Why did the Today Programme invite Claire Perry MP to debate website blocking this morning? Aside from giving Perry an impression of authority on the internet that she does not command — the peg for the discussion was the high court ruling that ISPs block the music file-sharing site Pirate Bay. Perry is leading a campaign to make internet service providers (ISPs) responsible for access to pornography online. While both issues concern ISPs’ role as gatekeepers, conflating pornography (legal) with copyright infringement (illegal) dangerously muddies the argument – a point that the Internet Service Provider Association’s Nicholas Lansman attempted to make before being defeated by John Humphrys’ bluster.
Despite the government making it clear that it is not interested in introducing default filtering for pornographic websites in a response to Index on Censorship and other civil liberties groups in January, Claire Perry remains insistent that this is what is required. Her scaremongering report (“the whole history of human sexual perversion is only a few clicks away”) calls for network level “opt-in” to force ISPs to provide customers with a “clean internet feed as standard”. In other words, Perry would like the internet to be censored for everyone; in order to access “adult content”, customers would have to choose to receive it.
The first problem with this is – who decides what is adult content? The classification of pornography is a subjective issue: one man’s work of art is another man’s history of sexual perversion. All filtering systems will censor some aspects of culture as pornography. The researcher Seth Finkelstein was the first to decrypt blacklists of pornographic material back in 1995 and found that feminism, gay rights and sex education were all swept up by puritanical filters. It is not possible to filter pornography without interfering with our right to freedom of expression and our access to information.
The second problem is – that Perry and her supporters are calling for the censorship of legal material. This would set a dangerous precedent for censoring any material that we might personally find distasteful or offensive.
And the third problem is an issue that faces the high court as much as any parent who would like the responsibility for monitoring their children’s access to content taken out of their hands. If, as Perry’s report claims, children are now more “tech savvy” than their parents and know how to circumvent device filters, then they will find their way past network filters too.
The blunt tool of high court injunctions and crude filters can only offer limited protection – whether for copyright holders or anxious parents – at the high price of our access to information .
Jordanian internet users have reacted angrily to government encroachment on the freedom of the internet. Flying in the face of the reputation of Jordan as a Middle East haven for technology and relative liberalism, the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology has stated its support for a blanket ban on online pornographic material, an easy jumping-off point for wider controls.
The Ministry was responding to a petition set up through the social-networking site Facebook to censor x-rated material in order to “bring an end to sexual crimes such as incest, rape and adultery”. Leaving aside the dangers of writing policy based on Facebook petitions, the majority state-owned Jordan Times named the petition, which garnered 29,459 “likes”, as the main driver behind government support.
The petition is at the very least convenient for the government: the article, extolling this movement of “people power” glossed over the use of actual sources, hinting at the possibility that the petition could originate from within the government itself. The same article also quotes Alexa, “an Internet metrics company”, as providing the figure that “between 77 per cent and 80 per cent of Internet users in Jordan access pornographic sites”.
The Ministry of ICT will now begin consulting with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as to how to filter and block the sites, although the obliging “anonymous source” at the Jordan Times told the paper that “at this stage, there are no financial allocations for a project to block these sites.”
Jordanian bloggers have responded furiously to the implication that the government will now either use part of its’ taxpayer-funded research and development budget to pay for this move, or that the cost of censoring will be built into ISP costs. Blogger Roba Abassi cited the eventual aim of having “Internet Service Providers…provide a restricted Internet ‘by default’ and for those who want an unrestricted internet to ask for that and pay extra.”
Jordan was recently ranked at 128 out of 179 countries in Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) annual ranking of freedom of expression. A previous attempt to sanction and “regulate” online content was eventually quashed in 2010 after a widespread outcry: potential penalties ranged from fines to forced labour for posting material online that violated vaguely defined rules of “public decency” or “national security”. It seems that with the first attempt to control the internet directly by state having failed, the Jordanian government is now finding more insidious ways to pressure private companies to do their dirty work for them, citing “public interest” as their motivation.
Online payment service PayPal have backtracked on a policy against processing sales of e-books containing themes of rape, bestiality or incest. Protests from authors and anti-censorship activist groups, including Index on Censorship, led to a revision of their policy, which will now focus on e-books that contain potentially illegal images, not e-books that are limited to just text. Spokesman Anuj Nayar said the service will still refuse to process payments for text-only e-books containing child pornography themes. Nayar added that the revised policy will focus on individual books, rather than entire classes of books.
The fall of the regime of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali has allowed internet users in Tunisia to enjoy a period of unfettered web access after the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI) turned off its censorship machines. Now the internet censorship debate has surfaced again.
In May last year a Tunisian court ordered the ATI to block X-rated websites following a complaint lodged by a group of lawyers who argue that pornography violates Islamic values and presents a threat to children surfing the web. This case initiated a debate about “red lines” and internet freedom.
After losing an appeal on 15 August 2011, the ATI took the case higher to the Court of Cassation, claiming that “the filtering of pornographic websites listed by Smart Filter could not be carried out for the five internet service providers.” A verdict is due in the next few days. If the court orders the agency to reinstate filtering, the agency will find itself forced to perform a censorship role it no longer wants to play.
Over the past year, the ATI has attempted to redefine its function. Moez Chakchou, the ATI’s CEO, describes its role post revolution as “guaranteeing net neutrality, and when we say net neutrality we should not care about the content”.
The ATI chief told Index: “From a judicial point of view, I am obliged to filter, and I do respect these verdicts even though they contradict my personal beliefs.”
Earlier this year, Tunisia’s Interim President Moncef Marzouki, raised the issue of “red lines” in an interview. ‘’There should be red lines limiting freedom of speech…these red lines should not be used as pretexts for censorship…the lines should be debated and accepted by all’’ he said.
Free speech activists believe that filtering pornography or creating “red lines” could pave the way for a comeback of censorship.
“We are fighting against a ghost of the past… It would be regrettable to resort to operations of anonymous (OpTunisia) or to use proxies again just like under the Ben Ali regime”, said Dhouha Ben Youssef, a blogger.
“I believe that the first important step to take in order to prevent the comeback of censorship is adding the word “internet” in the new constitution…because I don’t consider internet as means of communication only, but as means of expression”, she added.
Tunisia does not currently have legislation covering internet censorship, the ATi Chief warns that:
“If the state wants to draw red lines for net freedom, it should first establish an independent authority to regulate the internet. Internet legislation should not be drafted without a regulation authority that creates balance, between public and individual interests”
