Well said! I’ve never come across anything remotely resembling child porn online, even through “Stumble Upon” (and that brought me some dodgy places) – but have been shocked and appalled by plenty of stuff while channel hopping on tv.
If there’s no evidence that it will deal with the problem then it is a useless concept. If it is merely a smokescreen to introduce Internet censorship then thats a whole other story.

We need to be looking at the causes for these disgusting acts against children – not attacking the symptoms. We need to be taking a zero tolerance approach to child abuse (not letting massive pedophile rings get away with it and abdicate responsibility). If we can eliminate the cause the symptoms disappear.. If we attack the symptoms only, then other symptoms merely take their place..

Funny Conor how you wonder what the Churches position on this is just two posts before and now you make an allegation saying you know what it is just later.

It’s aboout what it could lead to. As far as I am concerned I cannot see why anyone you have an attraction to look at these horrible images; however as a matter of principle I am against any attempt at Irish ISPs filtering any content that is available on the www. You need to look at it from a larger perspective… If this issue is dealt with you can bet you house that the Irish government will use it as an opportunity to censor other parts of the web that they do not like.
I am a man of principle and as this issue is concerned, any attempt to filter content from the web is an act of censorship.

@Lisa, people don’t object to the goal of this legislation, protecting children is a very important goal. The problem is that this legislation does absolutely nothing to achieve that goal, the proposers even admit it won’t stop “determined” people from accessing the material, by which they mean it would only stop people accidentally stumbling across it. (they mention people using email and what not, which seems to imply that it would stop web access, they of course don’t explicitly say that because then it would be too easy to point out their lie.)

The second effect this approach would have is to drive this stuff further underground, making it harder for the garda to actually catch and stop child pornographers. The sad fact of the matter is that everything we do to prevent stuff like this always makes the remainder harder to catch and stop, so the measures that we implement must be based on proper research, designed to actually reach the goal of protecting kids, rather than the knee jerk reaction that doing something is always better than nothing, which is clearly evident in the article which makes no attempt to argue that the steps will be effective or worthwhile, but prefers to manipulate the public with emotional arguments about the, admittedly horrible, problem of child pornography .

Then there are the claims of censorship, in order to implement a system like this the government needs to rely on a blacklist of which to block. This blacklist can obviously not be made public as it would serve as instructions for the pornographers to change their websites as well as advertisement for paedophiles in other countries. So we must take the word of the government as well as the governments in the future that they will never use this blacklist to block other content they dislike. This seems like an incredibly naive position.

In short we would be giving a massive amount of power over any speech to the government, for what they admit won’t really do anything to curtail the problem (and in my view has a good chance of making it worse). I would much prefer the government to tackle the problem head on than just sweep it under the rug as this would. That being said I fully expect this to pass, as much as the Simpsons parody the whole “wont somebody please think of the children” it is an effective way of getting bad legislation passed or making lazy politicians look like they are actually contributing.

Finally I think the figures they quoted are extremely misleading. From the wording I’d guess they don’t exclude things like web crawlers, which could massively inflate their figures and make the problem look worse than it actually is. If anyone has a citation of where they got those figures I’d love to know.

Hi Lisa and John
sorry I can’t engage more comprehensively but time is against me atm.

Blocking is a tool for the benefit of law abiding citizens and the victims of abuse in the imagery. Online banking and payments facilities are unsafe to many forms of attack but we mitigate the threats as best we can and acknowledge that life must go on.

Re driving the stuff underground: we as a society must trust An Garda Siochana, and by extension INTERPOL, CEOP, FBI and other forces who work on our collective behalf to investigate and police crimes against children through computers, digital devices and on the internet. This is why you will likely never hear a conversation about the ravages and unbelievable nature of these crimes in the public domain.

If you trust these agencies to abstract us from the imagery then by contrast you have to listen to them when they call for measures to assist them in combating those crimes. It is a fact that the majority of offenders that are processed through the courts in any country are ‘simple viewers’ and ‘open traders’. Police throughout the world are bogged down investigating cases against these consumer groups when they really need bandwidth to get at the ‘closed communities’ aka closed paedophile rings, and the expert users who are at the top of the tree and very difficult to prosecute.

The case of Timoty Cox (the son of god) is a case in point and shows just how technically secure and vicious these online abusers are.

