Do you know how to get round a porn block? If your immediate thought here involved something like a VPN or Tor, then congratulations: it sounds like should your government implement a porn block you’ll have a reasonable idea how to circumvent it. However, can I ask that you please please please stop telling me on Twitter that you how to get around a porn block? Allow me to explain why.
Recently, I’ve been writing and tweeting a lot about the Digital Economy Bill – this is UK legislation that aims to make all porn sites verify their users to make sure they’re over 18. On the surface, it sounds like an idea that has been dreamt up by your well-meaning if conservative auntie. But scratch the surface and you realise it’s terrifying – it will have serious implications for personal privacy, hand an extraordinary amount of power over to large porn companies, and mean that smaller companies and individuals will almost certainly be forced to shut down. That’s why heroes from free speech, privacy, and sexual freedom organisations were protesting outside Parliament today at the Kink Olympixxx.
Porn blocks versus age verification
The law isn’t specifically a ‘porn block’ – it lays out a set of criteria that porn sites must meet in order to serve their content to UK users. Namely they have to take personal details to verify they’re over 18. So the government isn’t saying ‘we’ll block all the porn’, it is effectively saying ‘you need to pay for your porn with your personal data.’ At the moment it’s unclear exactly what data sites will collect and how, as well as what will happen to sites which refuse to take this data – a block might be possible in future. For now the government is planning to issue huge fines to sites which don’t comply. So when we talk about a ‘porn block’, in fact we’re talking about age verification. But don’t think that because I’ve said ‘it’s not really a block’ then it’s OK: in practice the law will ‘block’ you from seeing porn unless you’re willing to hand over your personal data. And eventually it may well lead to a full block for non-compliant websites.
[UPDATE 19/11/16 – SURPRISE the government is now proposing a full block for non-compliant sites]
When I discuss this appalling law – the Digital Economy Bill – often people tell me ‘yeah, but you can get round a porn block easily – just use X, Y, Z method.’
This is true, of course, and the fact that porn blocks are easily circumvented (often by the very people they are misguidedly aiming to protect from ‘bad’ content) is yet another mark in the ‘law is an ass’ column.
But. And it’s a MASSIVE ‘but’:
Usually when people say ‘but you can get round a block!’ they are not arguing that ‘the law is an ass because it’s so easy to circumvent.’ They’re arguing ‘there’s no need to fight this law because it’s easy to circumvent.’ The former is an excellent point, the latter is deeply unhelpful.
Why you need to stop telling me you can get round a porn block
1. You may know how to get round a porn block: not everybody does. Saying civil liberties campaigners should stop campaigning against a deeply regressive law because it won’t personally affect you is like telling anti-poverty campaigners they shouldn’t fight cuts to welfare because you’ve got loads in savings.
2. A law like this, regardless of whether it’s effective, sends an extraordinarily powerful message. It tells people ‘this thing you do is bad/obscene/harmful.’ Telling the entire population of a country that consensual adult sexual practices (which, by the way, are entirely legal to do) are somehow damaging to the fabric of society if they’re filmed, sends a deeply troubling message. No doubt you’re going to circumvent the porn ban because you enjoy what you’re watching, right? Are you comfortable with the nation being sold the lie that you are somehow deviant or freakish for doing so? I hope not.
3. Making every single porn website collect personal data about the people who visit it means that there’s a possibility that data will be leaked. Again, you might be OK, because you can get round the porn block – good for you. But what about your neighbour, who might face persecution from relatives/employers/arseholes if their private, consensual sexual tastes are leaked?
4. Chances are that once you’ve got round the porn block, the kind of porn you’ll be able to enjoy will have changed – and at the very least reduced drastically. While big porn companies like MindGeek have the resources to implement expensive age verification controls, smaller companies and independent producers will be absolutely destroyed by the costs involved. If there’s a workable solution, it will involve them paying subscriptions to larger sites, which in turn contributes to one or two large companies holding the keys to the porn kingdom. So you can get round a porn block: well done. But there’ll be much less porn for you to see once you get there.
