The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is a registered charity based in Cambridge, England. It states that its remit is "to minimise the availability of online sexual abuse content, specifically child sexual abuse images and videos hosted anywhere in the world and non-photographic child sexual abuse images hosted in the UK." Content inciting racial hatred was removed from the IWF's remit after a police website was set up for the purpose in April 2011. The IWF used to also take reports of criminally obscene adult content hosted in the UK. This was removed from the IWF's remit in 2017. As part of its function, the IWF says that it will "supply partners with an accurate and current URL list to enable blocking of child sexual abuse content". It has "an excellent and responsive national Hotline reporting service" for receiving reports from the public. In addition to receiving referrals from the public, its agents also proactively search the open web and deep web to identify child sexual abuse images and videos. It can then ask service providers to take down the websites containing the images or to block them if they fall outside UK jurisdiction. If found on the open web, it traces where the content is hosted (geographically) and either directly issues a notice to the hosting company to remove the imagery (if hosted in the UK) or works with a network of hotlines and police around the world who follow their own country's process for removing the imagery. More than 99% of all the child sexual abuse images found by IWF are hosted outside of the UK. In this instance, whilst work to remove the imagery takes place, IWF places the web address on its URL List for partners to block the content. Aside from the IWF URL List, the IWF has developed many services which may be used by internet companies to help stop the spread of child sexual abuse imagery online. The IWF operates informal partnerships with the police, government, public, and internet companies across the world. Originally formed to police suspected child pornography online, the IWF's remit was later expanded to cover criminally obscene material, though this was removed from the IWF's remit in 2017. The IWF takes a strong stance against the term 'child pornography' and on its website cites "we use the term child sexual abuse to reflect the gravity of the images and videos we deal with. Child pornography, child porn and kiddie porn are not acceptable descriptions. A child cannot consent to their own abuse". The IWF is an incorporated charity, limited by guarantee, and largely funded by voluntary contributions from UK communications service providers, including ISPs, mobile phone operators, Internet trade associations, search engines, hardware manufacturers, and software providers. It also currently receives funding from the European Union by comprising one-third of the UK Safer Internet Centre. The IWF is governed by a board of trustees which consists of an independent chair, six non-industry representatives, three industry representatives plus one co-opted independent representative with a specialism in human rights. The Board monitors and reviews IWF's remit, strategy, policy and budget to enable the IWF to achieve its objectives. The IWF operate from offices in Vision Park, near Cambridge. It has been criticized as an ineffective quango that does not deserve its charity status, for producing excessive numbers of false positives, for the secrecy of its proceedings, and for poor technical implementations of its policies that have degraded the response time of the whole UK Internet. IWF claims to have succeeded in reducing the percentage of the worldwide child sexual abuse images that are hosted in the UK from 18% in 1996 to 0.04% in 2018.
History
Background
During 1996, the Metropolitan Police told the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) that the content carried by some of the newsgroups made available by them was illegal, that they considered the ISPs involved to be publishers of that material, and that they were therefore breaking the law. In August 1996, Chief Inspector Stephen French, of the Metropolitan Police Clubs & Vice Unit, sent an open letter to the ISPA, requesting that they ban access to a list of 132 newsgroups, many of which were deemed to contain pornographic images or explicit text.
This list is not exhaustive and we are looking to you to monitor your newsgroups identifying and taking necessary action against those others found to contain such material. As you will be aware the publication of obscene articles is an offence. This list is only the starting point and we hope, with the co-operation and assistance of the industry and your trade organisations, to be moving quickly towards the eradication of this type of newsgroup from the Internet ... We are very anxious that all service providers should be taking positive action now, whether or not they are members of a trade association. We trust that with your co-operation and self regulation it will not be necessary for us to move to an enforcement policy. The list was arranged so that the first section consisted of unambiguously titled paedophile newsgroups, then continued with other kinds of groups which the police wanted to restrict access to, including alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.cheerleaders and alt.binaries.pictures.erotic.centerfolds. Although this action had taken place without any prior debate in Parliament or elsewhere, the police, who appeared to be doing their best to create and not simply to enforce the law, were not acting entirely on their own initiative. Alan Travis, Home Affairs editor of the newspaper The Guardian, explained in his book Bound and Gagged that Ian Taylor, the Conservative Science and Industry Minister at the time, had underlined an explicit threat to ISPs that if they did not stop carrying the newsgroups in question, the police would act against any company that provided their users with "pornographic or violent material". Taylor went on to make it clear that there would be calls for legislation to regulate all aspects of the Internet unless service providers were seen to wholeheartedly embrace "responsible self-regulation". The ISP Demon Internet regarded the police request as "unacceptable censorship"; however, its attitude annoyed ISPA chairman Shez Hamill, who said:
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