Re emotional arguments: if you were raped and someone made a movie of the event, how would you feel walking though the Blanchardstown Centre tomorrow in the knowledge that anyone, without any attempt of restriction, can see the images of your rape online. Now consider the implications for say an 8 year old girl or boy

This is not a victimless crime and there is nothing computer generated in the images of movies. The sounds and activites are real, and so are the victims, and some of those victims are Irish.

Re censorship: the Senate motion included language to ensure that blocking would be used only where child abuse material was a factor, and affords due process and redress where unfounded action is taken against a site where it is found that an error is made.

Re the figures: they come from ISP’s themselves, organisations like the IWF in the UK, individual police forces, the NCMEC in the US – there are many sources and I am mindful of the potential for crawlers to increase figures, but from conversations with fellow people in the child protection who are close to those who compile the figures, they have no interest in inflating them because there is a simple argument that just one image of just one child being abused is too much. So when you get into figures of how many thousand attempts to reach CAM are blocked in a day, or an hour, you are in danger of asking the next question: what constitutes too much, or an acceptable quota of CAM that we can live with?

Nothing about this blocking conversation is easy, but I would advocate that if you want to take the emotion out of the conversation then you should sit in McDonald’s this afternoon and not react to the child in the buggy that is screaming its lungs out for something or other.

We get emotional about our children :)

Pat

@Pat,
The filtering scheme in the UK was introduced in 2004 to cover CAM. In 2011 it was extended by court order to cover copyright infringement. There were proposals after the London riots to extend it to cover social media. In fact if you look at any filtering scheme in any country, they generally extend to cover more and more questionable areas. You must have great faith in the Irish government to think the same wouldn’t happen here.

Additionally the majority of your comment is a complete red herring, so let me ask you a counter question. Should we ban all cars from going over 5 mph on our roads, what number of kids involved in car accidents is an acceptable quota?

If somebody comes up with an effective proposal to stop CAM, then I will support it whole heartedly, as it stands this doesn’t even pretend to do that.

@John
The CAM filtering scheme in the UK is under pressure from several points of view of which politically motivated interference is just one. There will always be attempts to use anything in legislation, good or bad, for the advantage of one group or another. It’s our collective job to ensure that these interferences do not happen. In 2007 the music industry claimed that child porn was great for them because they could piggy back child porn filters to get at copyright infringer’s. Little did they know that in Ireland it might happen the other way around.

My argument is a red herring? Your counter question is about traffic, speed limits and saving children from injury or death. Yet CAM, the subject that we are addressing, already has all of that (minus the vehicle traffic bit) and much much more besides. And blocking CAM is not going to stop that. It is going to restrict consumer access to it which goes some way to protecting the human rights and identity of the child, and stopping ad hoc consumer access does restrict and warn off casual offenders, which in turn protects children in the homes of these consumers.

You want something that you can support that comprehensively solve the CAM issue? Well, the removal at source policy advocated by the ISPAI doesn’t work and has failed since the beginning of self-regulation, and the nature of the movement of CAM sites is a primary reason for that.

So if we cannot get at CAM sites around the world, then you are left with two instruments: blocking which we are discussing, and one other which no-one dares to so much as whisper, but I’ll outline it to you.

I was in a room of people recently where the issue of CAM was front and center. In a very heated discussion, the following point was made: Cardinal Brady silenced two children because of the requirements of the good of the church and canon law. In doing that he is alleged to have prolonged the influence and activities of the paedophile priest Brendan Smith. It is of course possible to monitor any network and report where detectable that consumers are consistently accessing CAM. In a thousand CAM consumers there is statistically three hundred abusers who are defiling one or more children. Detecting these ‘Brendan Smiths’ will lead to children being saved.

It is argued in some quarters that the refusal of authorities and industry to institute active surveillance of CAM consumers for the purpose of identifying and saving victims of child abuse who cannot make report for themselves is akin to the Canon Law argument. The Senators and supporters are seeking to do what is possible to prevent access to CAM through blocking. The anti-blocking campaign argues that since you cannot stop paedophiles who circumvent blocking, then you should do nothing.

But you can do something. You can initiate active surveillance, deep packet analysis, and various other common network security techniques that do everything from shielding from malware to preventing unauthorised access to sensitive documents. Now the question becomes scale and administration which is a matter of infrastructure, resources and cost. If you want comprehensive action to deal with online paedophiles then it is available. The question is whether net neutrality and anti-censorship should supersede the needs of the child abuse victim.

So if you want to go further than blocking to actively detect abusers and save children then I am all for it. Oddly I don’t think that you will get much support for it.

