Lessons learned. (Or perhaps not)
Posted on Apr 06 2007 | Tagged as: Work, Censorship
Having just spent two weeks on work experience at the Pink Paper1, the best story (ie most original one) I’ve been working on turned out to be a bit of a nothing. With the benefit of hindsight, it should have been fairly obvious, and once I’d got the bit between my teeth I let myself get a touch blinded by wanting to get a good story. Lesson learned, though – what I was there for, after all.
The story itself was that the wi-fi internet service in Heathrow airport (terminal three, in this case) was blocking access to all gay rights websites — the International Lesbian and Gay Association, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Peter Tatchell’s site — because of what the internet filtering programme, SiteCoach, deemed to be “Harmful Content”.
I was assured by a very nice (though audibly annoyed) woman from T-Mobile, who provide the wi-fi internet to terminals three and four, that it was a technical cockup and nothing more sinister. A spokesman for the SiteCoach program told me2 that the sites in question would be added to the “safe list” straight away, so they’d never be blocked, and that it wasn’t strictly speaking blocked anyway – rather the real world filter interrupts the pages loading, in the case of Peter Tachell’s site, because it found the phrase “teenage sex” in the bibliography section.
But that says more about mindless censorship than it does about anything else, about the ludicrous implicit assumption that a website containing the words — and just words — “teenage sex” should automatically be barred from potential access by children.
________
1 I know.
2 And addressed me as “Mr White”, one of many things that get right on my nipples for no particular reason.