5. This extra point was added by SpaceCaptainSmith in the comments, and I think it’s well worth highlighting: “I don’t like telling people how to get round web blocking because some blocks actually exist for good reason. Some online content *should* be blocked – terrorist sites, online child sexual abuse, that sort of thing. One of the things that I find more disturbing about this legislation is that it would place legal adult material involving consenting adults in the same category, and turn people into criminals for trying to access it.”
6. While it’s looking very likely that the government will implement this law, it is not yet entirely inevitable. All the while we spend talking about how you’ll be fine is time we could otherwise spend fighting back. There’s a petition here you can sign. You can also tweet/facebook your support. You can write to your MP. You can donate to/support sexual freedom campaigners and organisations that are fighting the law.
So don’t tell me how you’d cleverly get around a porn block and all the steps you’d take to do it: help the campaigners who are fighting to make sure you never need to.
I could have used this blog post to explain to people how to successfully get round a porn block. I could explain how to use certain tools to, for instance, access the Pirate Bay website (currently blocked in the UK by all major ISPs as far as I’m aware and yet still available through a number of mirrors because the block has been almost hilariously ineffectual). But I am nervous about giving you a step-by-step guide to doing something which amounts to breaking the law. This info is available online elsewhere, but I am very risk-averse when it comes to this stuff so please do not use the comments of this post to tell people how to get round government-implemented blocks. Your comments will be deleted, and yes of course I understand the irony.
9 Comments
Thank you for writing this. I shall, like you, be firing this off to people who try to give me the…. “yeah, but,” argument
Mollyxxx
Thank you for such an eloquent and succinct breakdown of the problem.
it’s posts like this that make visiting your blog so very worthwhile. All the best from Switzerland . . .
Heres a #6: I don’t like telling people how to get round web blocking because some blocks actually exist for good reason. Some online content *should* be blocked – terrorist sites, online child sexual abuse, that sort of thing. One of the things that I find more disturbing about this legislation is that it would place legal adult material involving consenting adults in the same category, and turn people into criminals for trying to access it.
That’s a very good point – hope you don’t mind but I’m going to add it to the list above (with credit to you ofc). It’s just not everyone reads the comments, and I don’t want that to go unnoticed.
“But I am nervous about giving you a step-by-step guide to doing something which amounts to breaking the law.”
While this is of course your site and you are fully entitled to accept or reject comments for whatever reasons you wish, I would disagree with the assessment that an end user’s evasion of a porn block “amounts to breaking the law”. I have not seen any suggestion that either this or any future proposed legislation would impose any legal obligations on end users not to access particular sites (unless the sites were publishing material that was itself illegal, such as child porn) or create any new criminal offenses relating to the evasion of government-imposed blocks — rather, the legal requirements are imposed upon either the sites themselves (to perform age verification) or ISPs (to implement the blocks). Even accessing The Pirate Bay is not in itself unlawful (AFAIK) unless you actually start downloading or uploading copyright-infringing content.
I suppose you might argue that accessing a site by evading a block is exposing the site to legal liability for serving content without the required age verification, but then if the site was blocked, that suggests that it wasn’t complying with the age verification law in the first place (probably because it is a foreign website that is outside of the UK’s jurisdiction, as most porn sites are — but good luck explaining that to the technologically-illiterate government).
One of the key reasons people want to get around blocks is to do things that are illegal: uploading/accessing copyrighted or illegal material, etc. Hence why I don’t want a guide to it here. The issue is not whether getting round the block itself is illegal, the issue is with the ethics and legality of *me providing a guide on how to do it.*
“if the site was blocked, that suggests that it wasn’t complying with the age verification law in the first place (probably because it is a foreign website that is outside of the UK’s jurisdiction, as most porn sites are…)”
this law applies to those sites too. any site which allows a user from the uk to access it must comply, not just sites hosted in the uk.
The point of the law is to prevent under 18s accessing porn.
That’s what we’re told.
We can still aces FREE porn so long as we prove our age by giving personal data.
I agree with everything GOTN says on this subject.
But i also point out – everywhere that I speak about this.
My son and ALL teenagers will easily get around the porn block in the ways mentioned. Because they are tech savvy.
They already know how to do all those things, and if they don’t know, then they have a friend who does.
So while we or our neighbours are caught up by this law
our kids can still access porn Freely and relatively easily.