Pat

@Pat,
The point I was trying to illustrate with my counter question was that a bad proposal with good motivations is still a bad proposal. I even picked an example which would actually protect children, which is more than I can say for this proposal, to make it easier to endorse.

Firstly this proposal is designed to really only stop accidental access only. It mentions that it won’t stop determined access, and as someone who is quite familiar with I.T. (as I will assume you are also seeing as you talked about deep packet inspection), I understand exactly how low a bar one would need to pass to qualify as determined. You assertion that stopping this is enough to protect children in the home, implies that people are paedophiles who just haven’t stumbled onto CAM yet, and is quite frankly insulting.

Seeing as it is established by the proposal itself, this step won’t really do much to stop “determined” access, your implication that it is a choice between blocking and the much more invasive deep packed inspection, is quite baffling. I suspect that the push for deep packet inspection will quickly follow the passage of this proposal, and seeing as I have already assumed you are I.T. savvy, the passage of DPI would probably lead to the push for banning encryption, as DPI would also not be enough to block CAM. Although I’d imagine you will have more of a fight there. Meanwhile the CAM consumers will move on to harder and harder things to monitor and block, like VPN’s and darknets. The exact same routes that people in places like Libya took when the government tried to silence their descent can be used for far more evil purposes.

The question isn’t whether net neutrality and anti-censorship should supersede the needs of the child abuse victim. The question remains, does introducing censorship and eviscerating the internet as well as leaving the door open for massive (and as usually happens with censorship, almost inevitable) abuse by the government do anything at all to protect child abuse victims. I still maintain it does not, and I have yet to hear anything to change my mind on that fact (or perhaps I haven’t heard enough emotional arguments to cloud my mind from that question).

But in any case as I already stated, I fully expect our freedom of speech to be trampled in a misguided and futile attempt at a noble cause, and as such I accomplish nothing. So I leave the last word to you.

John
I very respectfully agree to disagree with you. Don’t be insulted by my assertion that ‘simple viewers’ who come across CAM go on to abuse at a rate of 30%. That is true and is a statistical fact in Ireland, the UK, the EU and the US.

I’m not aware of a push towards DRI or further on surveillance, but DPI is used by some ISP’s outside of Ireland, and organisations where regulatory compliance is a core business factor. I don’t seen anyone calling for mandatory reporting of consumers from ISP’s and my point to you was that if anti-blocking people keep using the excuse that blocking does not stop determined access, then would they consider a solution that would absolutely dissuade that activity?

Darknets are what they are and I wont go into them in this conversation and I’m sure that you will understand why.

You have to understand that no-one, absolutely no-one that I have dealings with who seeks blocking has any time for censorship. I and my family like the internet and its freedoms and I have no truck with anyone interfering with that freedom.

But CAM is different.

Take a look at section e of the motion: e) Be guided by transparent procedures and provide adequate safeguards, in particular to ensure that the restriction is limited to what is necessary and proportionate, and that users are informed of the reason for the restriction.”

If the only thing that we differ on is censorship mission creep then maybe we all need to get together and ensure that section ‘e’ of the motion is enshrined in law as requested

Thx for the engaging conversation. Pat

@Pat,
Thank you also for the interesting and thought provoking conversation.

Anyone who views, uploads, or downloads child abuse images is participating in the abuse of the children. As such the full rigors of the law should be applied – jailing, treatment (if available) and a place on the sex offenders register for a good number of years.

That’s the ideal – in reality we don’t take child abuse images at all seriously. Even calling these grotesque abuse images ‘porn’ is an insult to victims.

Oliver O’Grady was recently jailed for possessing child abuse images – actually he had thousands of explicit images of children stored on computers and USB drives, some depicting victims as young as two. All of the children in these images were abuse victims. Gardaí also found more than six hours of child pornography videos and more than 500 pages of online discussions on the subject of child abuse images.

At the trial the judge said O’Grady had a serious problem and 14 years in an American prison had not rehabilitated him then he jailed O’Grady for three years! This guy will be back on the streets next year – more children will be harmed.

@Pat,
Sorry to bother you again, I just wanted to ask for clarification on one point if I may. When you say “simple viewers”, is that just people who regularly or deliberately view CAM, or does it include accidental accessors. I ask because if it is just the deliberate viewers, then it seems disingenuous and misleading to mention it in a debate on a proposal which specifically concedes that it isn’t meant to target deliberate access. Whereas if it includes accidental access, then clearly the problem is much more serious than I originally thought (not that I don’t think it is very serious), and I may have to concede the entire debate and say it is worth the risk.

