[Infowarrior] - UK Web Censor: A victory for the terrorists

[Richard Forno]

A victory for the terrorists
Website censorship erodes the very freedoms that the home secretary  
purports to defend

           o John Ozimek
           o guardian.co.uk,
           o Sunday November 02 2008 20.00 GMT


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/02/uksecurity-internet

The UK has a very real problem with websites that incite terrorism,  
and if we are not careful the government's preferred cure could be as  
bad as the disease itself. Faced with the impossibility of policing  
material that originates from abroad, the home secretary is now  
planning to appoint herself the UK's first official censor.

In 2006, the government passed a law banning the display of material  
that "directly or indirectly" encouraged terrorism.

"Direct encouragement" is easy to spot. It includes virtually all  
website that urge true believers to "kill the infidel". Not, however,  
a site featuring Achmed, the dead terrorist, as that is clearly  
satire. "Indirect" is a little harder to pin down. Apparently this is  
"glorification of the commission or preparation" of certain acts,  
together with a nudge that such acts would be a good idea right now.

If you do come across incitement to terrorism on the internet, report  
it to your nearest police constable. They will then issue the  
"relevant person" with a "take-down" notice: and in quaint British  
fashion, the site must be down within two working days, excluding  
Christmas or Good Friday, but not including Eid. Or else.

An eternal difficulty with such legislation is that "one person's  
terrorist is someone else's freedom fighter". The law may be outwardly  
neutral: but it is focussed pretty exclusively on muslim terrorism.  
You won't find many web sites that glorify western covert ops being  
reported or closed down.

Or to put it another way: "Lyrical Terrorist", Samima Malik was first  
found guilty, then cleared, of inciting terrorism through poetry. It  
seems unlikely in the extreme that our laws would ever be used against  
the freelance anti-terrorism websites – mostly US-based – that wage a  
constant, possibly illegal and sometimes seriously unpleasant  
citizens' war against the "axis of evil".

I also know, or hope I know, that the decision to close a site will  
not be left in the hands of humble beat officers, who have after all,  
previously arrested wearers of anti-Blair t-shirts for  
"offensiveness". That said, I'm not sure I trust more senior policemen  
either. After all, it was an officer with the met's obscene  
publications unit who leant on satirical site "thinkofthechildren" on  
the grounds it "could" incite violence. There's a weasel word, if ever  
there was one: so many things "could" glorify terrorism.

Sadly, this only catches UK-hosted websites, which are a small  
proportion of the whole: the most prolific inciters of terrorism lie  
well beyond the reach of the most dedicated UK copper. This is a  
biased law, but it's also a figleaf: a symptom of government  
pretending that something can be done.

Yet government now wishes to do more. Recently, the home office  
informed me that "the government has been working … to develop  
filtering software [to protect] against illegal material that promotes  
or encourages terrorism".

However, just because the home secretary doesn't like something  
doesn't make it "illegal". In fact, "illegal" material doesn't  
actually exist, at least, not as such. Terrorism material, in British  
Law, is defined largely – albeit not exclusively – by the intent of  
the person possessing it. The Catholic church may once have possessed  
an index of banned books: we do not.

There is altogether too much of the lynch mob about this proposal: to  
go after the devil, we'd happily chop down every law in the land to do  
so. Is that really what we expect from one of the most senior  
ministers in the land?

Herein lies the real risk from terrorism. It's all very well arguing  
that terrorism sites are pernicious, evil, etc. But what the home  
office is doing is equally dangerous. Substituting police opinion for  
due process may be operationally efficient: but it is an erosion of  
legality.

Replacing a properly enacted power to block banned sites with a  
filtering process that will permit the home secretary to censor by  
executive fiat strikes at the core of civil liberties in this country.

Terrorism is serious stuff; so too are some of its remedies.