net.wars

There's a sense in which you haven't really arrived as a skeptic until someone's sued you. I've never had more than a threat, so as founder of The Skeptic, I'm almost a nobody. But by that standard Simon Singh, author with alternative medicine professor Edzard Ernst of the really excellent Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine, has arrived.

I think of Singh as one of the smarter, cooler generation of skeptics, who combine science backgrounds, good writing, and the ability to make their case in the mass media. Along with Ben Goldacre, Singh has proved that I was wrong when I thought, ten years ago, that getting skepticism into the national press on a regular basis was just too unlikely.

It's probably no coincidence that both cover complementary and alternative medicine, one of the biggest consumer issues of our time. We have a government that wants to save money on the health service. We have consumers who believe, after a decade or more of media insistence, that medicine is bad (BSE, childhood vaccinations, mercury fillings) and alternative treatments that defy science (homeopathy, faith healing) are good. We have overworked doctors who barely know their patients and whose understanding of the scientific process is limited. We have patients who expect miraculous cures like the ones they see on the increasingly absurd House. Doctors recommend acupuncture and Prince Charles, possessed of the finest living standards and medical treatment money can buy, promotes everything *else*. And we have medical treatments whose costs spiral every upwards, and constant reports of new medicines that fail their promise in one way or another.

But the trouble with writing for major media in this area is that you run across the litigious, and so has Singh: as Private Eye has apparently reported, he is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association. The original article was published by the Guardian in April; it's been pulled from the site but the BCA's suit has made reposting it a cause celebre. (Have they learned *nothing* about the Net?) This annotated version details the evidence to back Singh's rather critical assessment of chiropractic. And there are many other New Zealand. And people complain about Big Pharma - the people alternative-medicine folks are supposed to be saving us from.

I'm not even sure how much sense it makes as a legal strategy. As the "gimpy" blog's comments point out, most of Singh's criticisms were based on evidence; a few were personal opinion. He mentioned no specific practitioners. Where exactly is the libel? (Non-UK readers may like to glance at the trouble with UK libel laws, recently criticized by the UN as operating against the public interest..

All science requires a certain openness to criticism. The whole basis of the scientific method is that independent researchers should be able to replicate each other's results. You accept a claim on that basis and only that basis - not because someone says it on their Web site and then sues anyone who calls it lacking in evidence. If the BCA has evidence that Singh is wrong, why not publish it? The answer to bad speech, as Mike Godwin, now working at Wikimedia, is so fond of saying, is more speech. Better speech. Or (for people less fond of talking) a dignified silence in the confidence that the evidence you have to offer is beyond argument. But suing people - especially individual authors rather than major media such as national newspapers - smacks of attempted intimidation. Though I couldn't possibly comment.

Ever since science became a big prestige, big money game we've seen angry fights and accusations - consider, for example, the ungracious and inelegant race to the Nobel prize on the part of some early HIV researchers. Scientists are humans, too, with all the ignoble motives that implies.

But many alternative remedies are not backed by scientific evidence, partly because often they are not studied by scientists in any great depth. The question of whether to allocate precious research money and resource to these treatments is controversial. Large pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to do it, for similar reasons to those that led them to research pills to reverse male impotence instead of new antibiotics. Scientists in research areas may prefer to study bigger problems. Medical organizations are cautious. The British Medical Association has long called for complementary therapies to be regulated to the same standards as orthodox medicine or denied NHS funding. As the General Chiropractic Council notes NHS funding is so far not widespread for chiropractic.

If chiropractors want to play with the big boys - the funded treatments, the important cures - they're going to have to take their lumps with the rest of them. And that means subluxing a little backbone and stumping up the evidence, not filing suit.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 5:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is more than ten years since it was possible to express dissent about the rights and wrongs of controlling the material available on the Net without being identified as either protecting child abusers or being one. Even the most radical of civil liberties organisations flinch at the thought of raising a challenge to the Internet Watch Foundation. Last weekend's discovery that the IWF had added a page from Wikipedia to its filtering list was accordingly the best possible thing that could have happened. It is our first chance since 1995 to have a rational debate about whether the IWF is fulfilling successfully the purpose for which it was set up and the near nationwide coverage of BT's Cleanfeed, despite the problems Cambridge researcher Richard Clayton has highlighted (PDF).

