Inside The UK's Web Blacklist Keeper
from the sounds-like-a-fun-job dept
The BBC's Rory Clellan-Jones (the same guy whose YouTube vid of a soccer match he filmed got yanked) has taken an interesting look inside the Internet Watch Foundation, the organization that runs the UK's child-porn blacklist. The piece does little to counter the negative press the IWF has received in light of its misguided blocks on Wikipedia and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, with the group's CEO appearing to gloss over the failures because he doesn't "want to dwell" on them, instead trying to hide behind the moral cover of stopping child porn. But the group's efforts on that front don't appear to be particularly fruitful, either: one of its "analysts" who looks into complaints the group receives about images online says that few of the images it finds are in the UK, so it just reports them to sister groups in the countries where they are hosted, if such groups exist. The aim of the IWF -- to stop child porn -- is laudable, but its techniques, and their collateral damage, leave much to be desired.Filed Under: blacklist, censor, internet watch, uk
Companies: internet watch foundation
