Neil Gaiman says “If you accept – and I do – that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don’t say or like or want said.”
Continue reading Thought Crime On The Agenda, Cartoons Are Next For The Censor
It seems that self appointed, unaacountable quango that is the Internet Watch Foundation has decided that the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine – an 85 billion page web history dating back to 1996 – is a hotbed of kiddie porn and has added it to whatever list it declares as “unsuitable and illegal viewing”. Demon Internet (now owned by Thus) is reported as blocking access to the entire site.
If it is trying a damage limitation exercise then it is too late. The IWF’s reputation has been damaged and its methodology, transparency and accountability publicly challenged. That damage still remains. The questions still remain to be answered. That the IWF has recognised that it got this one wrong is a good thing. A pity it has taken a backlash from the internet community as a whole to achieve that. As an organisation involved purely with the internet the IWF could and should have forseen the consequences of their heavy handed approach.
There has been a lot of debate surrounding the decision of the Internet Watch Foundation to censor a Wikipedia article about a Scorpions album from 1976 by putting the address of the page on its blacklist, claiming that the album cover is child pornography.
A number of ISPs use the IWF’s blacklist to block access to known potentially illegal sites which may include child porn. Those ISPs are now reported as preventing their customers from accessing the Wikipedia website.
The Register posted its own report as well as a follow up about online retailers’ efforts to remove the “potentially illegal” (in the words of the IWF) image from their websites. As ever, the comments pages following those articles raise some very valid points.