The background: the early 1990s was full of media scare stories about the Internet. In 1996, the police circulated a list of 133 Usenet newsgroups they claimed hosted child pornography, and threatened seizures of equipment. The government threatened regulation. And in that very tense climate, Peter Dawe, the founder of Pipex, called a meeting to announce an initiative he had sketched out on the back of an envelope called SafetyNet, aimed at hindering the spread of child pornography over the Internet. He was willing to stump up £500,000 to get it off the ground.

Renamed the IWF, the system still operates largely like he envisioned it would: it operates a hotline to which the public can report the objectionable material they find. If the IWF believes the material is illegal under UK law and it's hosted in the UK, the ISP is advised to remove it and the police are notified. If it's hosted elsewhere, the IWF adds it to the list of addresses that it recommends for blocking. ISPs must pay to join the IWF to subscribe to the list, and the six biggest ISPs, who have 90 to 95 percent of the UK's consumer accounts, all are members. Cleanfeed is BT's implementation of the list. Of course, despite its availability via Google Groups, Usenet hardly matters any more, and ISPs are beginning to drop it quietly from their offerings as a cost with little return.

The IWF's statement when it eventually removed the block is rather entertaining: it says, essentially, "We were right, but we'll remove the block anyway." In other words, the IWF still believes the image is "potentially illegal" - which provides a helpful, previously unavailable, window into their thinking - but it recognises the foolishness of banning a page on the world's fourth biggest Web site, especially given that the same image can be purchased in large, British record shops in situ on the cover of the 32-year-old album for which it was commissioned.

We've also learned that the most thoughtful debate on these issues is actually available on Wikipedia itself, where the presence of the image had been discussed at length from a variety of angles.

At the free speech end of the spectrum, the IWF is an unconscionable form of censorship. It operates a secret blocklist, it does not notify non-UK sites that they are being blocked, and it operates an equally secret appeals process. Some of this is silly. If it's going to exist the blocklist has to be confidential: a list of Internet links is actions, not words and they can be emailed across the world in seconds, and the link targets downloaded in minutes. Plus, it might be committing a crime: under UK law, it is illegal to take, make, distribute, show, or possess indecent images of children; that includes accessing such images.

At the control end of the spectrum, the IWF is probably too limited. There have been calls for it to add hate speech and racial abuse to its mandate, calls that as far as we know it has so far largely resisted. Pornography involving children - or, in the IWF's preferred terminology, "child sexual abuse images" - is the one thing that most people can agree on.

When the furor dies down and people can consider the matter rationally, I think there's no chance that the IWF will be disbanded. The compromise is too convenient for politicians, ISPs, and law enforcement. But some things could usefully change. Here's my laundry list.

First, this is the first mistake that's come to light in the 12 years of the IWF's existence. The way it was caught should concern us: Wikipedia's popularity and technical incompatibilities between the way Wikipedia protects itself from spam edits and the way UK ISPs have implemented the block list. Other false positives may not be so lucky. The IWF has been audited twice in 12 years; this should be done more frequently and the results published.

The IWF board should be rebalanced to include at least one more free speech advocate and a representative of consumer interests. Currently, it is heavily overbalanced in the direction of law enforcement and child protection representatives.

There should be judicial review and/or oversight of the IWF. In other areas of censorship, it's judges who make the call.

The IWF's personnel should have an infusion of common sense.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's one of the curiosities of being a free speech advocate that you find yourself defending people for saying things you'd never say yourself.

I noticed this last week when a friend, after delivering an impassioned defense of the rights of bloggers to blog about the world around them - say, recounting the Nazi costumes people were wearing to the across-the-street neighbor's party last weekened or detailing the purchases your friend made in the drugstore - and then turned around and said she didn't know why she was defending it because she wouldn't actually put things like that in her blog. (Unless, I suppose, her neighbor was John McCain.)

Probably most bloggers have struggled at one point or another with the collision these tell-the-world-your-private-thoughts technologies create between freedom of speech and privacy. Usually, though, invading your own privacy is reasonably safe, even if that invasion takes the form of revealing your innermost fantasies. Yes, there's a lot of personal information in them thar hills, and the enterprising data miner could certainly find out a lot about me by going through my 17-year online history via Google searches and intelligent matching. But that's nothing to the situation Newcastle civil servant Darryn Walker finds himself in after allegedly posting a 12-page kidnap, torture, and murder fantasy about the pop group Girls Aloud.