@Pat,
Sorry to bother you again, I just wanted to ask for clarification on one point if I may. When you say “simple viewers who come across CAM go on to abuse at a rate of 30%”, is that just people who regularly or deliberately view CAM, or does it include accidental accessors. I ask because if it is just the deliberate viewers, then it seems disingenuous and misleading to mention it in a debate on a proposal which specifically concedes that it isn’t meant to target deliberate access. Whereas if it includes accidental access, then clearly the problem is much more serious than I originally thought (not that I don’t think it is very serious), because honestly that figure seems far higher than I ever thought it would be and I may have to concede the entire debate and say it is worth the risk. Although I would also have to ask what percentage of that figure is accidental access and what percentage is deliberate, otherwise it is possible that the accidental may be negligible.

Sorry to be pedantic about this, but I have some trepidation about statistics because I understand how misleading they can be when out of context. Thanks.

Sorry for the double post, thejournal has been up and down all week for me.

Hi John
there are four basic classifications of CAM abusers: think of this as a triangle divided into four divisions – at the top of the triangle are the expert users – these are the guys who use every technical solution available to protect themselves from detection.

Next step down is the closed trader better known as members of paedophile rings. Again these characters value their security and act accordingly. These top two groups are where police need to focus because their activities against children are very dangerous, and the efforts of police and forensics people required to catch them are very large indeed.

Next down the triangle is the open trader. These guys may or may not use significant security and very often are easily caught because they are trading images through email, p2p, web downloads, irc, usenets, and LEA’s are very active in those spaces

Then at the bottom of the triangle are the simple viewers. These guys drift around largely web based sites and through these interactions gain information about online paedophilia and the methods through which they can move up the triangle.

30% of simple viewers and open traders are abusing. It is difficult for someone in their basement or attic to orientate into darknets directly without access to these lower level sites and the information and contacts that they acquire while in there.

The simple viewer who is looking at imagery and has not yet (or simply is never inclined to) abuse a child in the physical is a huge threat because they most often remain suspended in this space where they access online material but may have opportunity to physically gain trusted access to an unwitting child, either their own or someone elses. Almost three quarters of CAM offenders in the EU and US are are between the ages of 21 and 50 with a 50% likelihood that they are married and 41% likelihood that they have children of their own.

UK figures for CAM abusers were the highest ever in 2010 (2011 figures not available yet) which is troubling because the previous high occurred in 2003 during Operation Ore where scores of arrests were made. 2010 also shows a spike in Ireland’s figures. This can to some degree be explained by better cooperation between police forces through the interpol crimes against children unit who are genuinely very good at what they do.

This is in contrast to figures from the ISPAI hotline that found that there was a reduction of 183 (i think) reports of online CAM down to 254 (again I think off the top of my head) which is not so surprising since not everyone knows what hotline is. I recently asked a school of 750 secondary school girls that I was addressing on internet safety if they knew what hotline.ie was. Absolutely no one did, and most though it was an Irish porn site of a site for adult party lines.

And yet I am privy to a log file extracted from just one CAM site that found up to 293 Irish IP addresses visited that one site, in just one night. Now there are 300+ sites on the interpol ‘worst of’ list which is not inclusive of all CAM, just where the victim is between new born and aged 10, and where penetrative sex, sadism or bestiality is a factor. So that list doesn’t include where a child is stripped nude and photographed or where the child is involved in oral-only sex, or where the child is developing or post-pubertal.

In 2010 the IWF detected 1,315 (close enough without looking it up again) individual domains with over 16,000 url’s containing CAM.

From all those numbers you can quickly get an estimate in your mind of the actual size of the issue in Ireland, and why there is so much effort by me, the GS, INTERPOL, ISPCC, Barnardo’s, and politicians who know of the background are pushing for the blocking of CAM.

This is not some frivolous request based on our collective need to expend a huge amount of our personal time briefing people and trying to explain the nature of the problem. I would be a lot richer if I moved quietly back into the IT Security space. We need to do something about this, and very quickly.

If we can disrupt the simple viewer and open trader through filtering then we will have gone a long way to restricting the ability of casual or simple viewers and traders to take up an orientation towards CAM and beyond.

