Internet Watch Foundation - Blacklist of Web Pages

Blacklist of Web Pages

The IWF compiles and maintains a list of URLs for individual webpages with child sexual abuse content. A whole website will only be included on the list if that whole domain is dedicated to the distribution of child sexual abuse images. It says "every URL on the list depicts indecent images of children, advertisements for or links to such content, on a publicly available website. The list typically contains 500 - 800 URLs at any one time and is updated twice a day to ensure all entries are still live". Offending UK URLs are not listed as they are taken down very quickly; URLs elsewhere are listed only until they are removed. The list is applied by the ISPs of 95% of commercial Internet customers in the UK. According to the IWF website, blocking applies only to potentially criminal URLs related to child sexual abuse content on publicly available websites; the distribution of images through other channels such as peer-to-peer is a matter for "our police partners", and IWF has no plans to extend the type of content included on the list.

A staff of four police-trained analysts are responsible for this work, and the director of the service has claimed that the analysts are capable of adding an average of 65-80 new URLs to the list each week, and act on reports received from the public rather than pursuing investigative research.

Between 2004 and 2006, BT Group introduced its Cleanfeed technology which was then used by 80% of internet service providers. BT spokesman Jon Carter described Cleanfeed's function as "to block access to illegal Web sites that are listed by the Internet Watch Foundation", and described it as essentially a server hosting a filter that checked requested URLs for Web sites on the IWF list, and returning an error message of "Web site not found" for positive matches.

In 2006, Home Office minister Alan Campbell pledged that all ISPs would block access to child abuse websites by the end of 2007. By the middle of 2006 the government reported that 90% of domestic broadband connections were either currently blocking or had plans to by the end of the year. The target for 100% coverage was set for the end of 2007, however in the middle of 2008 it stood at 95%. In February 2009, the Government said that it is looking at ways to cover the final 5%. In an interview in March 2009, a Home Office spokesperson mistakenly thought that the IWF deleted illegal content, and didn't look at the content they rate.

Although the IWF's blacklist causes content to be censored even if the content has not been found to be illegal by a court of law, IWF Director of Communications Sarah Robertson claimed, on 8 December 2008, that the IWF is opposed to the censorship of legal content. In the case of the IWF's blacklisting of cover art hosted on Wikipedia just a few days prior, she claimed that “The IWF found the image to be illegal”, despite the body not having any legal jurisdiction to do so.

In March 2009 a Home Office spokesperson said that ISPs were being pressured to sign up to the IWF's blacklist in order to block child pornography websites and said that there was no alternative to using the IWF's blacklist. One of the ISPs which refused to subscribe to the blacklist, Zen Internet, has said that it has "concerns over its effectiveness".

As of 2009, the blacklist was said to contain about 450 URLs. A 2009 study by researcher Richard Clayton at the University of Cambridge found that about a quarter of them were specific pages on otherwise legitimate free file hosting services, among them RapidShare, Megaupload, SendSpace and Zshare. Listing these pages on the confidential blacklist of pages would cause all accesses to the sites hosting them to be referred to the IWF, potentially causing unintended interference as discussed below.