As unwise postings go, this one sounds like a real winner. It was (reports say) on a porn site; it named a real pop group (making it likely to pop up in searches by the group's fans); and identified as the author was a real, findable person - a civil servant, no less. A member of the public reported the story to the Internet Watch Foundation, who reported it to the police, who arrested Walker under the Obscene Publications Act.

The IWF's mission in life is to get illegal content off the Net. To this end, it operates a public hotline to which anyone can report any material they think might be illegal. The IWF's staff sift through the reports - 31,776 in 2006, the last year their Web site shows statistics for - and determines whether the material is "potentially illegal". If it is, the IWF reports it to the police and also recommends to the many ISPs who subscribe to its service that the material be removed from their servers. The IWF so far has focused on clearly illegal material, largely pornographic images, both photographic and composited, of children. Since 2003, less than 1 percent of illegal images involving children is hosted in the UK.
As a cloistered folksinger I had never heard of the very successful group Girls Aloud; apparently they were created like synthetic gemstones in 2002 by the TV show Popstars: the Rivals. According to their Wikipedia entries, they're aged 22 to 26 - hardly children, no matter how unpleasant it is to be the heroines of such a violent fantasy.

So the case poses the question: is posting such a story illegal? That is, in the words of the Obscene Publications Act, is it likely to "deprave and corrupt"? And does it matter that the site to which it was posted is not based in the UK?

It is now several decades since any text work was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, and much longer since any such prosecution succeeded. The last such court case, the 1976 prosecution against the publishers of Inside Linda Lovelace apparently left the Metropolitan Police believing they couldn't win . In 1977, a committee recommended excluding novels from the Act. Novels, not blog postings.

Succeeding in this case would therefore potentially extend the IWF's - and the Obscene Publications Unit's - remit by creating a new and extremely large class of illegal material. The IWF prefers to use the term "child abuse images" rather than "child pornography"; in the case of actual photographs of real incidents this is clearly correct. The argument for outlawing composited or wholly created images as well as photographs of actual children is that pedophiles can use them to "groom" their targets - that is, to encourage their participation in child abuse by convincing them that these are activities that other children have engaged in and showing them how. Outlawing text descriptions of real events could block child abuse victims from publishing their own personal stories; outlawing fiction, however disgusting seems a wholly ineffectual way of preventing child abuse. Bad things happen to good fictional characters all the time.

So, as a human being I have to say that I not only wouldn't write this piece, I don't even want to have to read it. But as a free speech advocate I also have to say that the money spent tracking down and prosecuting its writer would have been more effectively spent on...well, almost anything. The one thing the situation has done is widely publicize a story that otherwise hardly anyone knew existed. Suppressing material just isn't as easy as it used to be when all you had to do was tell the publisher to get it off the shelves.

Of course, for Walker none of this matters. The most likely outcome for him in today's environment is a ruined life.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This has been the week for reminders that the border between real life and cyberspace is a permeable blood-brain barrier.

On Wednesday, Linden Labs announced that it was banning gambling in Second Life. The resentment expressed by some of SL residents is understandable but naive. We're not at the beginning of the online world any more; Second Life is going through the same reformation to take account of national laws as Usenet and the Web did before it.

Second, this week MySpace deleted the profiles of 29,000 American users identified as sex offenders. That sounds like a lot, but it's a tiny percentage of MySpace's 180 million profiles. None of them, be it noted, are Canadian.

There's no question that gambling in Second Life spills over into the real world. Linden dollars, the currency used in-world, have active exchange rates, like any other currency, currently running about L$270 to the US dollar. (When I was writing about a virtual technology show, one of my interviewees was horrified that my avatar didn't have any distinctive clothing; she was and is dressed in the free outfit you are issued when you join. He insisted on giving me L$1,000 to take her shopping. I solemnly reported the incident to my commissioning editor, who felt this wasn't sufficiently corrupt to worry about: US$3.75! In-world, however, that could buy her several cars.) Therefore: the fact that the wagering takes place online in a simulated casino with pretty animated decorations changes nothing. There is no meaningful difference between craps on an island in Second Life and poker on an official Web-based betting site. If both sites offer betting on real-life sporting events, there's even less difference.

But the Web site will, these days, have gone through considerable time and money to set up its business. Gaming, even outside the US, is quite difficult to get into: licenses are hard to get, and without one banks won't touch you. Compared to that, the $3,800 and 12 to 14 hours a day Brighton's Anthony Smith told Information Week he'd invested in building his SL Casino World is risibly small. You have to conclude that there are only two possibilities. Either Smith knew nothing about the gaming business - if he did, he know that the US has repeatedly cracked down on online gambling over the last ten years and that ultimately US companies will be forced to decide to live within US law. He'd also have known how hard and how expensive it is to set up an online gambling operation even in Europe. Or, he did know all those things and thought he'd found a loophole he could exploit to avoid all the red tape and regulation and build a gaming business on the cheap.

