This January, under government pressure, many of the United Kingdom’s internet service providers (ISPs) — together providing over 90 percent of the country’s home broadband connections — turned on “porn filters” for all of their customers, requiring them to actively turn off the filters to view any content deemed unsuitable. Prime Minister David Cameron pushed the program through under the guise of protecting the “innocence of children,” but as warned by opponents of Internet regulation, the filters are now blocking large amounts of clean content. To show just how restrictive these web blockers are, the nonprofit Open Rights Group recently released an online tool to let anyone see how many of the UK’s ISPs block a given website. ORG also tested the 100,000 most-visited domains and found nearly 20 percent were blocked by at least one service provider, including numerous sites that were perfectly innocent.
Already alarmed that UK residents couldn’t access a fifth of the Internet unless they made an embarrassing call requesting their ISP to unblock adult content, I wanted to see exactly what the filters were blocking. My first thought was to check the site for Students for Sensible Drug Policy, an international grassroots advocacy organization for which I chair the board of directors. Expecting our political website to easily avoid filters intended to block obscenity, I almost didn’t believe it when the tool showed it was blocked by four ISPs.
Discovering that citizens of a supposedly free country were being denied access to SSDP’s website was infuriating. While being targeted for our political beliefs by institutions from the IRS to public universities to Chase Bank is nothing new, surging poll numbers and supportive statements from Bill Clinton and other members of the political establishment had made it seem like those days might be behind us.
To make sure SSDP being blocked wasn’t a fluke, I ran the websites for eight other leading U.S. and UK drug policy reform organizations through ORG’s tool. All but one were blocked by at least one ISP, and most by many more:
Students for Sensible Drug Policy: blocked by four
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition: blocked by four
Drug Policy Alliance: blocked by zero
National Cannabis Industry Association: blocked by three
Marijuana Policy Project: blocked by two
NORML: blocked by three
Americans for Safe Access: blocked by six
Marijuana Majority: blocked by three
Transform Drug Policy Foundation: blocked by two
Global Initiative for Drug Policy Reform: blocked by four
