Home Office clueless over its own anti-child porn measures

Posted on 17 Mar 2009 at 18:28, by Dawinderpal Sahota

The Home Office has admitted that it has been trying to force ISPs to subscribe to the Internet Watch Foundation's (IWF) blacklist, even though it doesn't know what the organisation does.

Speaking exclusively to Computer Shopper, a Home Office spokesman thought the IWF deletes illegal websites and doesn't look at the content they rate.

He also revealed that the government's measures to ensure that the IWF is blocking illegal content only consist of "meeting with the IWF fairly regularly for updates on how they're doing."

We asked if the IWF needed a licence in order to view and rate content legally, but the Home Office spokesman didn't realise that's what the organisation does. When we explained that the IWF has to view the content in order to rate it, he told us that "it's not illegal to delete such images, it's illegal to actually possess it, produce it or reproduce it - it's not illegal to delete it, which is what they [the IWF] do."

In fact, the IWF doesn't delete images. It is a self-appointed, self-regulated internet watchdog, which views user-submitted content and compiles a list of websites that it deems to contain illegal images. Some ISPs subscribe to this list and block access to the sites.

Despite being clueless about how the IWF rates content, the Home Office admitted it was forcing ISPs to sign up to the organisation's blacklist in order to meet targets it set itself.

In 2006, the Home Office minister Alan Campbell pledged that all ISPs will block access to child abuse websites by the end of 2007. Currently, ISPs covering 95 per cent of broadband users tackle the issue by subscribing to the IWF's blacklist.

The remaining five per cent of users are down to ISPs that refuse to sign up to the IWF's list. One of these ISPs, Zen Internet, has said that it has "concerns over its effectiveness".

When we asked the Home Office whether ISPs have an alternative to using the IWF's blacklist, the spokesman told us that there is none. He admitted that the government is telling ISPs that they have to block all child pornography websites and that they have to do it using the IWF's blacklist.

View the full transcript of our interview with the Home Office about tackling child abuse online.