I have no personal interest in gaming; risking real money on the chance draw of a card or throw of dice seems to me a ridiculous waste of the time it took to earn it. But any time you have a service that involves real money, whether that service is selling an experience (gaming), a service, or a retail product, when the money you handle reaches a certain amount governments are going to be interested. Not only that, but people want them involved; people want protection from rip-off artists.

The MySpace decision, however, is completely different. Child abuse is, rightly, illegal everywhere. Child pornography is, more controversially, illegal just about everywhere. But I am not aware of any laws that ban sex offenders from using Web sites, even if those Web sites are social networks. Of course, in the moral panic following the MySpace announcement, someone is proposing such a law. The MySpace announcement sounds more like corporate fear (since the site is now owned by News International) than rational response. There is a legitimate subject for public and legislative debate here: how much do we want to cut convicted sex offenders out of normal social interaction? And a question for scientists: will greater isolation and alienation be effective strategies to keep them from reoffending? And, I suppose, a question for database experts: how likely is it that those 29,000 profiles all belonged to correctly identified, previously convicted sex offenders? But those questions have not been discussed. Still, this problem, at least in regards to MySpace, may solve itself: if parents become better able to track their kids' MySpace activities, all but the youngest kids will surely abandon it in favour of sites that afford them greater latitude and privacy.

A dozen years ago, John Perry Barlow (in)famously argued that national governments had no place in cyberspace. It was the most hyperbolic demonstration of what I call the "Benidorm syndrome": every summer thousands of holidaymakers descend on Benidorm, in Spain, and behave in outrageous and sometimes lawless ways that they would never dare indulge in at home in the belief that since they are far away from their normal lives there are no consequences. (Rinse and repeat for many other tourist locations worldwide, I'm sure.) It seems to me only logical that existing laws apply to behaviour in cyberspace. What we have to guard against is deforming cyberspace to conform to laws that don't exist.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We used to speculate about the future of free speech on the Internet if every country got to impose its own set of cultural quirks and censorship dreams on The lowest common denominator would win – probably Singapore.

We forgot Canada. Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, is being sued for defamation by Wayne Crookes, a Vancouver businessman (it says here). You might think that Geist, who doubles as a columnist for the Toronto Star (so enlightened, a newspaper with a technology law column!), had slipped up and said something unfortunate in one of his public pronouncements. But no. Geist is part of an apparently unlimited number of targets that have linked to other sites that have linked to sites that allegedly contained defamatory postings.

In Geist's words on his blog at the end of May, "I'm reportedly being sued for maintaining a blogroll that links to a site that links to a site that contains some allegedly defamatory third party comments." (Geist has since been served.)
Crookes is also suing Yahoo!, MySpace, and Wikipedia. (If you followed the link to the Wikipedia stub identifying Wayne Crookes, now you know why it's so short. Wikipedia's own logs, searchable via Google, show that it's replacing the previous entry.) Plus P2Pnet, OpenPolitics.ca, DomainsByProxy, and Google. In fact, it's arguable that if Crookes isn't suing you your Net presence is so insignificant that you should put your head in a bucket.

One of the things about a very young medium – as the Net still is – is that the legal precedents about how it operates may be set by otherwise obscure individuals. In Britain, one of the key cases determining the liability of ISPs for material they distribute was 1999's Laurence Godfrey vs Demon Internet. Godfrey was, or is, an otherwise unremarkable British physics lecturer working in Canada until he discovered Usenet; his claim to fame (see for example the Net.Legends FAQ) is a series of libel suits he launched to protect his reputation after a public dispute whose details probably few remember or understand. In 2000 Demon settled the case, paying Godfrey £15,000 and legal costs. And thus were today's notice and takedown rules forged.

The truly noticeable thing about Godfrey's case against Demon was that Demon was not Godfrey's ISP, nor was it the ISP used by the poster whose 1997 contributions to soc.culture.thai were at issue. Demon was merely the largest ISP in Britain that carried the posting, along with the rest of the newsgroup, on its servers. The case therefore is one of a string of cases that loosely circled a single issue: the liability of service providers for the material they host. US courts decided in 1991, in Cubby vs Compuserve, that an online service provider was more like a bookstore than a publisher. But under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act it has become alarmingly easy to frighten individuals and service providers into taking down material based on an official-looking lawyer's letter. (The latest target, apparently, is guitar tablature, which, speaking as a musician myself, I think is shameful.)