It is difficult to give you a simple answer to your question but I hope that you can see from my answer that there are in fact many aspects to consider when trying to estimate the threat to children when people are viewing CAM

Thats the thing, the claim that it can be blocked isn’t true.

Look at the amount of money and lobbying that goes into stopping copyright content on the internet, the amount of time, money and resources that have gone into anything to stop child porn is only a fraction compared to what the likes of the MPAA have put into getting laws passed such as the DMCA etc.

Bottom line is it can’t easily be stopped, thats the sad fact so its better to put the resources into stopping it being made in the first place then they’ll be nothing to distribute on the internet.

If its not made in the first place this helps victims far more then just making it harder to distribute content that has been made.

While it can’t be blocked 100% on the internet ISP’s could still take some reasonable steps to make it harder to share such content but as mentioned above they won’t be able to block all content.

Hi Arch.
In fairness to the politicians, in this case they raised something that has been called for since 2004 and has effectively been buried politically. You shouldn’t underestimate the extent of influence of lobby groups who have successfully beaten back any attempt to raise this in the Oireachtas, the Dept of Justice and just about anywhere else that it should be raised.

The Gardai wrote letters to the ISP’s about this and were roundly put down. INTERPOL have made presentations to key people in Ireland and on the media and were essentially put down. I completed a report for Barnardos on the subject in 2009 and was invited to make a presentation to ‘advisors’ at the DOJ. I sent my preso screens to them to ensure that they worked on their system. They ran the preso and when they realised what I was about to say, a rep met me in the office kitchen upon my arrival and indicated that they would not allow me to challenge this subject in the manner that was obvious from my preso screens and showed me the door to the building.

In this particular case, Senator van Turnhout stuck her political neck out and with the aid of the Taoiseach’s nominees to the Senate, put forward the motion.

In this case I would advocate that you might give some credit where it is due.

Pat

Ahh yes. We’re just like China.

We really do talk a ‘good game’ in this country about child sexual abuse. Don’t we! We talk about paedophiles, rapists and we demand assurances that it will ‘never happen again’. We lamabse groups that ‘could have done more’ to protect children and lay the entire blame for sex abuse at their feet. But we really know that it is something in scoiety and that if it is to be challenged we’re going to have to face it. But suggest one measure to do anything about it and WHAMMO you run straight into opposition.

I appreciate that we ‘talk a good gane’. The question is whether we believe that we say.

In my opinion everything that is put forward should have a level of opposition, so that what is being put forward can be understood better at the risk of it being the wrong choice. How many times have errors been made in trying to fix or improve something? It happens every day and opposition can only be constructive no matter the level of effort needed to overcome it.

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” Albert Einstein.

The important thing is to get the correct action, the correct legislation.

I think we should get rid of the police, and just spend the money on helping the victims of crime. Because, like you know, people are bad and stuff, and always will be bad, so why bother, like seriously, just why bother….

That is different and just looking at the basics of the argument, police are a proven method of crime prevention and are direct in that effort.

Policing internet content is very effective in this country, we can not police other countries servers, content or users.

This does not mean we should block Irish users access to all sites from the countries that are the problem because all the content is not illegal.

Would you care to provide some references for this big statement or is this your unsubstantiated opinion?

As opposed to your unsubstantiated opinion?

Show me your evidence to the contrary?

I believe any resource that is available should be put to the protection of children and in this case it is my opinion (substantiated or not) that the end result of this tactic at it’s most successful would be less help than actual direct action at the front line of childcare.

If you clicked the link to watch the video http://cleanternet.org/ you would see the “substantiated” information about poorer countries not having the resources to combat the problem, maybe by giving direct support to these countries would be of more help?

Censoring child pornography equates to giving a cancer patient a wig and neglecting to treat the tumour. It wouldn’t stop a single predator and any would-be molesters out there will graduate anyway. Peer to peer transfer of the data enables them to see it anyway (as said above).
And child porn is not easy to accidentally find so I doubt one in three “accidental veiwers” all of a sudden becomes a paedophile. That’s like saying one in three people who accientally watch gay porn become gay.
Leaving these sites functional, disgusting as they are, makes it easier to find these monsters as they can be tracked through them (and that would be treating the tumour).

I’ve watched the video….twice. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever! It just says that Internet censorship is bad, but offers no solutions to the problem. How can you target funds at counselling victims and treating perpetrators if you can’t identify either? Why is legislation aimed at curbing child abuse and prosecuting the abuses an attack on democracy?

