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With its newly adopted Communication on a 'comprehensive EU strategy to promote and safeguard the rights of the child', the Commission intends to pursue its global action on children's rights. One may however wonder whether the strategy for fighting child porn on the Internet, which mostly relies on private hotlines, is really efficient and compliant with the rule of law.
These were the main issues raised at the afternoon session of the EC Safer Internet Forum 2006, held in Luxembourg on 21 June, on 'Illegal Content: Blocking access to child sexual abuse images'. Following the invitation of the organizers, Rikke Frank Joergensen (Digital Rights Denmark) and Meryem Marzouki (Imaginons un réseau Internet solidaire, IRIS - France) represented EDRI. Other speakers were two representatives of private hotlines, Helena Karlén (ECPAT Sweden) and Peter Robbins (UK Internet Watch Foundation - IWF) and two representatives of ISPs, Benoît Lavigne (French ISP Association, AFA) and Sabine Frank (German Search Engine Providers, FSM). The discussion was introduced by Ola-Kristian Off (Norwegian lawyer and former ICRA European Director) and moderated by Richard Swetenham (Head of the eContent and Safer Internet Unit, EC DG INFSO).
From the digital civil rights point of view, hotlines run by private organizations, be they ISPs or NGOs, and their cooperation with the police to remove local content or block access to it when hosted on foreign websites, are breaching the rule of law in that the police acts as the judging power and ISPs as the executing power, as Joergensen exemplified with the Danish case. At the EU level, Marzouki showed how freedom of expression and creation, transparency and accountability, as well as the risk of massive over-blocking of legal content are at stake when courts are left outside the process. Other important issues were related to violations of due process and dual criminality rules and, in some cases, to the loss of evidence, which may result in preventing accurate investigations. ISP representatives backed to a large extent these deep concerns, with Lavigne discussing the efficiency of filtering, as well as its side effects mainly in terms of threats to freedom of expression, and Frank insisting on the transparency issue.
Despite all these risks, private hotlines representatives are pushing hard towards generalizing blocking of access, as already practiced on a large scale in 4 European countries. The UK and the 3 Scandinavian countries are using blocking systems like British Telecom 'Cleanfeed' (recently analyzed by Richard Clayton from EDRI member FIPR - UK), or the Swedish company 'Netclean Technologies' products and the blocking system of the Danish Telecom operator TDC. Karlén even proposed to interconnect hotlines all around the world following the SETI@Home project, and to set up an international database of URL blacklists. Showing how IWF is cooperating with other hotlines, ISPs and the police, Robbins said that IWF intends to share its databases with other members of the Inhope network. He also mentioned that IWF is currently sharing its blacklists with its members, while licensing them to non IWF members.
The latter information made Marzouki wonder during the discussion whether these practices could lead on the one hand to commercial business, like we have witnessed content rating bureaus selling services, and on the other hand to a 'least common denominator' strategy to define illegal content throughout the world, and at least in Europe, without any court intervention. Other participants to the Forum took the floor to raise the issue of privacy: when tentative access is made to blocked content, what happens with the personal data of individuals requesting these URLs, some indeed on purpose, but some others only incidentally, without any intention to access child porn content?
Despite the conclusions on the need for more hotline transparency, the Safer Internet Forum 2006 clearly showed that civil liberty organizations must remain very vigilant against the risk of worldwide interconnection of blacklists and massive content blocking, without any sound legal decision.
RAPID: 'Commission launches comprehensive EU strategy to promote and
safeguard the rights of the child' (04.07.06)
http://europa.eu.int/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/06/927
EC Safer Internet Forum 2006 (21.06.06)
http://europa.eu.int/information_society/activities/sip/si_forum/forum...
Rikke Frank Joergensen: 'Blocking access to child pornography. The Danish
Case' (21.06.2006)
http://europa.eu.int/information_society/activities/sip/docs/forum_jun...
Meryem Marzouki: 'Five Little Questions About Blocking Access to Child Porn
Images' (21.06.2006)
http://www-polytic.lip6.fr/article.php3?id_article=144
Richard Clayton: 'Failures in a Hybrid Content Blocking System' (1.06.2005)
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/cleanfeed.pdf
(Contribution by Meryem Marzouki, EDRI-member IRIS)