But the more important underlying thread is the attempt to keep widening the circle of liability. In Cubby, at least the material at issue appeared on the Journalism Forum which, though independently operated, was part of CompuServe's service. That particular judgement would not have helped any British service provider: in Britain, bookstores, as well as publishers, can be held responsible for libels that appear in the books they sell, a fact that didn't help Demon in the Godfrey case.

In the US, the next step was 2600 DeCSS case (formally known as Universal City vs Reimerdes, which covered not only posting copies of the DVD-decrypting software but linking to sites that had it available. This, of course, was a copyright infringement case, not a libel case; with respect to libel the relevant law seems to be, of all things, the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which allocated sole responsibility to the original author. Google itself has already won at least one lawsuit over including allegedly defamatory material in its search results.

But legally Canada is more like Britain than like the US, so the notion of making service providers responsible may be a more comfortable one. In his column on the subject, Geist argues that if Crookes' suits are successful Canadian free speech will be severely curtailed. Who would dare run a wiki or allow comments on their blog if they are to be held to a standard that makes them liable for everything posted there? Who would even dare put a link to a third-party site on a Web site or in a blogroll if they are to be held liable for all the content not only on that site but on all sites that site links to? Especially since Crookes's claim against Wikimedia is not that the site failed to remove the offending articles when asked, but that the site failed to monitor itself proactively to ensure that the statements did not reappear.

The entire country may have to emigrate virtually. Are you now, or have you ever been, Canadian?

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We may joke about the "Great Firewall of China", but by the end of 2007 content blocking will be a fact of Internet life in the UK. In June, Vernon Coaker, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Home Department told Parliament, "I have recently set the UK Internet industry a target to ensure that by the end of 2007 all Internet service providers offering broadband Internet connectivity to the UK public prevent their customers from accesssing those Web sites." By "those", he means Web sites carrying pornographic images of children.

Coaker went on to say that by the end of 2006 he expects 90 percent of ISPs to have blocked "access to sites abroad", and that, "We believe that working with the industry offers us the best way forward, but we will keep that under review if it looks likely that the targets will not be met."

The two logical next questions: How? And How much?

Like a lot of places, the UK has two major kinds of broadband access: cable and DSL. DSL is predominantly provided by BT, either retail directly to customers or wholesale to smaller ISPs. Since 2004, BT's retail service is filtered by its Cleanfeed system, which last February the company reported was blocking about 35,000 attempts to access child pornography sites per day. The list of sites to block comes from the Internet Watch Foundation, and is compiled from reports submitted by the public. ISPs pay IWF £5,000 a year to be supplied with the list – insignificant to a company like BT but not necessarily to a smaller one. But the raw cost of the IWF list is insignificant compared to the cost of reengineering a network to do content blocking.

How much will it cost for the entire industry?

Malcolm Hutty, head of public affairs at Linx, says he can't even begin to come up with a number. BT, he thinks, spent something like £1 million in creating and deploying Cleanfeed – half on original research and development, half on deployment. Most of the first half of that would not now be necessary for an ISP trying to decide how to proceed, since a lot more is known now than back in 2003.

Although it might seem logical that Cleanfeed would be available to any DSL provider reselling BT's wholesale product, that's not the case.

"You can be buying all sorts of different products to be able to provide DSL service," he says. A DSL provider might simply rebrand BT's own service – or it might only be paying BT to use the line from your home to the exchange. "You have to be pretty close to the first extreme before BT Cleanfeed can work for you." So adopting Cleanfeed might mean reengineering your entire product.

In the cable business, things are a bit different. There, an operator like ntl or Telewest owns the entire network, including the fibre to each home. If you're a cable company that implemented proxy caching in the days when bandwidth was expensive and caching was fashionable, the technology you built then will make it cheap to do content blocking. According to Hutty, ntl is in this category – but its Telewest and DSL businesses are not.

So the expense to a particular operator varies for all sorts of reasons: the complexity of the network, how it was built, what technologies it's built on. This mandate, therefore, has no information behind it as to how much it might cost, or the impact it might have on an industry that other sectors of government regard as vital for Britain's economic future.

The How question is just as complicated.

