Charging an establishment with the dissemination of child pornography should not be done lightly. Pornographic material containing minors is a despicable and reprehensible tack that should be snuffed out with the strongest beatstick the law can muster. The serious implications that such an allegation carries notwithstanding, the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation recently decided to level just such an accusation against Wikipedia. Rather unfortunately for the IWF, the grossly misappropriated charges were both unreasoned and telling of a systemic flaw in the IWF’s processes.

The brouhaha began on December 5 when the Internet Watch Foundation issued a warning over an article on The Scorpions’ 1976 album Virgin Killer. The warning alleged that the album cover was potentially illegal and advised ISPs to block the content on the grounds that it did indeed run afoul of UK decency laws.

The IWF subsequently added both the article and the cover’s detail page to a blacklist which has been adopted by a number of ISPs that service more than 95% of the United Kingdom’s internet users. Traffic to Wikipedia originating in the UK was subsequently routed through any one of six proxy servers that contain this growing blacklist of illegal content.

While such a mechanism is sufficient to block many individuals, the Wikipedia administrator’s noticeboard described the broader inefficacy of such a system.

The IWFs decision has been carried out very ineffectively. Two URLs—the article and the description page of the image—were blocked. This unnecessarily censored the text of the article and the image’s description page while leaving the image itself easily accessible by varying the URL slightly or using a direct link to Wikimedia’s image server, upload.wikimedia.org. The IWFs actions have thus greatly inconvenienced thousands of contributors who have never even heard of Virgin Killer, while doing nothing to prevent anyone wishing to view the image for whatever reason from doing so.

A more appropriate course of action, from a purely technical point of view, would have been to block the image file itself and the directory in which generated thumbnails reside, rather than two pages that happen to contain it, thus actually blocking the image whilst causing no collateral censorship. Had the IWF contacted the Wikimedia Foundation before acting, this could have been explained to them.

The system also crippled Wikipedia’s ability to identify vandals. As the product of millions of anonymous contributions, the Wikimedia Foundation relies on the ability to identify and remove malicious contributors by IP address. Given that the sum of the UK now appeared to originate from just six addresses, Wikipedia was forced to place a blanket-ban on edits and submissions from the UK.

A small subset of users on smaller ISPs also experienced a complete inability to access any content hosted on Wikipedia due to poor use of BGP and other routing mistakes. These mistakes are the very same which rendered much of the world unable to access YouTube when Pakistan attempted to block it on grounds of religious outrage.

Technical issues aside, the ethical ramifications of the IWF’s actions are of much greater concern. A block on the article potentially represents impingement on the basic right to receive and impart information. This may violate Article 10 in the European Convention on Human Rights which guarantees the right to freely exchange information within the limitations prescribed by law. Given that the image in question has never run afoul of the law, this violation seems all the more likely.

Alternatively, the image itself could have been separately blocked by the ISPs with whom the IWF associates. By executing their block in the fashion chosen, the foundation has clearly demonstrated it holds little understanding for the operation of the Internet. This is a chilling revelation for an organization that acts to “police” the Internet.

Lastly, the IWF’s policy to preemptively block content without inquiry flatly disregards an individual’s or institution’s presumed innocence in western law. Western jurisprudence places the burden of proof at the feet of the plaintiff, but the IWF seems content to shift this burden to the defendant who must then fight the presumption of guilt to prove the content’s legality.

Perhaps the most disturbing component of the IWF’s recent activities lies in the statement given at the conclusion of these events. In a December 10 statement posted to their website, the IWF backtracked on their original outcry based on actual research into the case. “The IWF board has today considered [its previous] findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case, and – in the light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability – the decision has been taken to remove this web page from our list,” the statement said.

Indeed, Virgin Killer’s cover art has been widely available since 1976 and present on Wikipedia since June of 2005. The IWF’s own statements make the tacit implication that their content review team did not effectively consider a raft of evidence that contravened their initial decision.

As the Internet Watch Foundation goes down swinging to the Streisand Effect, it is clear that their most recent actions against Wikipedia have revealed the need for systemic changes in their policies and procedures. An organization dedicated to curtailing the electronic dissemination of pedophilic material should have a better grasp on the scope and function of both their domain and the applicable laws.