, is that this could extend beyond the boundaries of sexuality. Take the infamous fight between McDonalds and protestors, as seen in this excerpt from No Logo. McDonalds attempted to shut down protestors using libel claims, and the whole thing wound up in court. In that particular case, the courts sided with the protesters, but as we've seen numerous times in the past, the courts can make utterly wrongheaded decisions that end up being reversed shortly thereafter by a saner court. The problem, of course, is that trying to shut down free speech like this is difficult-at-best on the Internet, for all those reasons that I'm not going to belabour. That's a strength, not a weakness.

This ruling provides a new avenue for shutting down free speech, by blocking people at the ISP level. Previously ISPs wouldn't really do this; they wanted to be seen as "common carriers", not responsible for what they carry. (Hosting is different, but we're not talking about hosting here). Now, of course, that's pretty much out the window, and ISPs have implicitly claimed responsibility for what they carry and the ability to block it.

Of course, it's unlikely that protester sites would be blocked right now. A clear path from point "A" to point "B" can be laid out, though. It starts with kiddy porn. It then moves to other objectionable kinds of porn- that disturbing "Max Hardcore" degradation stuff, which is (as far as I know) technically illegal in Canada. Having established that blocking has little to do with kiddy porn but the illicit nature of the material, the next target is everybody's favorite whipping boy: the pirates, as the Canadian equivalents of the RIAA and MPAA rush to have all those nasty torrent sites blocked.

(Since you can't block bittorrent traffic nowadays, thanks to the legitimate users, you have to target the sites.)

After that, the "illicit information" angle is clear, and the blocking extends to both "hate sites" (a favorite target of censor-happy folks, thanks to their odiousness), and then, as night follows day, unacceptably radical political speech, just as soon as the lawsuit hits the air.

Not that any of this is new, of course. This is the reason WHY ISPs want common carrier status, and why it's important for them to have it. The thing is, since child pornography is so terrible, it's easy to lose sight of that in the rush to protect, and soon enough the race is on to block Greenpeace from Canadian ISPs.

The problem, though, is that doing something like this isn't going to prevent child pornography. There's simply no way to block all those sites, and no way to block other channels (like, say, Freenet) which are legally and technically designed to evade such blocking. The only possible way that this can work is exactly what I mentioned earlier- a "whitelist" of sites that you CAN go to, with everything else blocked.

That would be disastrous.

I was right, and still am right, about the pointlessness of a group like the CRTC or FCC (or, for that matter, the cable companies) trying to regulate and filter the Internet as a whole. It's going to screw with fundamental freedoms while only slightly inconveniencing the real bad guys, who should be pursued with tools (like criminal investigation and prosecution of big child porn producers and distributors) far more effective and appropriate to the task.

Apparently, though, that's not going to stop them from trying.