Cleanfeed itself is insecure (PDF), as Cambridge researcher Richard Clayton has recently discovered. Cleanfeed was intended to improve on previous blocking technologies by being both accurate and inexpensive. However, Clayton has found that not only can the system be circumvented but it also can be used as an "oracle to efficiently locate illegal websites".

Content blocking is going to be like every other security system: it must be constantly monitored and updated as new information and attacks becomes known or are developed. You cannot, as Clayton says, "fit and forget".

The other problem in all this is the role of the IWF. It was set up in 1996 as a way for the industry to regulate itself; the meeting where it was proposed came after threats of external regulation. If all ISPs are required to implement content blocking, and all content blocking is based on the IWF's list, the IWF will have considerable power to decide what content should be blocked. So far, the IWF has done a respectable job of sticking to clearly illegal pornography involving children. But its ten years have been marked by occasional suggestions that it should broaden its remit to include hate speech and even copyright infringement. Proposals are circulating now that the organisation should become an independent regulator rather than an industry-owned self-regulator. If IWF is not accountable to the industry it regulates; if it's not governed by Parliamentary legislation; if it's not elected….then we will have handed control of the British Internet over to a small group of people with no accountability and no transparency. That sounds almost Chinese, doesn't it?

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Sky News host looked horrified. How, he asked, could anyone claim that getting rid of child pornography online had anything to do with freedom of speech? Surely, he added, anyone would know child pornography when they see it. "Of course," he added, "I've never seen any…"

We are all against child abuse.

The occasion for this discussion, which also included John Carr, from the NCH: ten years ago this week, a bunch of us sat in a room somewhere in Central London while Peter Dawe explain his back-of-the-envelope scheme for combating child pornography online. Most of us thought it was a bad idea, and against Net freedoms, but the then very real threat of regulation was worse. Carr and I were both there, arguing on opposite sides.

In honor of the tenth anniversary, the Internet Watch Foundation released a bunch of statistics. Removed 30,000 Web sites from the British Internet. Seen Britain's share of such sites shrink from 18 percent to .2 percent. A third of the Web sites reported to IWF are found to be "potentially illegal". (These get forwarded to the police.)

The IWF includes a note at the end of the press release to the effect that it doesn't like the term "child pornography" because it "can act to legitimise images which are not pornography." IWF prefers the term "child abuse", because, it says, "they are permanent records of children being sexually abused." But that isn't necessarily so: digital composites do not document anything at all. No one, as far as I'm aware, has done – or legally been able to do – a study of the images of this type that circulate. It would be valuable to know what percentage are images from known cases, for example, or how many can be identified as not children at all, either because they are clearly digital composites or because they use young-seeming adults.

I am willing to stipulate that the images the IWF inspects are, as I have been told they are, horrendously upsetting to look at. But we will never really know; there can be no transparency in this situation. I am also willing to stipulate that in spite of our fears in 1996, other than a few wobbles of purpose, the IWF seems to have stuck to its very narrow remit. It has not, as it has a couple of times suggested it might, branched out into hate speech and copyright violations. It has stuck, basically, to the one thing most people agree is wrong, though of course there is no external review of what's being removed.

Carr noted two things I didn't know. First, that the US is now the world leader in child pornography sites. Second, that Congress is now considering initiatives to change that. Until now, there's been this little problem of the First Amendment which, Carr said, is sacred to Americans. This was the moment when our host looked so horrified.

I'm not sure the First Amendment, which includes freedoms of assembly, religion, and the press as well as free speech, is as sacred as it used to be. For one thing, freedom of speech is one of those things that everyone wants for themselves but not so much for other people. For another, it's commonly misunderstood. The First Amendment doesn't guarantee free speech of all types and in all circumstances. What it actually says is that "Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech." It may well be that had the Founding Fathers lived in a time where giant corporations were as much of a threat as governments they would have drafted that differently. But the Constitution, like the Bible or Shakespeare, lives on interpretation and textual analysis. What the First Amendment bans, therefore, is legislation that limits free speech.

Which is why, when I went to look up the Congressional moves mentioned by Carr (which I've been unable to find and which even he suggested might be just midterm election posturing), I discovered that this week the ACLU is in court with the government over the 1998 Child Online Protection Act. In its action, ACLU is representing a host of well-respected plaintiffs, including Salon, Dictionary.com, and Powell's Bookstores.

