In the run up to an election …..

We know that a General Election is coming in the UK. The current government is now in the last Parliamentary session before they must prorogue Parliament and send members back to their constituencies to seek re-election. The last date that the election can be held is June 2010 - that is the time when the 5 year maximum period runs out.

So, the Government must go to the country. The likelihood is that the election will be before the absolute last date, possibly on Thursday 6th May. This is the date already set-aside for district council elections in England so it would make sense for the General Election to be held on the same day.

Of course, the election may come sooner and The Crusher hears whispers that a date in March may already be in consideration.

The recent State Opening of Parliament (18th November) saw one of the shortest Queen’s Speech ever as plans for future legislation were cut back and cut back to the absolute minimum. Many expected measures were dropped in the rush to cut back to what the Govt. thought they might just be able to squeexe through before the election. Perhaps the headline piece was the Digital Economy Bill which has now received its Second Reading in the House of Lords. This rather contentious piece now passes to the committee stage which will not now take place until January. That is beginning to look mighty close to the election. The Crusher is minded to think that there may be very little of the contents of the Queen’s Speech that will actually make it all the way to the Statute Book.

But - as we now run up to the election, and the State Opening was perhaps the first and opening element of the election campaign, a look at something elsewhere in Europe. A General Election was held in Portugal on Sunday 26th September. Posters across the country exhorted the population to cast their vote. But one poster caught the eye of The Crusher - a large billboard alongside the main road leading to the airport just outside central Lisbon.

Now, clearly child protection is an issue in Portugal as it is here in the UK. Perhaps we are less likely to see campaigning here on this particular front. Translated, the poster reads:

“If you want to provide paedophiles with freedom, continue to vote as you would normally. For chemical castration of these criminals and to change Portugal, vote MMS.”

This particular party did not win the majority mandate - the election returned the previous centre-left government but with a reduced majority.

Somehow it seems unlikely that we will see this poster reproduced here in the run up to the General Election.

Joined up thinking?

The Parliamentary Internet Conference held at Portcullis House, House of Commons, on 15th October was an interesting day - not just an opportunity to hear Ed. Richards (CEO Ofcom), Martha Lane Fox, Stephen Timms and others but also the opportunity for the All Party Communications Group (apComms) to release its report into its inquiry, ‘Can we keep our hands off the net?’

apComms called for evidence and submissions over the summer (during the Parliamentary recess - a period that most people link with lack of work and extra long foreign holidays for our elected servants) and has now put together a report and a series of key recommendations. There are 11 recommendations on a wide range of topics, from Privacy to dealing with illegal (or ‘unlawful’ as the noble Lord, the Earl of Erroll corrected) file sharing, from behavioural advertising to eSafety tuition in schools.

But, The Crusher was rather taken with two recommendations that appear to be at opposite ends of an argument.

There has been much discussion about the likelihood of Government mandating the filtering of child abuse sexual imagery at the network level by ISPs. In 2007, Ministers set a target of 100% consumer broadband circuits to be filtered - so far that target has not been reached although there is suggestion that the proportion of consumer circuits that are now subject to filtering is in the mid to high 90s% range.

Recommendation 7 is that the Government does not legislate to enforce the deployment of blocking systems based on the IWF lists. This has the potential to damage future attempts to fix problems through self-regulation and will thus, in the long term be counterproductive.

The thinking here is that all major ISPs already block access to child abuse images and that any action to force others to take action will be counterproductive as it militates against attempts to find self-regulatory solutions to other problems.

OK, that is fairly clear although there may be some issue with the perception of the extent of current filtering practice. Whilst the number of consumer circuits with filtering in place may be in the mid to high 90% range, these may well be as a result of the actions of fewer than 10 large ISPs. The Crusher understands that the number of ISPs currently implementing child abuse filtering may well only be in the order of 20 to 30 - with some 270 plus mainly medium to small ISPs not currently implementing any form of network level filtering.

The report then goes on to consider the problem of malware infected machines. Now machines that are infected with malware makes them likely to become part of a large scale ‘botnet’ and potential distributed sources of junk email and denial of service attacks. The problem is that the infected machines are not on the ISP network and are machines owned and used by end users who may have greater or lesser understanding of the security implications or needs of always on broadband Internet connectivity.

Recommendation 10 is that there should be a voluntary code for ISPs relating to the detection of and effective dealing with, malware infected machines in the UK. If this voluntary approach fails to yield results in a timely manner, then Ofcom should unilaterally create and impose sich a code on the UK ISP industry.

The report notes that ISPs have systems in place to proactively filter incoming junk mail but do not take actions to filter outgoing junk. The report continues, ‘a reduction in compromised end user machines is essential to make the Internet a dafer place, so the ISPs need to act voluntarily as a group to improve the situation ….. if the ISPs cannot voluntarily agree to act, the report sees Ofcom as the appropriate regulator to impose a compulsory regime.

Interesting stuff. Filtering out material from infected machines will not be easy and will not be cheap - so additional development and application costs for the ISP (and, ultimately the end user). But, note the sting in the tail here - if self-regulation does not work then a compulsory regime should be imposed.

The Crusher sees some lack of joined up thinking here. On the one hand the report suggests that mandatory child sexual abuse imagery filtering should not be applied as it militates against self-regulation in other areas - and then recommends a compulsory regime for filtering the output of malware infected machines, albeit in the event of a failure of self-regulatory approaches.

The Crusher is intrigued: a self regulatory approach has seen pretty well all ISPs implement filtering to identify and remove incoming junk mail and virus infected items. For most that has been a commercial decision but there is undoubtedly a cost for the ISP. Self regulation is now being proposed to require ISPs to filter and remove outgoing junk and infected items. There may also be actions in relation to unlawful (thank you Merlin!) file sharing. But, the one thing that is illegal is to view child sexual abuse imagery (it is a Criminal offence under the Sexual Offences Act to view obscene images of children) - there is self-regulation but mandatory filtering is not recommended. Yet it is for dealing with malware - and as far as I am aware it is not yet a criminal offence to leave one’s Internet connected computer unsecured, without anti-virus or firewall protection.

The apComms group seems to have have worked on elements individually and with application of specific evidence - but the linkage of items from one part to another seems to have failed. Joined up thinking in the final output would have been helpful.

The full copy of the apComms report can be found here