ISPs to block child porn sites in Canada

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 24 November 2006 16:38

Your IT - Entertainment

Mirroring a similar program in the UK, Canada’s major ISPs have banded together to support ‘Project Cleanfeed Canada’ to block child porn sites from access by Canadians. It’s a good start, but there’s still a long way to go.

Cybertip.ca, Canada’s national tipline for reporting child sexual exploitation, with a richly resourced website of information, has launched Project Cleanfeed Canada, based on the successful UK launch of their own Project Cleanfeed in 2004.

Working with major Canadian ISPs such as Rogers, Telus, Bell Canada, Shaw, SaskTel, MTS Allstream and Videotron, 500 and 800 offending sites will be blocked from access by their Canadian customers.

The system works through reports from the public on sites considered offensive or illegal, and along with sites they have discovered themselves, Cybertip.ca will rate the sites and inform ISPs of which sites and IP addresses need to be blocked.

The system is still some weeks away from actually starting up, with some ISP participants scheduled to come onstream in a 3 month timeframe, and others longer after that who are the smaller ISPs that didn’t join in the first wave of the service becoming available.

There is some concern that the system won’t solve the problem, as people actually seriously interested in finding and distributing child porn won’t be doing from publicly accessible websites, but those with a password protected entry in an area of a website which for all intents and purposes looks like a completely different site altogether.

The detection of these types of camouflaged sites needs continual law enforcement investigation into the underbelly of the online world, while Cybertip.ca also has a never ending battle on its hands to educated parents, children and Internet users in general about safety on the Internet.

Cybertip says that the IP addresses of people who either inadvertently landed on one of the blocked pages, or sought out the content, won’t be tracked by the participating ISPs. They say it’s not going to be used to monitor who’s doing what, just to prevent people from accessing the sites in Canada, whether by accident or on purpose.

Some people worry that, while the blocking of child porn websites is very desirable for the online and real world safety of our children, that this technology might also be used in the future to arbitrarily block access to websites that the government of the day doesn’t want their people to have access to. Clearly, any site can be blocked if child porn websites can be blocked, and it’s de rigueur in some countries around the world.

China is a well known example for having the ‘Great Firewall of China’ blocking access to all kinds of sites, both good sites and bad ones that should be blocked. They have also blocked global news websites with the most recent episode being with the Wikipedia on, Wikipedia off, then on, and back off again story of the past couple of weeks and well into the past.

We applaud Cybertip.ca’s initiative in getting this project up and running. It’s already in the UK, and is likely being considered by other Commonwealth countries such as Australia and New Zealand, with something similar no doubt underway in the US and other countries as well.

In Australia, visit the NetAlert website for local information on how to best protect yourself and your family from today’s online dangers.