ISPs 'could face lawsuits'
2008-01-18 13:02
London - The UK's law-and-order official wants extremist content off the web, saying on Thursday she intends to deny Islamist ideologues the use of a key recruitment tool.
But internet service providers and experts say they could be accused of corporate censorship and face a spate of lawsuits if they carry out any government order to aggressively police the internet.
UK Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, giving the keynote speech at a conference on radicalisation and political violence, said "the internet is not a no-go area for government". She compared her government's plan to counter extremism on the internet to its long-standing campaign against paedophiles and child pornography online.
"If we are ready and willing to take action to stop the grooming of vulnerable young people on social networking sites, then I believe we should also take action against those who groom vulnerable people for the purposes of violent extremism.
"Where there is illegal material on the net, I want it removed," she said.
But how? And who would do the removing? Smith didn't go into details, saying only that she was working closely with the communications industry.
Service providers, for their part, were not enthusiastic.
Subjective judgments
Britain's Internet Service Provider Association (ISPA), which represents major service providers such as BT Group PLC and the UK arms of Time Warner Inc's and Yahoo Inc, said the most troublesome websites were hosted abroad, beyond the government's legal reach in any case.
And even if sites suspected of inciting terror were hosted in the UK, the ISPA said its members had neither the competence nor the desire to rule on whether a particular site was illegal.
Attempts to do so, the group said, would amount to corporate censorship and would subject service providers to lawsuits and accusations of breaking free-speech laws.
Unlike the case with child pornography, which is often easily recognisable by sight, policing terror-related websites requires subjective judgments on whether a foreign-language text was inciting anything or anyone, the ISPA contends.
Finally, if an ISP pulled a particular website identified as inciting terror, it could be sued.
Experts agreed, saying terror-related material was much more difficult to identify unambiguously, and that it would be difficult to extend the UK's strict anti-child pornography efforts - which includes censoring parts of the web known as paedophile hot spots - to sites that were merely carrying opinions, no matter how offensive.
Increasingly, in any case, incitement and propaganda work was taking place on closed, password-protected forums. Given that context, Ian Brown, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, said the idea of "removing" anything from the internet wasn't realistic.
"(Censorship) just drives it underground," he said. "It might remove some of it from the open, visible, internet but it will just move to servers that are closed."