Wikileaks

[Richard Clayton]

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Wikileaks has just published a copy of "the secret Internet censorship
list for Denmark" dating from February 2008.

The vast majority of the entries are for sites whose names suggest that
they would contain child sexual abuse images, the remainder of the names
are a bit more anodyne.

I haven't provided a link to this, because they have, somewhat
spuriously in my view, provided a set of clickable links to the sites
and this complicates the legal situation ...  in particular the IWF has
been known to recommend the removal / blocking of pages that consist to
links to illegal material. 

There are several points worth noting about the list:

The list contains only hostnames -- whereas the IWF list contains rather
more specific URLs (unless the site contains a lot of material, when
they use the hostname). Nevertheless, it is 3883 long (about twice the
length of the average IWF list).

It contains a number of apparent errors (dot missing after "www")

It contains one site with nyud.net appended (meaning that they don't
understand how the "Coral Content Distribution Network" functions)

        try this link if you don't either :)

        http://www.google.com.nyud.net/search?q=coral+nyud

It contains a number of sites that were hosted on Geocities... Since
Yahoo! removes abusive sites reported to them within 20 minutes (and are
members of NCMEC) this means that either Denmark do not pass reports to
other INHOPE members, or that the FBI were operating these sites in some
sort of sting operation...

The final point to note is that Wikileaks provide the opportunity to
access the site from various countries, one of which is the UK. However,
this is entirely misleading -- its merely a UK domain name, the actual
server you connect to is in Sweden!  At present the page does not appear
to be on the IWF list...

There's doubtless more to learn about this list (even though it is so
old that some of the sites will have disappeared long ago [one would
hope "all" but that's not how these things go]), but it is necessary to
proceed with considerable caution since accessing child sexual abuse
images is a serious criminal offence, and there is no statutory defence
available for curiosity, or even academic research into blocking systems

- -- 
richard                                              Richard Clayton

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.         Benjamin Franklin


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