PORNOGRAPHY on the Internet is nothing new. Witness the fun the British tabloids had two years ago with headlines such as 鈥淪ex and the Internerd鈥�. The difference is that in 1993 there were no more than a couple of million people on the Internet worldwide, and most of those were thirtysomething and worked in academia or research. Since then, the number of people with access to the network has swelled more than tenfold with a consequent increase in the number of children who can log on.
A moral panic about the effects of this cyberporn on our children is taking hold, starting with a vengeance in the US (see: 鈥淪eeing blue鈥�). There, a bill designed to outlaw pornography on the Internet which had looked like a lost cause has now reached the House of Representatives 鈥� creating fury among civil libertarians in its wake. And Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway, a recently published report from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, is fuelling the fire nicely with claims that pornography is 鈥渙ne of the biggest, if not the biggest, recreational applications of users of computer networks鈥�.
But even if the bill becomes law and the research established fact, just how hard will it be to police the Net from day to day? The biggest obstacle lies in the Internet鈥檚 flexibility. It is well known that the network was given a decentralised structure so that it would survive even if large parts of it were damaged by a nuclear attack. One consequence is that it does not route data along a single path, and this sometimes means that the thousands of packets of data that make up a single file will travel along many hundreds of different routes.
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For a program to monitor Internet activity effectively, it would have to intercept all the pieces, identify them, put them back together into a single file, and view the resulting document before sending it on to its destination. And remember, there are many, many millions of these pieces sent every hour of every day. The resources needed to monitor all Internet activity would be simply staggering. Even today, a monitoring system would have to gather, coordinate and analyse 30 megabytes of data every second of every day.
For the time being at least, such a calculation is academic. There is no simple way for a computer system to discern the contents of a picture, let alone decide whether or not an image is suitable for widespread transmission. When a picture is digitised by a computer, it is transformed into a series of numbers, none of which will reveal a picture until the whole thing is rebuilt.
There are, however, some research groups that see the potential for this kind of monitoring software. Willy Cheu, for example, the director of IBM鈥檚 multimedia library technology group based in the US is working on pattern-recognition techniques which could 鈥渆ventually鈥� recognise subject matter such as naked bodies. This software would search for identifiable shapes and textures in a picture and compare them to known body parts. Cheu is reluctant to say when this software will be ready for release 鈥� if ever. There are myriad problems. How, for instance, would a computer distinguish between a naked 鈥済lamour鈥� shot and a family photograph on the beach?
And even if Cheu鈥檚 project, or similar pattern recognition experiments, are a success, tracing all the parts of a single transmission is extremely difficult. The TCP/lP protocol 鈥� the rules by which a file or message is broken into pieces so that it can be transmitted and reconstructed at the other end 鈥� has no space for additional information such as a description of whether it is part of a picture, a file or an e-mail message. Pattern-recognition software of the type that Cheu is working on would have to intercept all the pieces of a file, combine them and judge whether they were illegal or not before passing them on to the intended destination. The obstruction this would cause would be an enormous setback to the Internet.
If an automated monitor is not possible, a second option open to the authorities is for a group of human agents to sit with personal computers and continually browse the Internet, watching for illegal postings. If a series of pornographic images were to be discovered on a public newsgroup, the agents would work their way down the Internet address chain until they arrived at the host site which ought to have that person鈥檚 name on file.
Even this system has its failings. Anonymous mail 鈥� essential for people discussing highly sensitive issues 鈥� can be sent via an Internet computer that strips out the 鈥渇rom鈥� information before forwarding. Overall, though, the manual 鈥減olice on the beat鈥� approach appears workable.
The hard part may be persuading law enforcers to take the job on. In Britain, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has said that its members are reluctant to take responsibility for monitoring international traffic over the Internet. The ACPO knows that if the bill becomes law in the US, similar laws are likely to come into force in Europe. Nevertheless, the chief constable of West Mercia, David Blakey, says there is neither time nor capacity to police the whole network.
Even if European and American law enforcement officers did decide to collaborate on policing any decency act of the future, there are still ways to evade the long arm of the law, argues Pushpendra Mohta, cofounder of CERFnet, the world鈥檚 second largest Internet access provider (IAP). As a provider of dial-up access to the Internet via the company鈥檚 own network, Mohta pushed hard to keep CERFnet free of liability when the bill in its original draft looked like penalising everybody who carried illegal material. If American IAPs became liable for carrying offensive information, he says, another country could break ranks and declare its IAPs free of accountability. In this instance IAPs could set up shop in that country to avoid punishment.
Self-regulation
What is needed then is something that will pacify not only the American nation but the whole Internet community and the forces expected to police it. Given the gaps between international laws, the only worldwide community with the power to achieve this is the computer industry itself.
Bill Duvall, reportedly the first person to send data over what was then called the ARPANET, is now chief executive of an organisation called SurfWatch. Duvall was motivated to do something about the spread of pornography over the network after watching his 14-year-old daughter surfing. But instead of looking for a nationwide solution to a moral problem, Duvall wanted to offer a way of restricting children鈥檚 access that would suit individual families.
