Hot on the heels of introducing the Investigatory Powers Bill, "one of the most extreme surveillance laws ever passed in a democracy,” the UK government now wants to censor online porn.
The headline amendment to the upcoming Digital Economy Bill is the proposed introduction of mandatory 18+ age verification checks for pornographic websites. Public debate has primarily centered on whether such age verification checks are appropriate in the first place (86% of respondents in a recent ICBP poll thought they were).
The debate has also considered whether the move is at all practical, given the international nature of the internet. Under the proposals, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) will be given the power to order UK ISPs to block websites anywhere in the world that do not comply the law’s age verification requirements.
This all very well, but readily available technologies such as VPNs make it easy to evade porn blocks and other requirements by allowing users to geo-spoof their location to another country.
Blanket Censorship of Legal Content
More worrying, however, is a lesser-known amendment to the new law. This allows the BBFC to block websites that feature "non-conventional” sex acts prohibited for commercial sale in the UK.
In other words, UK adults will be prevented from viewing perfectly legal sex acts between consenting adults. This is content that is legal and increasingly normalized throughout the rest of the "free world.”
And it has nothing to do with "protecting the kids.” That is what the age verification checks are for. This amendment is solely about the government imposing its own puerile and puritanical morality on adult British citizens.
Why This Censorship Is Wrong
Wikipedia defines censorship as:
"The suppression of free speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.”
It is about exercising power to enforce one world view over that of others, and has nothing to do with a modern, inclusive, pluralistic and progressive society. The UK government wants to censor content that is not criminal, and which is widely regarded throughout the rest of the world as "normal.”
As a spokeswoman for MindGeek, one of the world’s biggest pornographic website operators, told the BBC,
"Many of the sexual activities prohibited from R18 [the BBFC’s most explicit certification] are normalised and accepted aspects of healthy sexuality, and are proudly celebrated by the feminist, queer and ethical porn movements internationally.”
What consenting adults get up to between themselves is entirely up to them. And if they wish to publish what they do online and other adults wish to watch them, then that is none of the government’s business.
I will stress again that we are not talking about allowing kids to access this content, and that the content involves fully legal sex acts. If no crime is being committed, then it is not the government's place to tell us what we can and cannot see.
David Banisar is senior legal counsel at Article 19, a charity that campaigns for freedom of speech. He explained to the Guardian why the amendment would be unlikely to survive a challenge in front the European Court of Human Rights:
"This is really an ancient battle that has been going on since the internet existed, which is there’s a lot of content out there that some people don’t like and they are trying to restrict it in a way which is overly broad, which catches a lot of things that are – while not desirable to everybody’s tastes – still perfectly legal to see.”
Mission Creep
Back in 2013, the UK government announced that an agreement had been made with the country’s four major ISPs to introduce an "opt-in” system of censorship of pornographic material on the internet.
Under the new system, all new internet subscriptions would have "family-friendly filters” that restricted adult content turned on by default. To turn these off, the subscriber would need to ask for them to be turned off (placing them in the embarrassing position of having to request porn access from their ISP).
In practice, this initiative has been largely unsuccessful. The vast majority of UK internet account holders simply have no interest in limiting their access to porn!
The way in which the "porn filters” was implemented, however, is both highly instructive and very worrying.
Not Just Porn…
Almost immediately, reports flooded in of sites such as ChildLine, the NSPCC and the Samaritans (O2), award-winning British sex education site BishUK.com and the Edinburgh Women's Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre (TalkTalk), Sexual Health Scotland, Doncaster Domestic Abuse Helpline, and domestic abuse tackling website Reducing The Risk (BT) being blocked (to name just a few).
This meant that abusive and controlling parents could (and still can) prevent vulnerable children from accessing vital services and information designed to inform and protect them. The last category, sex education, shocked many observers by including apparently homophobic filters:
"Sex education will block sites where the main purpose is to provide information on subjects such as respect for a partner, abortion, gay and lesbian lifestyle, contraceptive, sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy.”
The problem, however, went far beyond censorship of just a sexual nature. The internet freedom and privacy rights organization Open Rights Group (ORG) talked to various ISPs about how the ‘pornwall’ would be implemented. It found that a disturbingly wide range of internet content was likely to be filtered. The list suggested by the ORG includes the following:
- Pornography
- Violent material
- Extremist and terrorist related content
- Anorexia and eating disorders
- Suicide-related websites
- Alcohol
- Smoking
- Web forums
- "Esoteric material” (I are unsure what this actually means)
- Web blocking circumvention tools (such as VPNs)
And More...
TalkTalk’s Home Safe filtering system was much praised by then-Prime Minister David Cameron. Based on talks with the ISP, TorrentFreak observed that additional content was likely to be censored, including:
- Dating
- Drugs and tobacco
- File-sharing sites
- Gambling
- Games
- Social networking
- Weapons
Content blocked by ISPs at the government’s bequest is indicative of the kind of content that it would like to restrict access to. Blocking access to information on sexual health, drugs, and gambling addiction is bad enough. Rather than "protecting” children and other vulnerable members society, it actively puts them at risk.
But it is censorship of web forums (undefined), "esoteric material” and anti-censorship tools that I find particularly disturbing. Not only are the parameters of such censorship dangerously ill-defined, but they clearly show an authoritarian desire to exert political and social control on the population.
The UK government, then, already has a track record of using the notion of protecting children from porn to push for much wider politically and ideologically motivated censorship…
So How Does This Apply to the Digital Economy Bill?
The new Bill explicitly gives the BBFC powers to block content that is not pornographic:
"The steps that may be specified or arrangements that may be put in place under subsection (2) (c) include steps or arrangements that will or may also have the effect of preventing persons in the United Kingdom from being able to access material other than the offending material using the service provided by the Internet service provider.”
What this "other material” is that the BBFC has the power to block is not explained.
Given that the government has already exploited the issue of porn censorship in order to perform mission creep into other areas of censorship, together with the fact that it has just passed the most extreme surveillance laws in the so-called free world, this is a very worrying ambiguity.
There is ample evidence to suggest that the UK government is exploiting "think of the children” fears about the "porn bogeyman” in order to soften up an already largely docile public into accepting more authoritarian forms of censorship.
Convincing the public to accept that the government has a key role to play in policing access to legal content is a powerful step towards building a repressive state. It is the thin end of a very dangerous wedge.
Age Checks Are a Mass Surveillance Gift
On a different, but related note, requiring every UK adult who wishes to access porn (as long as it is porn of a kind considered acceptable to the BBFC!) to sign-in using their credit card and a UK government-authorised age verification system, will provide the UK government with access to a vast trove of information that is about as personal as information can get!
As Brian Paddick, shadow home secretary of the Liberal Democrats party, explains,
"The Investigatory Powers Act already has the potential to undermine online privacy and there is very little in the new bill to protect our most sensitive data. Liberal Democrats will do everything possible to ensure that our privacy is not further eroded by this Tory government.”
And of course, the government’s current record on data breaches is hardly reassuring. So it is probably safe to assume that this trove of ultra-personal information will also soon be available to legions of criminal hackers.
Conclusion
Censorship of legal content is a tool of oppression. It is used by authoritarian governments to suppress social unrest and political dissent. And it most certainly has no place in a free, open, and democratic society.
Stirring up moral outrage in order to whip up public support for much wider social and political repression is the one of the oldest tricks in the authoritarian handbook.
ProPrivacy.com takes the position that all censorship (of legal content) should be opposed in all its forms. A free and open society is one that is free and open to all.