Also, the video is satirical in nature, the “poorer” countries that host these websites are USA, Canada, Germany, Japan, Russia, etc.

@Stephen Ramsey – totally agree.

@Bingo Bus – below.

I never mentioned counseling victims or perpetrators and the legislation is not aimed at curbing child abuse, it’s aimed at giving the permission to blocking internet content which is not specific in the slightest.

It’s like banning books or dvds that might go against one persons belief and that is incorrect to do.

The care of the children should be paramount, but the origin of these images and where they are being displayed are countries with bad child protection legislation and practices, if that was tackled head on we would see more results. In my unsubstantiated opinion as it was pointed out. *sighs*

Our countries can have global or continental, certainly joint ventures against or with a country that is giving or has difficulty in achieving human rights, child rights or crimes against humanity, so why can there not be a worldwide effort of child support that would bring down the percentage of abuse to children as that is the real crime of our times.

Gerard I’ve made no argument. I’ve merely asked you for references.

It would be as easy for me to say that ‘Where introduced, filtering has been 100% efffective in protecting children’.

You can cite the poor parts of the world if you want. This isn’t really a problem though. Your link inadvertently draws attention to another aspect of the problem – it doesn’t matter where the sites are situated – the filtering can be done in Ireland. It is being done in Norway, UK and New Zealand. End of problem.

No Jon you have not made an argument and all I said was victims are not helped by censorship which they clearly are not, I never gave percentages or facts, I only gave my opinion to which you replied to in an attacking and sensational way by claiming it was a “big statement”, if this is your opinion of my opinion, I would ask you to show me proof where it would state that this censorship has indeed helped victims of abuse.

Furthermore the link was not supplied by me so I would read carefully before attacking a persons opinion.

Filtering can only do a certain amount and as I mentioned before does nothing directly for victims of the abuse, it is done to protect the rights of internet users and does not end any problem.

Again Jon, I was not talking specifically about child porn when I mentioned that is was my opinion that it would be incorrect to ban books or dvds that might go against a persons belief, again you did not read it correctly as I only likened it to the situation.

If we could just block and ban this material, things would be great but it can not be done and while we are on the subject of books, I just had another thought. If a book publishes with banned material, should you prosecute everybody who buys it to read it unknowingly, stop the sale of books altogether or should you just prosecute the writer and publisher? It would be practice to go to the root of the problem.

@Jon West

I find you intimation that I would suggest that “people ought to have a right to be in possession of child pornography” as a personal attack and an insult and I would like you to read and understand what I write before such an intimation as this is a public medium.

None of what you have written has argued any valid point, none of it is helpful of positively suggestive (in my opinion without fact or percentages) and has shown you to be nothing more than lacking in intelligence and someone who likes to argue for the sake of saving face.

I read and re-read your post several times and I have to admit some incredulity. At the very best it was ambiguous. They are your words not mine.

If it was left open to interpritation and that was what you took from it then what does that say about you?

Could it be possible you were just looking for something to pick at?

No

PS. The people at theJournal have kindly removed my comment. I apologise for misunderstanding your point.

Apology accepted.

Blocking a domain name or IP address range is very very easy (easy get around such blocks also),

Getting physical access to a server that a site is hosted on in another country in order to access the logs to see who’s need connecting to it to upload or download data and then tracing back these IP’s to actual addresses and pinning it on a person is much much harder and requires far far more work.

Just because they can do one doesn’t make it as easy to do the other,

If eircom can send me out a letter for downloading a film they can catch these people. If everyones Internet bill went up by a few cent a month and was put into a global fund to track these people down I would be perfectly happy with that.

Sean, your talking about stuff that won’t happen, Yes you can suggest it but its unworkable and just won’t happen end of.

As I’ve mentioned already above the money and resources that goes into stopping copyright content is far far more then any of the money that goes into stopping child porn.

The notification you receive for downloading copyright content isn’t due to eircom’s leg work either its down to the movie company employing other companys to monitor known trackers, locate eircom IP’s and then ask eircom to notify you to stop downloading copyright content.

Its not the same thing at all. Your suggestion assumes an awful lot, like all laws in all countrys in the world are the exact same, they are not and never will be and that is why your suggestion is not workable.

The very fact you don’t understand that blocking and identifying a person are not as easy as each other suggests you don’t understand the workings of things like this and instead are just throwing out an ill-thought out knee jerk suggestion.

Sean, it’s not an internet problem. These ppl exist with or without the internet so why should only internet users foot the bill?