The point of the ACLU's action is not to defend child abuse – we are all against child abuse. The point is that it is very, very difficult to draft a law that only, narrowly, bans child pornography and therefore could pass the First Amendment test in court. And COPA didn't manage it; instead, it banned material that might be "harmful to minors", whether or not that material might be valuable to adults. Clinton, who signed it into law in 2000, ought to be ashamed of himself. But I suppose politically it's a valid strategy: win votes for yourselfyou’re your party by creating a law that looks like you're doing something to protect children; let the ACLU be the bad guy later and by getting it overturned.

So what I should have said to our host is this: it's freedom of speech that's allowing us to have this discussion. But freedom of speech does not mean condoning child abuse.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Illinois is a fine state. It is the Land of Lincoln. It is the birth place of such well-known Americans as Oprah Winfrey, Roger Ebert, and Ronald Reagan. It has a baseball team so famous that even I know it's called the Chicago Cubs. John Dewey (as in the Dewey decimal system for cataloguing library books) came from Illinois. So did the famous pro-evolution lawyer Clarence Darrow, Mormon church founder Joseph Smith, the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, semiconductor inventor William Shockley, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

I say all this because I don't want anyone to think I don't like or respect Illinois or the intelligence and honor of its judges, including those of Charles Kocoras, who who awarded $11.7 million in damages to e360Insight, a company branded a spammer by the Spamhaus Project.

The story has been percolating for a while now, but is reasonably simple. e360Insight says it's not a bad spammer guy but a good opt-in marketing guy; Spamhaus first said the Illinois court didn't have jurisdiction over a British company with no offices, staff, or operations in the US, then decided to appeal against the court's $11.7 million judgement. e360Insight filed a motion asking the court to haveICANN and/or Spamhaus's domain registrar, the Canadian company Tucows, remove Spamhaus's domain from the Net. The judge refused to grant this request, partly because doing so would cut off Spamhaus's lawful activities, not just those in contravention of the order he issued against Spamhaus. And a good time is being had by all the lawyers.

The case raises so many problems you almost don't know where to start. For one thing, there's the arms race that is spam and anti-spam. This lawsuit escalates it, in that if you can't get rid of an anti-spammer through DDoS attacks, well, hey, bankrupt them through lawsuits.

Spam, as we know, is a terrible, intractable problem that has broken email, and is trying to break blogs, instant messaging, online chat, and, soon, VOIP. (The net.wars blog, this week, has had hundreds of spam comments, all appearing to come from various Gmail addresses, all landing in my inbox, breaking both blogs and email in one easy, low-cost plan. The breakage takes two forms. One is the spam itself – up to 90 percent of all email. But the second is the steps people take to stop it. No one can use email with any certainty now.

Some have argued that real-time blacklists are censorship. I don't think it's fair to invoke the specter of Joseph McCarthy. For one thing, using these blacklists is voluntary. No one is forced to subscribe, not even free Webmail users. That single fact ought to be the biggest protection against abuse. For another thing, spam email in the volumes it's now going out is effectively censorship in itself: it fills email boxes, often obscuring and sometimes blocking entirely wanted email. The fact that most of it either is a scam or advertises something illegal is irrelevant; what defines spam, I have long argued, is the behavior that produces it. I have also argued that the most effective way to put spammers out of business is to lean on the credit card companies to pull their authorisations.

Mail servers are private property; no one has the automatic right to expect mine to receive unwanted email just as I am not obliged to speak to a telemarketer who phones during dinner.

That does not mean all spambusters are perfect. Spamhaus provides a valuable public service. But not all anti-spammers are sane; in 2004 journalist Brian McWilliams made a reasonable case in his book Spam Kings that some anti-spammers can be as obsessive as the spammers they chase.

The question that's dominated a lot of the Spamhaus coverage is whether an Illinois court has jurisdiction over a UK-based company with no offices or staff in the US. In the increasingly connected world we live in, there are going to be a lot of these jurisdictional questions. The first one I remember – the 1996 case United States vs. Thomas – came down in favor of the notion that Tennessee could impose its community decency standards on a bulletin board system in California. It may be regrettable – but consumers are eager enough for their courts to have jurisdiction in case of fraud. Spamhaus is arguably as much in business in the US as any foreign organisation whose products are bought or used in the US. Ultimately, "Come here and say that" just isn't much of a legal case.

