TORONTO – Taking a one-size-fits-all approach to tackling illegal content on the Internet won’t work, says Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa.
Geist made his comments at the conclusion of a panel discussion on illegal content and lawful access, during the Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto on Monday.
Among the illegal online content discussed were child pornography, hate messages, defamation, copyright infringement, and broader issues of legality ranging from terrorism to spam e-mail. Each of these criminal activities raises different legal issues, Geist said. For example, while it’s illegal to create, distribute and access child pornography, the same is not true of hate literature, which is only illegal to publish and distribute, not view.
“I think there is a tendency to lump all of these evils together, and say, ‘If we can do it for child pornography and child abuse, then surely we can do it for hate,’” Geist said.
However, as long as the “law of the land” states that it isn’t illegal to access hate literature, the approach taken to lawful access from an Internet perspective needs to be consistent with current laws, Geist said.
If a hate site is located in Canada, it’s easy enough to have it taken down, Geist said. It becomes a problem when the site’s server is located outside the country.
So while having Canadian ISPs block content from foreign-hosted hate sites seems like the right thing to do, it amounts to censorship.
“We need to err on the side of free speech”, Geist said. He also noted that if there is a shift toward an increased ability to block or take down sites, it must be done in a transparent and accountable fashion.
Earlier in the discussion, Len Rudner, national director of community relations for the Canadian Jewish Congress, questioned when government and ISPs would consider there was enough reason to block hate-filled Internet communications from entering the country.
Rudner presented a series of slides that showed an increasingly violent blog and e-mail campaign by an American white supremacist who encouraged his loyal supporters to kill a Canadian human rights lawyer, employees of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, an Edmonton reporter, and eventually all Jewish Canadians.
“The Canadian Jewish Congress has a deep appreciation for the rule of law and for the value of free speech. But to be honest with you, we’ve never believed that free speech was an absolute right or that the Canadian Charter should be a suicide note,” Rudner said.
“The time has come for government agencies, law enforcement agencies, groups like Canadian Jewish Congress, and ISPs to sit down at the same table and develop a strategy (to deal with the issue of foreign-based hate content entering Canada),” Rudner said.
David Butt, a partner at Paul Gillespie Consulting, said the problem is that parliament’s laws are illogical in the hate realm.
“Let’s look at the child abuse image law. It’s illegal to produce the stuff, it’s illegal to disseminate the stuff, so it’s a no-brainer to say that it’s also illegal to consume it because there isn’t supposed to be anything out there to consume in the first place,” Butt said.
“They’ve got to do the same thing with hate. It’s as simple as that,” he said. “Parliament just has to get its act together. The law has to stop being an ass. It has to correct that illogicality, and then Bell and Rogers have all the coverage they need to go ahead and block hate just as robustly as they block child abuse images.”
Butt’s consulting organization was founded by Paul Gillespie, a former Toronto police officer turned law enforcement consultant, who was instrumental in the creation of the Child Exploitation Tracking System (CETS) that has been used by police forces around the world to successfully track down child predators on the Internet.
Gillespie also took part in the panel and gave a CETS progress report. As of this month, CETS is being used in Canada, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Italy and Brazil, and it’s being developed in Australia, the United States, Spain, Chile, Colombia and Romania.
Despite best efforts, law enforcement agencies in Canada are still at least five years behind the criminals who sexually exploit children on the Internet, Gillespie said.
Rogers Communications has joined a number of initiatives aimed at fighting the online exploitation of children, said Pam Dinsmore, vice-president of regulatory affairs for the company’s broadband and video division. These initiatives include the Canadian Coalition Against Internet Child Exploitation (C-CAICE), Cybertip.ca, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P), and Project Cleanfeed Canada.
“These are complicated issues. They’re not easy to deal with,” Dinsmore said, adding that it took a year and a half of very careful consideration before Rogers decided to join Project Cleanfeed, which is a voluntary ISP-level initiative to block customer access to child sexual exploitation images on foreign Web sites.
