http://ubiwar.com/2010/02/04/crowdsourcing-counterterrorism/

by Tim Stevens

Lets be clear about this: the UK government’s new initiative for reporting hate, extremism and terrorism online has a very limited shelf-life. On the other hand, what else could government have done?

To be fair to the Home Office, they have made it perfectly clear that “most hateful or violent website content is not illegal. While you may come across a lot of things on the internet that offend you, very little of it is actually illegal.” Good call, and a message it’s good to see reinforced. They also clearly indicate what steps you can take if you really think it falls foul of the indicators of potential illegality: first enquire of website administrators, then hosts, and contact police only as a last resort. The reporting page is here.

The new scheme provides a reporting mechanism direct to a five-person team in Whitehall, within the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) Prevent Delivery Unit. This is the Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit, and they will decide if content submitted for review falls foul of legislation, and may be subject to Section 3 of the Terrorism Act (2006). This allows for notice-and-takedown (NTD) of content, although has yet to be used, mainly because it’s so difficult to decide what might, for example, constitute the ‘glorification’ of terrorism, and allied offences.

If we assume for now that there is even an argument for trying to remove certain types of material from the web then there are still problems with this scheme:

• it will probably be hijacked by single-issue groups (at least to start with)
• how does government maintain the visibility of this scheme?
• how are police competent to judge legality?
• it will have no transnational effect
• it won’t actually make any difference to the practical CT objectives of Whitehall
• how is this related to the ‘blacklist’ of sites that the Office of Security and Counterterrorism may or may not maintain?

Notwithstanding its minimal contribution to countering the production and consumption of extremist media, government opens itself up to potential ridicule, although I don’t think anyone’s going to be paying this much attention after a while.

It does have one important function, however. Government has painted itself into a corner over ‘internet terrorism’ and the role of content in radicalisation, etc. It has therefore spent two years trying to meet the challenge of ex-Home Secretary Jacqui Smith when she announced she wanted a zero-tolerance approach to online terrorist content. Pretty much everything else has failed and this scheme does have a communicative effect, even if it has little practical utility. What it can say, if handled properly, is a simple message: you cannot use the UK as a platform for terrorist media without censure. It’s a “sorry, you can’t do that here” statement that could fit snugly into a renewed attempt to demonstrate what exactly it is that the UK stands for.

This approach has worked with online child sexual abuse imagery, mediated by the Internet Watch Foundation, and the UK is no longer regarded as a place where paedophiles can exchange material with impunity. The total volume hasn’t changed but the ability to operate in UK cyberspace has. A similar concept seems to underpin this new initiative, which “aims to make the internet a more hostile environment for terrorists and violent extremists who seek to exploit modern technology.”

The whole thing can be derailed by one poor decision, of course, so the scheme has to be consistent from the start. Hopefully, it won’t actively seek to issue NTDs, let alone pursue prosecutions, and ‘do nothing’ should be the default position, as I always maintain.

In conclusion, this reporting and adjudication mechanism looks to be the ‘least worst’ thing government could have done. It hasn’t announced that this will ’solve’ the problems as they see it, and it hasn’t sought to grab the headlines by launching it. If managed well, this could have some real effect on online behaviours government sees as undesirable. It takes the heat off ISPs and hosting companies, restores a degree of responsibility to consumers, and is unequivocal that there is actually very little content likely to be affected.

At the end of the day, if you don’t like something, don’t read it or watch it. It won’t go away, whatever government does, but you can just go somewhere else, leaving the miniscule minority of ‘problematic’ internet users to do what they’re going to do anyway. They will shift their hosts abroad, as most of them did long ago, and carry on regardless. And they will do so knowing that the UK will not allow them to base their activities there.