The really tricky and disturbing question is: how should blacklists operate in future? Publicly listing the spammers whose mail is being blocked is an important – even vital – way of keeping blacklists honest. If you know what's being blocked and can take steps to correct it, it's not censorship. But publishing those lists makes legal action against spam blockers of all types – blacklists, filtering software, you name it – easier.

Spammers themselves, however, should not rejoice if Spamhaus goes down. Spam has broken email, that's not news. But if Spamhaus goes and we actually receive all the spam it's been weeding out for us – the flood will be so great that spam will finally break spam itself.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 1:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in about 1978, the wonderful actress Diana Rigg did a full half-hour with the American talk show interviewer Dick Cavett, during which she told the story of the Avengers episode in which she had to do a belly dance (Honey for the Prince). The American network executives reacted with some of the horror with which Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell said, "A handbag?"

The problem was navels. You can't, the network executives told Diana Rigg, show your navel on television. They insisted she wear a jewel to cover up her navel, and it had to be glued in place, and the glue didn't work…but I digress. "Where did that come from, I wonder?" Cavett asked, speculating that somewhere back in the mists of time some executive had decreed, "I don't want navels!" I'm working from memory here, but I think Rigg replied, "I think it's a lot of men who don't want to know where they come from."

Apparently even if the navel reference is just a black dot: the press barons who ran the comic strip Beetle Bailey, kept erasing the navels off Miss Buxley, the blonde, bikini-clad secretary whose job it was to be ogled by the general.

Eventually, the navelphobics lost. Enter their descendants, the nipplephobics (there's apparently an entire department on Desperate Housewives whose job it is to blur the actresses' nipples), some of whom are running things at LiveJournal, which recently declared some kind of war on icons depicting breastfeeding mothers. Even if those mothers are medieval paintings.

That is, of course, a vast over-simplification. According to a comment in Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blog by a member of LiveJournal's abuse team, in fact no rules have changed. LiveJournal always banned nipples (and areolae) in default icons in its terms and conditions. All that happened recently was that the site altered its FAQ to reflect that ban – which is when people noticed. That's online community for you. Things are going fine until suddenly someone reads an FAQ, at which point they behave as though you've just shot their mother.

What is a default icon? Well you may ask. When you search LiveJournal you get pages showing user profiles. Each of these has a small, square picture depicting…anything the user happens to like. One of my friends has a picture of something that looks like a ferret holding a rifle. Another has a picture of herself piloting a boat. Many users have a clutch of these pictures, and attach one to every blog entry.

The default icon is the picture that by default shows up on one of those profile pages. Banning nipples from default icons in no way stops users from putting up pictures of nipples with their postings, or linking to pictures of nipples, or talking about nipples, or even having nipples in real life. The idea, I guess, is that people should be able to conduct searches in the complete confidence that they will not see anything that offends them. Like nipples. It's the same reasoning by which the Federal Communications Commission bans terrestrial broadcast television from showing nudity, pornography, extreme violence, and swearing: someone could turn on their TV and accidentally see something that offends them. We can't have that.

Giggle.

So some people got cease and desist notices from the LiveJournal abuse team asking them to remove their lactating mother default icons. They took umbrage. There was discussion. And now there's going to be a protest: on 6/6/6, that is, Tuesday, when an indeterminate number of people are going to delete their LiveJournals to protest this discrimination against nipples, or at least against the ones that are in babies' mouths, and a fine, old time is going to be had by all. There is a subset of protesters who believe they are striking a blow for breastfeeding and against bottle feeding, but this is clearly a confusion between cyberspace and real life and beyond the reach of LiveJournal rules. They plan to restore their LiveJournals 24 hours later, since deletions are not permanent for 30 days.

My guess is that the number of protesters won't even make a dent in LiveJournal's 10 million bloggers. But the complaint isn't, ultimately, really trivial: the underlying reality is that LiveJournal isn't a small, open-source cooperative whose rules and standards are formed by the community any more. It's a business with a venture capital-funded owner that is trying to figure out how to "monetize" what it's bought. There will be many more disputes like this as the business develops, because the dispute is really about who owns LiveJournal: the users or the business. Every online community goes through this, and some even survive. Groups who really can't stand it break off and form their own spaces, such as free-association.net, which broke off from The Tribe when that service abruptly changed its terms and conditions.

One of the big adjustments the US is going through is that sometime in the last century it stopped being possible to deal with disagreements with your neighbors by moving 20 miles up the road and starting your own new town. But cyberspace is infinite. We can do the town right here. Posters, unite! You have nothing to lose but your nipples.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars' home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 1:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)