Who censors the censors? With Peter Dawe's Safety-Net Foundation (working title) attempting to offer a Usenet cancellation service so that ISPs can be confident that their servers are free of illegal material and they won't go to jail, that question becomes more pertinent than ever. If we really want to keep the censors honest, we need a worldwide network of censor-watchers.
Britain's Index on Censorship does this for print publications, and Amnesty International does it for humans. But for the Net we need something much finer-grained than a simple list of blocked newsgroups or Web sites - no matter how good resources like Declan McCullough's fight-censorship email list may be. Perhaps the Net at large could learn from a bit of software called Lazarus. This PERL routine, dreamed up by San Francisco student Chris Schafmeister and implemented by Homer Wilson Smith, was a response to a sudden spate of message cancellations on the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup in December 1994.
Still in action now, Lazarus takes advantage of three things: one, the unique ID assigned to each Usenet message; two, the way Usenet messages are cancelled (which involves posting a cancellation message that either comes from, or appears to come from, the original poster's account); and three, the fact that a number of sites are set up not to honour cancels. The upshot is that Lazarus tracks which messages have been cancelled, who they were from and any extra information posted by the canceller. The list generated by this is posted regularly to alt.religion.scientology. It ought to be possible for someone in a country with a definition of illegality different from the UK's to use Lazarus, or something similar, to track what's being cancelled and post a summary which British netizens can compare with official information. If users in different countries cooperated to monitor censorship activities in one another's countries and published the results, netizens might be able to keep a pretty good watch to ensure that our elected representatives didn't stray over the boundaries they themselves have laid down.
With a little thought and verification, the information could be made available to the world's media for further publication. This sort of thing has plenty of real-world parallels, and checking up on what is actually being censored is a normal part of checking up on our democratically elected servants and their appointed assistants. Let's just hope no one does anything nearly so silly in cyberspace as the Irish Board of Publications did in the 1950s, when they started adding as many as two books a day - most of them now considered great classics - to the banned list, which already included Marie Stopes's 1933 work, Catholic Methods of Birth Control. Otherwise, we might have to make fun of them too.
Wendy Grossman is a London-based freelance journalist.