ICELAND'S PORN BAN 'CONFLICTS WITH THE IDEA OF A FREE SOCIETY', SAY CRITICS
Anti-censorship campaigners say the Icelandic government's plan to ban pornography is 'an affront to
the basic principles of society'
Anti-censorship campaigners have called on Iceland to ditch its proposals to ban pornography online
and in print, labelling the plans "an affront to the basic principles of society". An open letter coordinated by Iceland's International Modern Media Institute, signed by activists and academics from 19
countries, claimed the proposals have "already jeopardised longstanding efforts to prevent censorship in
totalitarian regimes worldwide". The International Modern Media Institute is chaired by Icelandic MP
Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the former WikiLeaks activist. Writing to Iceland's interior minister Ögmundur
Jónasson, campaigners including the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the US, the Netherlands' Open
Source Working Group and Tunisian activist Rafik Dammak dissect the plans, pointing out that they
suggest no specific technology or definition of what to block, and claim it is not possible to censor
content without monitoring all telecommunications. "Everything must be examined automatically by
unsupervised machines which make the final decision on whether to allow the content to continue or
not. This level of government surveillance directly conflicts with the idea of a free society," they said.
Such censorship would require technology similar to that employed by China and North Korea, implicitly
justifying the censorship of those regimes, the letter stated. The plans for web censorship are seemingly
at odds with Iceland's liberal culture and the crowdsourced constitution currently working its way
through the Icelandic parliament. Its motivations, however, lie in tackling sexual violence, particularly
children's exposure to explicit and violent sexual material. Research shows the average age of first
exposure to online porn is 11. Jónasson's adviser Halla Gunnarsdóttir told the Guardian this week that
the country is "not anti-sex, but anti-violence", and that "what is under discussion is the welfare of our
children and their rights to grow and develop in a non-violent environment". The draft legislation
follows laws passed in 2009 and 2010 that criminalised customers rather than sex workers and closed
strip clubs. Thursday's letter, however, suggests that sexual violence should be tackled in schools and at
home. "The internet is not the source of violence, it is merely a medium by which violence is made
apparent," the activists wrote. "Iceland has positioned itself as a model democratic state in global
context when dealing with freedom of the press, the open process of drafting a new constitution and
open review of information regulation. "Therefore, we implore you to reject censorship as a viable
option and seek more effective means of improving society, both in Iceland and abroad."