BT Group's broadband Internet customers won't be seeing child porn even by accident if they can help it: The Internet service provider announced over the weekend they will install elaborate filtering to block access to suspected child porn sites, based on a list compiled by watchdog group the Internet Watch Foundation and reviewed by the Home Office.
BT calls the plan Cleanfeed and launched a trial run June 7, and will make it available to their full base of one million retail broadband customers within the coming weeks, according to a company statement. It's designed to intercept a user request to access any site on the list and go through two filters before blocking the site with a "site not found" error message if the site is determined to be a known repository of child porn.
BT said they were not intending the new program to launch any kind of broad content censorship. "In the U.K., because it is illegal to view these images, we can stop an illegal activity," the company's retail services chief, Pierre Danon, told reporters, adding that the blocking scheme won't reach out to such sites as actual or alleged "hate" sites, or sites promoting terrorism, or even sites pirating copyrighted materials. "We do not intend to, nor can we, extend [the program] to other areas," he said.
"At least they're doing two levels of filtering," said Adult Sites Against Child Pornography executive director Joan Irvine, whose group is working on developing a filtering system of its own for member sites. "It sounds like they are making an effort to make sure they don't filter out sites that are legitimate sites. By doing that double filtering, they're making sure they allow people access to legitimate sites."
Viewing child porn is illegal in Britain under the country's 1978 Child Protection Act.
In other news on the fight against child porn:
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Yahoo has provoked a probe into whether an Albuquerque man is sharing child porn, after he was said to have posted fourteen "questionable" pictures on Yahoo Groups and the Internet portal/search engine tipped off state police. Authorities say they won't bring charges until a full analysis of three computers seized from his home is done by the state's crime lab.
SIRACUSE, Italy – Nine Italian Websites have been shut down by postal police, after a prosecutor's office ordered the shutdown when the sites were determined to be child porn sites. The sites actually included warnings for parents to download filters to keep children from seeing the materials. This brings the total of such sites shut down here to fifteen.
SCRANTON, Pa. – From 1995 through 2000, no child porn cases were filed in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania. In 2001, three were filed. In 2002, one. In 2003, five. Thus far this year, two. Child porn fighting, this jurisdiction is discovering, is now a high-tech job that seems to be turning up child porn where the pre-Internet era seemed difficult if not impossible for finding where it did exist.
AIKEN, S.C. – Former New Ellenton, South Carolina police chief Van McMillan has been cleared of charges that he viewed child porn on a city computer. An official investigation – which may have been launched when a junior police officer said McMillan had viewed child porn – determined the city's computer network had problems with pop-up ads referencing porn sites including child porn, and that no actual images were found on McMillan's computer.
