EU blacklist loses 13 years of online history

The Internet Watch Foundation is a British nonprofit that claims to fight child porn. British ISP's rely on the IWF's blacklist to block websites.

But these days, the IWF doesn't seem too interested in going after child porn at all. A month ago, for example, it blocked almost every Internet customer in Britain from making any edits at all to Wikipedia.

I firmly believe this had nothing to do with kiddie porn and was designed to suppress political information. After all, the IWF is funded by the European Union, which isn't exactly known as a free speech giant.

Now the IWF's blacklist has led several major British ISP's to block the entire Wayback Machine website.

The Wayback Machine is an archive of 85,000,000,000 webpages going back to 1996. These include regular news sites and inoffensive personal websites that anyone might have created. But the IWF blocks them all!

Thirteen years of Internet history, gone.

Worse, the IWF's method of blocking the sites is as fraudulent as it was during its Wikipedia blockage scandal: Customers who try accessing any website on the Wayback Machine are confronted with the "Not found" spiel. Thus, many probably just think the pages are simply missing and not actually blocked.

One customer said that because of this prior restraint, he was unable to access webpages that were posted by the BBC, Parliament, the UN - and yes, even the IWF itself. Another said it was "yet more 'unintended collateral damage' from the IWF."

Well, obviously it's not unintended. The IWF pulled the same stunt last month with Wikipedia, so if it was unintentional, why didn't the IWF learn from that?

The IWF later confirmed that the Wayback Machine has been blacklisted. It says it was because of obscene images.

For the gabillionth time, THE PAGES ON WAYBACK MACHINE THAT THE IWF BLOCKED DON'T CONTAIN KIDDIE PORN!!! Understand?!?!?! So the IWF lied.

Did you honestly think the BBC or the United Nations would post child porn?

I wouldn't expect this situation to improve soon. I haven't heard of the IWF budging yet on its prior restraint of the Wayback Machine. They're not interested in fighting against outrageous filth. They're just using it as a pretext to prevent the free flow of political information.

(Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/14/demon_muzzles_wayback_machine;
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/14/iwf_details_archive_blacklisting)