Well, it seems the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), an independent UK-based Internet watchdog, has got itself into what could be a major publicity debacle; one from which it simply cannot emerge without losing a lot of face.

In what seems like a genuine move to prevent UK web-surfers from accidentally stumbling across an ‘offensive’ image, and to prevent those with questionable interests getting a little fix, they have classified as offensive a Wikipedia page about German band Scorpions’ 1976 album Virgin Killer, which features an image of a naked girl on the cover.

I’ll make it clear now; in my opinion the image isn’t one I think should be available to innocent surfers. If I owned the album, I probably wouldn’t keep it anywhere it might be found without specifically looking for it.

“Ok”, you might think, “what’s bad about censoring a picture of a naked child?”, you might think. Nothing. But that’s not the bigger picture.

For a start, I can’t possibly count the number of albums I’ve seen with more than just ‘questionable’ artwork. These images have been designed, agreed, printed to vinyl covers and CD inlays, and sent to HMV, before being bought by music fans. If there’s a time to censor an image, it’s when it is created – not once it has been accepted into a culture for 32 – yes, count them – 32 years, and suddenly looks like its censorship will garner you a few publicity points. Oops, I lost my neutrality for a moment there.

Of course, there will be exceptions – extremely offensive material will always be slipping through the net somehow, and remaining unnoticed for a while before being noticed by the authorities.

Oh, wait a minute, the authorities? But the IWF doesn’t have any official authority! It’s a charity that maintains a list of potentially offensive websites or web pages. The censoring is actually implemented by ISPs who use that list to check the pages viewed by innocent surfers, and block them if they appear in the IWF list.

Again, in my opinion there’s nothing much wrong with blocking pages of an offensive nature; but when your ISP monitors every page you view, where is your privacy? Who decides what is to be censored, and what is not? What is to prevent the power of universal censorship falling into the hands of the government, leaving the innocent web-surfer unaware?

I can’t answer that.

What I can say, however, is that the way in which the IWF has ‘blocked’ the Wikipedia page in question is by intercepting the traffic to that page, and returning a 404 Not Found message (although their implementation is laughable, see bottom). This interception is performed using transparent proxies, which results in every affected user (an estimated 95% of the UK) appearing to have one of a small range of IP addresses. For the non-technically minded, this basically means that everyone in the UK viewing Wikipedia appears to be doing so from one of only a few computers.

The implication is that anyone in the UK could take advantage of this effective anonymity, and deface, destroy and vandalise Wikipedia without the risk of being traced. Obviously, Wikipedia have therefore had to block anyone from these IP addresses from editing Wikipedia pages.

That’s nice. So: the IWF has decided one particular image is potentially offensive, and so Internet censorship is arbitrarily enforced, the UK can no longer contribute to Wikipedia, and every time a UK surfer views a webpage, it is monitored.

Where will it end? Will politically-biased writing become subject to censorship? Images of war and destruction? And who decides what is to be censored? On first glance, the IWF seems to simply ‘suggest’ websites which ‘may’ be offensive, and allows ISPs to make use of this list. But which ISP wants to fall into the trap of shunning censorship, only to find their name in the tabloids for “ALLOWING ACCESS TO CHILD PORN”. You know what the Sun and Daily Mail are like. And most of their readers, who probably wouldn’t (want to) understand the deeper issues.

So, until the ISPs decide this was a bad move, or the IWF backs down and accepts it has done the Internet community a disservice, Big Brother will be watching what we want to watch, and deciding whether or not we should be allowed.

Meanwhile, the IWF continues bagging those publicity points under the banner of ‘keeping the Internet safe’.

It was only a few years back when China was the one at which we would laugh and shake our heads in dismay and disbelief. Now we must look ever so big and clever to the rest of the world.

Internet Watch Foundation… FAIL.

And by the way, if you really want to see what all the fuss is about, but think you can’t because the Wikipedia page is blocked, you are wrong. Just do a Google Image search for the album title.

Decide for yourself. Is censorship appropriate? You’ll probably say yes. I did. But the IWF hasn’t solved anything – the image is still readily available to those who know how to use Google. And previous lessons learned from Internet censorship show that audiences are driven underground, and people start actively trying to beat the system, thus rendering this type of censorship obsolete.

The image has been around since the ’70s, so I bet it’s on more websites than just Wikipedia, on more hard drives than just those who visited the Wikipedia article, and on more CD and LP shelves than you can shake a stick at.

As for the effectiveness of the actual IWF webpage block, I can say with all honesty that it is just this side of the ‘Not Effective At All’ classification. The IWF has blocked the URL of the page on which the image appears, but not the URL of the image itself. The image can still be viewed directly; but ironically the webpage which puts the image into context cannot – except it can, because the IWF seems to be inept:

Here is the IWF-blocked Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer
But you can go here if you really want to see it: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virgin_Killer

Further reading

The IWF has made a grammatically poor statement here. Sorry if the link is broken; the URL changes each time a revision is made, and the old version becomes unavailable. Great system, guys.

My ISP, BeThere, has made this statement, which could be interpreted as suitably on-the-fence, or genuinely concerned for it’s customers’ best interests, depending on how sceptical you choose to be.