WebMink
Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Why IWF's Wikipedia Reversal Is Not Enough

While I was delighted to see the UK's morality police at the Internet Watch Foundation show a laudable honesty in backing down over their censorship of a learned article covering a decades-old controversy over an album cover, I was struck by the response from Mike Godwin, who is chief counsel to the Wikimedia Foundation. Mike sent it to a mailing list to which I subscribed and, with his permission, I've reproduced his response here in full as it makes very important points about why our freedoms are still at risk becuase of the worthy, yet flawed, approach of the IWF.

As general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation, I was one of the handful of people mobilized in our rapid response to Wikipedia's being censored in the United Kingdom as a result of Internet Watch Foundation's blacklist.

Although the Foundation (and Wikipedia users) are grateful that the Internet Watch Foundation changed its mind (after concerted protest from us and from our community), there is still plenty to be troubled by in the operations of the Internet Watch Foundation and its blacklist.

First of all, the IWF's blacklist is not at all transparent to users -- try to view a web page blocked as a result of the IWF's blacklist, and you get an error message that doesn't indicate that censorship is happening.

Second, the IWF's appeals process is also less than transparent. When we first challenged the IWF's blocking of Wikipedia content (the full text of the article, not just blocking of the offending but lawful image), we were soon told that there had been an appeal of the block but that Wikipedia had lost. Who represented Wikipedia in that appeals process? I asked that question immediately, and discovered that, of course, no one had represented our side.

Third, it's clear that IWF relies for its expertise on the question of whether content might be "potentially illegal" by talking to pro-censorship law-enforcement entities. This is not the way to operate if you want to understand freedom of expression as an expansive rather than a cramped and restricted freedom. Policemen and prosecutors tend to think of all the ways they can view an act as criminal -- you need civil libertarians (ideally lawyers trained in the theory of freedom of speech) to balance the perspective of law-enforcement personnel, if freedom is to mean anything in your society.

Finally, it is worth noting that the particular means by which censorship is implemented via the IWF blacklist is one that doesn't scale well. It may be all too easy for IWF to blacklist a marginal porn site and have almost all UK ISPs route communications with that site through a proxy server that blocks particular content. But that sort of blunt-instrument approach hardly scales when you're dealing with a top-ten website like Wikipedia, which relies on contributions from many hundreds of thousands of uses all around the world. Wikipedia's own need to prevent vandalism means that we have to be able to identify and block particular IP addresses where vandalism may originate -- the implementations of the blacklist by UK ISPs ensured that, to Wikipedia's servers, most contributions were coming from a small number of IP addresses. This meant that any attempt to block a vandal meant disempowering a huge collateral number of constructive contributors in the United Kingdom.

Even though we won this particular censorship skirmish, it bears repeating that the IWF signifies a very problematic approach to content control by governments, including, sadly, the United Kingdom. Not only is the process obscure, transparent, arbitrary, and capricious, but also, because the IWF is not itself a governmental entity, it is essentially unaccountable to the public it is supposed to be serving. That is something that citizens in the UK and elsewhere may feel requires some reform.


--Mike Godwin
General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation

Update: Removed the Google video embeds that were messing up Ubuntu viewers, let me know if there are other issues.

posted at 9:57 PM (UK) | |