More on Wikipedia censorship in the UK

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Mike Godwin <mnemonic () gmail com>
Date: December 11, 2008 7:43:48 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: More on Wikipedia censorship in the UK


Dave,

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






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