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Comment by thecopy | Hacker News Reader

A bigger question is why does the police spend time looking for pornography? What type of society is the UK developing into?

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This is from 20 years ago, the idea was to scan a selection of laptops going through border control on Eurostar, although it only worked on PCs:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/150465.stm

We (the UK) recently experienced a scandal where a celebrity was allegedly a prolific paedophile. After his death it transpired that numerous incidents had been reported and covered up by the police and the BBC (his main employer).

So now, guess what, the same police and BBC have transformed to be holier than thou organisations free to cast judgement on anyone they don't like because this will absolve them of any guilt regarding past failures (obviously).

Isn't this specifically intended to identify images of child abuse though, rather than rifle through the average users pornhub cache?

Yes, but we are in fact getting a nation wide porn filter in the near future.

Are we? Source?

I believe they are referring to the opt-out default filter isp's have been enabling. Not sure on the laws surrounding it.

No laws requiring ISPs to apply filters. It's just a voluntary agreement between ISPs and the Government. The Digital Economy Act 2017 has provisions in it to allow ISPs to apply default filters if subscribers agree to them in terms of service.

There are requirements in the DEA 2017 for 'adult' websites to verify the age of people who visit the site with the threat of their website being blocked if they don't comply. Check openrightsgroup.org for more on this

I think they just want to introduce a generation of teenages to VPN's because any sane person can see how this is going to go, that's assuming any site outside the UK even bothers to comply.

> to verify the age of people which is just silly. because they only need to ask for your age.

You're missing one important detail: the reason the agreement is 'voluntary' is that the Government threatened to force ISPs to do it through law if they didn't volunteer.

Voluntold.

I do wonder how that's going to pan out. Are they going to block reddit, imgur, 4chan, and tumblr?

Not a great one, but that's not new. We've been getting incrementally more draconian surveillance and laws for some time.

> The police force already leans on AI to help flag incriminating content on seized electronic devices,

This is people who're being investigated for possessing images of child sexual abuse. This might be because they've accessed a website known to distribute such images; or they've created imags of a child which were found.

Police need to search all the devices that person owns in order to find all the images. They need to do this to protect children who are still being abused; to detect unknown abusers; to add images to the various IWF etc lists; and to ensure the correct prosecution and sentencing approach is taken.

No, this was for after work.

So they can bully those who they don't like the disgraced bob quick's (senior counterterrorist cop who had to resign for security breaches) vendetta against a tory MP is one case.

The MP was part of a government who made a lot of moral comment about pornography. He accessed extreme pornography at work. Police needed to investigate because it was so extreme it might have been illegal.

He then lied about what the police had done.

That's not a vendetta, that's holding people to account.

This post is factually inaccurate and defamatory.

The computer was searched as part of a separate investigation (into leaks) which found nothing.

The pornography was not extreme.

The pornography was extreme. It was found a few weeks before laws were introduced that made it unlawful. This claim has been made many times, in print, and Green has denied it but not used UK defamation law to prevent the claims being made or to force corrections to be printed.

What is extreme porn?

I'm really skeptical of politicians that want to ban "extreme pornography" on the Internet yet let actual prostitution just kind of, slide under the radar.

Surprisingly not many Brits are aware that you can get a couple of high end hookers who will do anything for a few hundred quid per hour, and it's legal. Lots of these "escorts" are barely legal age, as well.

Maybe it's a ploy to get people off porn and into actual sex lol.

> What is extreme porn?

According to Section 63(2) of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008:

  An “extreme pornographic image” is an image which is both—

  (a) pornographic, and

  (b) an extreme image.

Hope that helps!

At least, though, in subsection 7 and 7A they define "extreme", as well as providing a nice catch-all of "grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character":

  (7) An image falls within this subsection if it portrays, in an explicit and realistic way, any of the following—

    (a) an act which threatens a person's life,

    (b) an act which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitals,

    (c) an act which involves sexual interference with a human corpse, or

    (d) a person performing an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal (whether dead or alive),

  and a reasonable person looking at the image would think that any such person or animal was real.

  (7A) An image falls within this subsection if it portrays, in an explicit and realistic way, either of the following—

    (a) an act which involves the non-consensual penetration of a person's vagina, anus or mouth by another with the other person's penis, or

    (b) an act which involves the non-consensual sexual penetration of a person's vagina or anus by another with a part of the other person's body or anything else,

  and a reasonable person looking at the image would think that the persons were real.

OK those make sense tbh, though there's a huge amount of porn that basically caters to those audiences yet is staged... I wonder if they deal with that.

That, IIRC, is the reason for the "a reasonable person looking at the image would think that the persons were real" clause. If it looks real, it is treated the same even if it is staged.

Maybe because he does not want any more details of his porn usage spread around - there would inevitablely be discovery if there were to be a libel case. Plenty of people use porn that is not extreme but would be embarrassing.

Edit - Also even the police have stated that there was nothing illegal found.

Additionally he was in opposition not in government at the time of the raid.

Edit again: in the UK as you should well know one is expected to provide evidence along with defamatory statements. Do you have any evidence?

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