Terrorists, beware! The European Union-funded "CleanIT" project has just wrapped up its work, aimed at preventing online terrorist propaganda and recruitment within Europe.
In the run-up to the final CleanIT conference in Brussels on Wednesday, the group published its final report, (PDF) a 30-page document outlining its final recommendations. This document and the conference are the culmination of a two-year, €326,000 ($440,000) study grant from the EU's Prevention of and Fight against Crime Programme (PDF). (Ars editor Cyrus Farivar will be moderating this conference, and his travel and lodging have been paid for out of CleanIT's budget.)
The final report has shed some of its earlier outrageous ideas—such as OS and browser-level monitoring as a condition of selling software products in the EU.
Nevertheless, CleanIT now advocates for increased cooperation between EU member states and argues that governments “should take an active role in reducing terrorist use of the Internet.” In addition, Internet companies should “state clearly in their terms and conditions that they will not tolerate terrorist use of the Internet on their platforms, and how they define terrorism.”
To do this, governments and Web companies will rely in part on users, thanks to a proposed “browser-based reporting mechanism [that] could be developed to allow end users to report terrorist use of the Internet.” Translation: a big "flag this site for terrorist activity" button in your favorite Web browser.
What could go wrong? Well, plenty, especially if the flagging leads to mandatory action as it does in the case of copyright infringement.
And assuming everyone can agree on precisely what is and isn’t a "terrorist website," what’s to stop such a site from simply moving outside of the 27-nation bloc? Not much, unless the EU wants ISPs to blacklist such sites.
Within the EU, these ideas aren't quite as strange as they might seem in the US. For instance, a French judge ruled that Twitter must identify anti-Semitic users—and must create a flagging system for users to note such posts. Less than a year ago, then-president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed a law that would make even viewing a hate website a crime.
But even CleanIT's backers know their ideas face an uphill battle, in part because of the sheer difficulty of defining "promotion of terrorism" and in part because of the nature of the Internet. Consider these caveats, from the final CleanIT document:
From a legal perspective, it is a challenge to reduce the terrorist use of the Internet because: The Internet is not a single virtual society governed by one system of rule of law.
• It is often difficult to determine which content on the Internet is illegal, also because illegality depends on the context in which it is presented and can differ worldwide and even between EU Member States.
• EU and Member States legislation and jurisdiction covers only a part of the Internet.
• Illegal content itself does not always lead to radicalization and terrorist acts, while content that does contribute to radicalization is not always illegal.
• Many activities of (potential) terrorists start in ordinary, easy accessible parts of the Internet and are not illegal.
The document also warns:
Any action taken to reduce the terrorist use of the Internet, whether by governments or by private entities, must comply with national provisions, EU, and other international legal instruments, and respect fundamental rights and civil liberties, including access to the Internet, freedoms of expression and assembly, the right to privacy, and data protection.
Those fundamental rights are outlined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Article 11 states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.”
Doubters
As CleanIT has progressed, many critics from within Europe have emerged.
Arthur van der Wees, a Dutch IT lawyer, told Ars that CleanIT doesn’t “have a clue how to battle [terrorism],” adding that he does not see any “clear solutions or preventive policies” in CleanIT's final document.
“As you and I have discussed before, this is not that surprising, as legislation including fundamental (human) rights, should not be compromised by documents like these,” he added. “As you can read in this final version, this is re-confirmed several times, so this leaves this document—in this phase—as nothing more than a status report without strong countermeasures against terrorism.”
One of Europe’s leading Internet rights advocacy groups, European Digital Rights (EDRI) based in Brussels, has been a constant thorn in the side of CleanIT. The group published draft documents from the group back in September much to CleanIT’s chagrin, and EDRI isn't much happier with the final product.
“The final report is an incoherent mix of three elements—the effective lobbying done by the filtering companies that took part, the support for privatized policing that was the motivation behind the project being funded, and the profound incompetence of the project team,” Joe McNamee, of European Digital Rights, told Ars.
He was even more blunt, measuring its total grant money divided by the final document’s word count.
“At €44 ($59) per word, it is difficult to imagine a more expensive, less useful document,” he quipped.
Peer review
Earlier this month, Europe Digital Rights even published leaked versions the EU’s own internal evaluations (PDF) for CleanIT. Those anonymous evaluations by three unnamed officials show that CleanIT just squeaked by to get its approval, with two out of three evaluators having serious doubts.
One unnamed evaluator said as much, noting:
“The proposal does not clearly explain how the objective is to be reached…Therefore I have substantial doubts if it is possible to achieve the desired objective this way.”
“The only indicators are the general principles and the guideline for implementation which are not verifiable.”
“I have serious doubts if the applicant will be able to deliver the results due to lack of methodology.”
Another wrote: “If the propose result of establishing general principles to address terrorist or other illegal use of the Internet can be achieved between private sector and law enforcement this would have to be regarded as a major breakthrough. With regard to the methodological weakness of the proposal it remains however questionable whether these results can really be achieved.”
At the end of the day, the final document’s own words—suggesting this may be a solution in search of a problem—may be its most damning. It concludes, “Terrorist use of the Internet is currently not widely known or understood.”
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