After a weekend鈥檚 brainstorming, Duvall produced the idea of a commercial software package that sits between the user鈥檚 browser and the Internet. The SurfWatch software contains a set of addresses of 鈥渦nrecommended鈥� sites which is updated every month from the company鈥檚 own Web site . Any address the user tries to access is first checked against the list. If it is listed and the user is under 18, the site is off-limits. At the moment, the criteria for banning a site are set by an informal gathering of parents, teachers and business people.
鈥淲e wanted to offer the capability of individual choice rather than censorship,鈥� Duvall says, and SurfWatch will soon enable parents and teachers to make their own choices of acceptable sites, with or without SurfWatch鈥檚 standard no-go list. SurfWatch could even forge a whole new industry from nothing. Ethical and political entrepreneurs could write their own lists and parents could subscribe to the one that most closely matched their beliefs.
Of course, there is no way of completely barring someone from public areas on the Internet. Duvall admits that with a little motivation and a few hours to spare, a child could get around the SurfWatch system. All they would need to do is use the Telnet program which allows one computer to log on to another computer. Using this method they can contact a computer without the SurfWatch software, and then go surfing from there.
At the top end of the market, companies that have a vested interest in making the Internet popular such as Netscape and Microsoft are working to prove that they can protect young people, without government legislation.
Microsoft has issued guidelines for the companies who will provide services on its commercial online service due to go live this autumn. The company is also working on smut-filtering software, like SurfWatch, with partners Netscape and Progressive Networks.
This flurry of activity to outlaw cyberporn upsets traditional users of the Internet. It is not hard to understand why. Once, the Internet was a free-speaking community where everyone was allowed to do their own thing. Then along came the camper-vans with parents and screaming children. While the government promises to legislate, the Internet community just wishes everybody would go away. Perhaps, if the law is enforced, and the commercial network services provide information that people really want, commerce will lead all the people away again. The Internet would then be left in peace to sink back into the academic underground it once was. And everybody will be happy.
Seeing blue
PICTURE this. A cosy evening when the dishes are packed away and the family settles down to relax. Father sits in an armchair with a book, mother shuffles some papers for work the next day and the children surf the Internet on the computer in the study. They gaze at screenfuls of text and pictures that come from the other side of the world. Occasional words and phrases, underlined and coloured blue, are links to another screen from another part of the world, and another, and another. Using the mouse to move on the World Wide Web, the children stumble on an 鈥渁dult鈥� area, pictures of naked men and women 鈥減erforming鈥� in a way that their young minds are not yet equipped to deal with.
This is the nightmare scenario that US Senator James Exon is trying to avoid. Last year, while he was watching his grandchildren surfing the Internet, the Nebraskan Democrat suddenly realised how easy it would be for them and others to come across pornographic images and download them onto their PCs.
This prompted Exon into action, and with the support of a like-minded Republican, Dan Coats, he tabled a bill calling for a limit to the unimpeded flow of poronography and lewd conversation over the Internet. Anyone who made obscene material available to children under 18 would face fines up to $100 000 and prison terms of up to 2 years. The bill was introduced to the Senate in February as part of the Telecom Reform Bill, some of which was designed to outlaw the use of telephones as publishing vehicles for indecent language.
Delays followed, however, as lawyers struggled to define terms such as 鈥渋ndecent鈥� and 鈥減ublisher鈥� in relation to the Internet. The bill very nearly died, until it got a new lease of life last month following Exon鈥檚 well-publicised unveiling of his 鈥渂lue book鈥� 鈥� a blue folder containing a selection of pornographic images taken from the Internet. The amendment was approved by a vote of 84-16, and the new Communications Decency Bill proceeded to the House of Representatives.
But even if Exon鈥檚 legislation manages to make its way through the next stage of the US legal system, any form of censorship of the Internet will face criticism, and possible counter action, from the network鈥檚 many libertarian users.
Resistance to the Exon bill takes two forms. Some contributors to Internet newsgroups think that it is the power switch to a huge Big Brother computer. This group can also cite the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which defends an individual鈥檚 freedom of speech. Newt Gingrich, the controversial Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, has made something of a political topic of the Decency Bill, calling it a 鈥渧iolation of free speech鈥�.
The other major complaint is that poorly handled legislation will make it difficult for the Internet to continue its organic growth 鈥� a growth made possible because people have been free to exchange ideas, and subsequently software, at minimum cost and with little outside interference. As things stand, there are no effective limits on what is discussed, bar some basic informal rules on taking an argument too far.
Shabbir Safdar, of the Voters Telecommunications Watch, an independent anti-censorship group that has monitored the Exon bill from the outset, believes people could be scared away from experimenting with the Internet if it becomes law. All it would take, he says, is for the operator of a public bulletin board to be arrested for handling pornography and used as an example to scare others away.