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David Cameron's Crackdown on Child Porn Needs Some Work

Blocking Google and Bing searches won't do much to stop the spread of child abuse images.
The internet safety summit is being held at Downing Street. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Sergeant Tom Robinson RLC/MOD

UK prime minister David Cameron is hosting an “internet safety summit" today, and a clampdown on child porn was at the top of the agenda. But even with Google and Microsoft on his side, there are questions remaining about the effectiveness of his war on porn.

Shortly before of the summit, Google announced that it had developed new algorithms to block people from searching for images of child abuse. In an op-ed in the British newspaper the Daily Mail, Eric Schmidt said his company had cleaned up search results based around 100,000 queries that “might be related to the sexual abuse of kids.”  Additionally, when you search for one of 13,000 blocked terms, you’ll see a warning reminding you that child abuse material is illegal (just in case you forgot) and be directed to help. Microsoft unveiled similar commitments for their search engine, Bing.

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Cameron lost no time in claiming the moves as a personal victory, referring back to his earlier call to block illegal content. “At the time, Google and Microsoft—who cover 95 percent of the market—said blocking search results couldn’t be done, that it shouldn’t be done,” he said. “I did not accept that then and I do not accept that now. Since then, we have worked closely with both Google and Microsoft and they have made significant progress in preventing child abuse content from being returned.”

That’s all very well—child porn is perhaps the one internet vice that even the most anti-censorship web user would be willing to relinquish some internet freedom for—but you’d be forgiven for thinking the whole idea sounds a little overly simplistic.

First, there’s the problem with blocking search terms in the first place. Cameron claimed the search queries targeted, which were drawn up by child protection experts, were “unambiguous,” but that seems quite frankly impossible. There are reportedly as many as 100,000 terms on the list—for comparison, the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains 231,100 entries. There seems a real risk, then, of the algorithm overreaching and preventing web users from accessing perfectly legal content. And surely cunning child porn sites could simply come up with new words, innocent at face value, to describe their content? It’s an impossible balance: block too much and you could target legitimate sites; block too little and the whole system is ineffective.

Then there’s the fact that any safety measures Google and Bing can come up with is only useful if paedophiles are actually using those search engines to get their child porn in the first place. Thing is, we know many of them aren’t. As Former Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) chief executive Jim Gamble told UK newspaper the Telegraph, "I don't think this will make any difference with regard to protecting children from paedophiles. They don't go on to Google to search for images. They go on to the dark corners of the Internet on peer-to-peer websites."

The government does recognise this problem to some extent: they've made it a new job for GCHQ, the UK intelligence agency involved in the recent mass surveillance debacle. According to the Daily Mail, they’ll be brought in to tackle child abuse material on encrypted networks, along with the FBI in the US. Speaking to British radio show host Jeremy Vine on BBC Radio 2, Cameron seemed to take it for granted that the "brilliance" of GCHQ would find a way to track down paedophiles using the dark web. In what sounded like it could have been a promotional speech for the agency, the Telegraph reported that the prime minister called GCHQ officials "the inheritors to the people who decrypted the enigma codes in the second world war," and stated, "If you take those brains and you apply them to the problem of tackling child abuse online you'll get results."

Whether that's ultimately true remains to be seen—but if GCHQ is successful in cracking the dark web, it would have implications way beyond child pornography, and could be a major blow to the last shreds of anonymity on the web.