I know and it’s a terrible world we live in when movie rights are more important than kids. I would have thought the Internet would be the pedos biggest medium so I would be happy to pay.

It is a virtual flood gate Pat. As soon as they get this through there is no stopping them blocking other more valuable material. As a matter of principle you should reject this laws.
As another user has posted below …

“Denmark has introduced such a system. It is now happily being used for all sorts of censorship.”

But no system or laws are herein proposed, only the suggestion that they would like to introduce legislation in this area as part of an upcoming Bill which has yet to be written as far as I can see.

I can’t oppose on principal legislation which has not been written, when I may not be opposed on principle. If ,for example, the legislation ends up forcing ISP’s to offer a free optional service under which sites which host certain types of content are blocked, I’d be perfectly fine with that. Where it becomes a problem to me is when it provides a mechanism for the government/ISP/independent other to decide what sort of content can be blocked without my consent.

It is an idea and I agree we need ideas and should not throw any suggestion away without looking at its possible merits but do you remember a case of an Australian that was convicted for possession of an image of child porn that was actually a Simpsons cartoon if memory serves me correct?

I doubt your cgi would fly as it would be like methadone scenario and maybe we should ban controversial comments on thejournal.ie?

Just a suggestion :P

Don’t the Japanese already have that? Only it’s not cgi it’s cartoons.. Some of them have some really sick and twisted stuff in them..

And the bankers. As we are going off topic then we may as well use the usual topics they people constantly bring up regardless of the subject material.

NO to the fiscal compact :D

Bertie Ahern!

Very interesting piece. Thanks for sharing.

The problem, Nicola, is that this will do little to noting to stop child pornography. I can understand your emotional attachment to this issue but I refuse to allow the government to implement laws that can be abused by other lobby groups to get information or material that they don’t agree with blocked.

This whole issue is a red herring. Look at the larger picture.

I take it you haven’t read 1984 then..

The article above states that this will do NOTHING, let me repeat that for you, NOTHING about the problem.
This move is apparently about stopping people from “accidentally stumbling upon child porn/abuse”, but people don’t “accidentally stumble upon” it.. It’s sick shit and if you wanna find it, you need to know where to look. It’s not like searching “child porn” on google is gonna get you there, or that you’ll click on a link at another website and find it – unless the other website was pretty dodgy too.. You have to be seeking it out – there is no “accidents”.

So what is the benefit of blocking access to parts of the internet if it won’t help the existing problem? That’s simple censorship – snuck in under a fallacious appeal to emotion.. It’s manipulation to get people to accept Internet censorship.

Pedophiles existed before the Internet did. We should be attacking the cause, not the symptoms.

But it doesn’t protect children at all Nicola, that’s the whole problem.

You’re studying childcare Nicola, you clearly have no idea of the technical reasons why IT systems don’t work the way you seem to think they do.

Read some of the supporting information linked here, sit down, have a think, apply some logic.
Try not to simply put your blindfold on and hope this will actually protect children.
All the while you’re wearing that blindfold, you won’t be able to see where the real efforts need to be made to get rid of this filth.

By what percentage has child sexual abuse in Norway and Sweden been reduced since the implementation of the filter?

Mike
Good question to ask and I don’t have a ready made answer for you. But I can get information around this and post it as a reply in the next couple of days. Of Norway I can say that their block page is invoked an average of 10k to 12k times per day. I can also tell you that they have a victim identification database and are extremely efficient at processing cases where child abuse of kids in Norway is found in imagery on the internet. I will try to get an accurate answer to your question though.

Pat

How do Norway filter? Could the 10k to 12k number be partially from false positives?

Mike
The Norwegian system is based on CIRCAMP. It is a voluntary system agreed between ISP’s and government and the blacklist is police based. I believe from speaking with people intimately familiar with their system that it is very robust and does exactly what it says on the tin. I also believe that the agreement is binding on the issue of mission creep. Regarding false positives specifically, I can’t guarantee an answer to that one way or another.

Pat

a voluntary system is bad, prefer a law based one, i wonder of the senators are pushing the law just to force a voluntary system on the ISPs

“e) Be guided by transparent procedures and provide adequate safeguards, in particular to ensure that the restriction is limited to what is necessary and proportionate, and that users are informed of the reason for the restriction.”

is very vague.

No one talks about blocking child abuse material negatively impacts on our ability to attract inward investment. People talk about an Internet filter impacting our ability to attract inward investment.

