Cameron To Rape Nation.

Today the UK Prime Minister David Cameron has unveiled a range of measures to further restrict the freedom of the Internet. However rather than being honest about what he is doing Cameron is instead trying disguise his actions as a moral crusade to protect the nations children from online pornography particularly child pornography. As you may have guessed by now I am very opposed to these new measures.

Although child pornography is rightly illegal and measures should be taken to stop people producing it and distributing it as with the proposed gun control measures in the US following the Newtown massacre David Cameron's proposals bear little connection to the problem they claim to be solving. For maximum emotional impact Cameron has recruited the parents of April Jones and Tia Sharp who were both abducted and murdered by men who had accessed child pornography online. The argument being that we need to restrict the freedom of the Internet in order to prevent similar such murders. While I have my own opinions about the true motivation behind the murders of both April Jones and Tia Sharp if you take them at face value the April Jones case was an example of a stranger abduction and murder. The number of these taking place in the UK has remained constant at a yearly average of 5 per year every year since the 1970's. As Internet use didn't become widespread until the mid-1990's it is fair to say that online access to child pornography has no impact whatsoever on this type of crime being committed. The Tia Sharp case was an example of abduction by a friend/relative. According to figures from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) this type of crime peaked in 2004/5 at 1035 and has been falling steadily every year since to the point it had nearly halved to 561. Therefore there seems to be absolutely no connection between that type of crime and the availability of child pornography online. Uncomfortably you could actually begin to make the argument that the increased availability of online child pornography has actually reduced the risk of child abduction by giving paedophiles another outlet for their unpleasant compulsions.

The second issue is that even if you disregard the evidence David Cameron's proposals are all aimed at big Internet search engines such as Google and Bing which have very little to do with the distribution of child pornography. Believe it or not firms like Google are not the Internet and aren't even Internet Service Providers (ISP) like Sky broadband, Virgin media, Talk Talk etc. Instead the simply compile a list of what is on the Internet like the index in a book and they most certainly don't list everything that is out there. Along with drug dealing, weapons trafficking and terrorism the majority of online child pornography is distributed through something known as the Dark Web. This operates much more like a fax machine service. That is to say I type in the address of your computer and my computer connects to your computer and we can share information between the two machines. To do this you don't need Google or Bing and you don't even need an ISP like Virgin media. All you need is a computer and a telephone line. Therefore increased restrictions on companies like Google and ISP's will have absolutely no impact on the Dark Web. Of course by the time you've built up the contacts to operate in the Dark Web you will already be very heavily involved in child pornography. There is an argument that peer to peer file sharing sites such as Napster (the original), Bit-Torrent, Pirate Bay, Megaupload etc provide a gateway for people with a cursory interest in child pornography to become involved in the Dark Web. However these sites are already illegal and totally independent of companies like Google. Therefore putting more restrictions on the legal part of the Internet will do nothing to help get these sites that are often based in nations with weak legal systems and frequently change their identity get shut-down.

The main thing that David Cameron wants companies like Google to do is create a blacklist of search terms that will not yield results but while instead get the user reported to the authorities for further investigation. As I had to type the term "Child Rape" into Google in order to find the statistics needed to write this post the first problem this creates should be obvious - It makes it much more difficult for people to access information about the issue. If people are unable to access information about the issue it becomes much more difficult to have an informed discussion about the issue. If we can't have an informed discussion about the issue it becomes much harder to solve the problem. The second problem this blacklist creates is that it adds to the precedent that the government is allowed to dictate what terms people can and can't search for on the Internet. We have already seen this with the government restricting access to websites that promote terrorism therefore it is not hard to imagine us slipping towards a world where you're not allowed to search for terms like "David Cameron and Lynton Crosby."

The final big proposal is to get ISP's to block all websites that contain 'Adult Content' including legal adult pornography along with mainstream age restricted films and music videos. In order to access this type of content the contract holder has to contact the ISP in order to have the block lifted. This actually something I have practical experience of because O2 who provide Internet services to my Blackberry already operate this way.

This first big problem I've encountered is that in order to get the block lifted you need to prove your age using a credit card. I don't have a credit card so I can't get the block lifted. The second major problem is that the block in absolutely no way inhibits my ability to look at pornography because the majority of porn sites aren't registered with the ISP meaning the ISP has no idea they contain pornography. However the block does seriously inhibit my ability to access news and analysis sites like the one my brother writes for because they are registered with the ISP as containing 'Adult Content' such as discussion about child pornography on the Internet. The Femen activists are a particular problem because I can access literally millions of pictures of topless women on my Blackberry but I often can't access new stories about particular topless women who have accosted the Russian President.

The ISP block is also clearly laying the groundwork for the end of net neutrality by allowing ISP's to block access to websites. The next step is that ISP's will block access to websites they don't have an agreement with. So for example if you use Sky Broadband you will only be able to access websites run by Sky or if you use Virgin Media you will only be able to access websites run by Virgin.

Therefore I think the current system whereby parents who rightly want to restrict their children's access to the Internet can opt into a block when they sign up with an ISP is the better solution to the problem.

14:30 on 22/7/13.