Internet Crime Hotline Reports Not-So-Hot Results On Legal Action

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March 03, 1998 (12:01 PM EST)

Internet Crime Hotline Reports Not-So-Hot Results On Legal Action

By Andrew Craig,

LONDON -- A British government-supported scheme that encourages Internet users to report offensive material found on the Internet has reported what it calls a successful first year of operation.

But it is unclear whether the scheme has led to any direct legal action against obscene and illegal material on the Net.

The Internet Watch Foundation's "hotline" opened in December 1996, and has received 781 reports on around 4,300 items on the Internet considered illegal by Internet users, mainly sent via e-mail, the voluntary group said Tuesday.

The group investigated 2,200 items during the year, but officials said at a meeting here in London Tuesday that feedback about any resulting legal action was "patchy" because most of the items originated overseas.

Reports of material considered illegal by the Internet Watch Foundation are passed on to the law enforcement body in the country where the material originated, via the United Kingdom's National Criminal Intelligence Service. But there have been only "a few cases in which we have been involved being dealt with by the U.K. courts," says the group's annual report. Most of these complaints are still being handled, meaning they cannot be reported on, it adds.

The Internet Watch Foundation acts as a hotline operator and clearinghouse for complaints about offensive material on the Net, sifting through complaints and passing them onto law enforcement agencies and ISPs.

ISPs do not want to host illegal material, and are doing a lot of work with the Internet Watch Foundation to encourage people to remove such material, said Laurence Blackall, chairman of the Internet Service Providers Association, a U.K. Internet industry body that helps fund and manage the scheme.

"People have now recognized that ISPs have no responsibility for what is published on websites and what it posted on newsgroups," Blackall said, adding that ISPs nevertheless wanted to help rid the Net of illegal material.

The majority of reports to the hotline -- 85 percent -- were about child pornography, the Net foundation says in its annual report. Other reported material included financial scams, racism, malicious e-mail, and adult pornography.

The United States is overwhelmingly cited as the source of offensive material by British complainants. Despite the fact that the group is British-based, just 6 percent of the reported material originated from the U.K., while 63 percent came from the U.S., 19 percent from Japan, and 11 percent from the rest of Europe.

The use of hotlines as a method of self-regulating the Internet has been adopted by the European Commission and is recommended in its policy documents, the group said. There are four other hotlines in Europe, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, and Germany.

Internet Watch Foundation officials said Tuesday they had heard of prosecutions arising from their reports in Switzerland and Germany, and that a number of names they have passed on to the American police have come up in police operations in the U.S.

The group said it had advised U.K. ISPs of 2,000 potentially illegal items to remove from their servers.

The British government is "generally very encouraged," by the group's work, said Barbara Roche, the U.K. government's minister for industry, who launched the report.