Pat,

“DPI, image level blocking, url level blocking, dns level blocking – take your pick. All of these techniques are long matured and the potential issues are well understood. Stop the image and let the page through, or stop the page and all the images on it, or stop the site and notify the owner of the presence of the illegal images and reinstate the site as soon as they are removed.”

But *how* do you know what is a child porn image and what is an image on say a baby in a Pampers advert?
The technical details and the mission creep are factually the biggest issues. The emotive language of your message convinces me again that this will go completely wrong.

Believe me, I want to see those disgusting images stopped but I want to see it done the right way!

I don’t accept your position as genuine. Nobody, and no genuine charity would ever equate pedophiles with clowns, as you have done. Secondly, no genuine charity would put the worry of their inward investment before the victims themselves, as you have just done. Pedophiles are clowns?. No.! Only a very specific type of predator could make a statement like that. I know exactly what type of predator that is. You should be ashamed, except people like you cannot feel shame, or indeed any other emotion. We know what you are and we know what makes you tick. The jig is up.!

@Dhakina’s Sword – I read your ‘mission creep’ statement below first and responded to that first. You seem to have something of a bizarre sense of proportion regarding your comment re inward investment. Perhaps you should read the piece again.

The ‘inward investment’ referred to has nothing to do with ChildWatch at all. The point being made was that any filtering of child abuse material would by virtue of the fact of having filtering at all, damage inward investment into the Irish digital industry as a whole, and ChildWatch has nothing to do with that industry.

My ‘clowns’ comment? I’ve addressed abuse survivors, child protection people, politicians etc etc and I tend to call paedophiles and predators by the term ‘clowns’ because the constant use of these correct names is wearing on the psyche of everyone involved. I mean if I were talking about grooming for two hours, do you have any idea of how many times that I might use the term ‘child sex predator’ during that talk?

So if you are from the International Federation of Professional Clowns and as such take offence to my comment then I absolutely apologise.

Would that not block good old fashioned porn though? There’s nothing wrong with porn, it doesn’t do anything for me personally, but is there a risk that you could block ‘regular porn’ and potentially get these people into trouble for something that’s entirely illegal?

EM: I believe the system can be tweaked that way so it tells difference between adult porn and child porn.
There are other criterias to set as well, for example adult porn would most times use legit domains/servers, while child porn would try to hide as much information as possible regarding its source. People who does that blocking software know Internet topograhy inside out and have their ways of identifying possible child porn sources – trust me. There is of course chance than some picture or video will still display as none of the system is 100% bulletproof but error factor could be verly low anyways.

There are no tools that can tell the difference. It is not possible to tweak the tools to tell the difference.
Censorship is not the answer – education of parents, and parental monitoring of children’s usage of their internet connections. If a parent values their kid’s online protection, they should do the work themselves.

Is the first part above being done now?

Mike
The first part? As in are the GS talking directly to ISP’s re blocking?

TBH I have no idea or particular insight into what the GS are doing in this regard. The PIU are not given to telling anyone about what they do. So I wouldn’t ask

Pat

The human inspection of an illegal image, notification to the owner of the site concerned part?

Mike

these two url’s give you a great idea of how the report to blocking and/or removal system works, and the volume of material that we are dealing with:

http://www.iwf.org.uk/hotline/report-process

http://www.iwf.org.uk/resources/trends

Note that the IWF is actually an NGO operated voluntarily in conjunction with industry, police and government.

Your strange “mission creep ” statement was a red flag for me. Historically, predators hid in plain sight, in Ireland. Since the predators of the church have long since exhausted that ploy, I have been wondering where they would crop up next. Hiding in plain sight yet again?. Surely, we couldn’t be fooled the same way twice, could we?. Could a socially adept psychopathic be so audacious as to infiltrate the very organisation designed to protect children, in order to abuse those children?.

The term ‘mission creep’ has absolutely nothing to do with paedophiles or predators. Maybe you should keep that sword in your sheath until such time as you actually have an idea of what you are talking about. The term mission creep refers to the expansion of an internet filter to be used for purposes beyond that for which it was originally intended – in this case child abuse material.

I have no problem explaining anything relating to the subject as best I can, and I do listen to others debating the issues and build an understanding of those issues, but I’m afraid that the purpose and focus of your comments are not to further the debate per se, and so I’ll leave you to continue on without further reply.

So who’s stopping you discussing these issues in public?. Feel free to do so.