Iceland's plan to ban Internet porn sparks uproar

JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press, By JILL LAWLESS and GUDJON HELGASON, Associated Press

Updated 3:36 am, Monday, February 25, 2013

REYKJAVIK, Iceland (AP) — In the age of instant information, globe-spanning viral videos and the World Wide Web, can a thoroughly wired country become a porn-free zone? Authorities in Iceland want to find out.

The government of the tiny North Atlantic nation is drafting plans to ban pornography, in print and online, in an attempt to protect children from a tide of violent sexual imagery.

The proposal by Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson has caused an uproar. Opponents say the move will censor the Web, encourage authoritarian regimes and undermine Iceland's reputation as a Scandinavian bastion of free speech.

Advocates say it is a sensible measure that will shelter children from serious harm.

"When a 12-year-old types 'porn' into Google, he or she is not going to find photos of naked women out on a country field, but very hardcore and brutal violence," said Halla Gunnarsdottir, political adviser to the interior minister.

"There are laws in our society. Why should they not apply to the Internet?"

Gunnarsdottir says the proposals currently being drawn up by a committee of experts will not introduce new restrictions, but simply uphold an existing if vaguely worded law.

Pornography is already banned in Iceland, and has been for decades — but the term is not defined, so the law is not enforced. Magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse are on sale in book stores, and more hardcore material can be bought from a handful of sex shops. "Adult" channels form part of digital TV packages.

Iceland's left-of-center government insists it is not setting out to sweep away racy magazines or censor sex. The ban would define pornography as material with violent or degrading content.

Gunnarsdottir said the committee is still exploring the details of how a porn ban could be enforced. One possibility would be to make it illegal to pay for porn with Icelandic credit cards. Another, more controversial, route would be a national Internet filter or a list of website addresses to be blocked.

That idea has Internet-freedom advocates alarmed.

"This kind of thing does not work. It is technically impossible to do in a way that has the intended effect," said Smari McCarthy of free-speech group the International Modern Media Institute. "And it has negative side effects — everything from slowing down the Internet to blocking content that is not meant to be blocked to just generally opening up a whole can of worms regarding human rights issues, access to information and freedom of expression."

Despite its often chaotic appearance, the Internet is not a wholly lawless place. It is regulated, to varying degrees, around the world. Police monitor the net for child pornography and other illegal material, and service providers in many countries block offending sites.

Some governments also censor the Internet at a national level — though the likes of authoritarian Iran, North Korea and China are not countries liberal Iceland wants to emulate.

European countries including Britain, Sweden and Denmark ask Internet service providers to block child pornography websites, measures that have met with only limited opposition.

But broader filtering has mostly been resisted. A few years ago, Australia announced it would introduce an Internet filtering system to block websites containing material including child pornography, bestiality, sexual violence and terrorist content. After an outcry, the government abandoned the plan last year.

Critics say such filters are flawed and often scoop up innocent sites in their net — as when Denmark's child pornography filter briefly blocked access to Google and Facebook last year because of a glitch.

On the streets of Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, there was some support for a porn ban, but also skepticism about how it would work.

"I think this is a good idea, but I think it might be problematic to implement this," said shop assistant Ragnheidur Arnarsdottir. "It is difficult to fight technology."

Iceland's moves are being closely watched. It may be a tiny country of only 320,000 people, but its economic and social experiments — like its active volcanos — often have international impact.

For centuries economically dependent on fishing, Iceland transformed itself in the early 21st century into a pioneer of aggressive credit-driven banking. Then in 2008, the country's debt-burdened banks all collapsed, making Iceland the first and most dramatic casualty of the global financial crisis, and leaving a string of failed businesses around the world.

The economy is now bouncing back, aided by Iceland's status as one of the world's best connected countries, with one of the highest levels of Internet use on the planet. Recent initiatives to boost growth include plans to make Iceland a global center of media and technology freedom — a status that advocates like McCarthy fear could be threatened by an online porn ban.

Anti-porn activists, however, are hailing Iceland as a pioneer. It is certainly not afraid to go its own way. Although the country has largely liberal Scandinavian values, it broke with most of Europe in 2010 by banning strip clubs.

"This is a country with courage," said Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women's studies at Wheelock College in Boston and author of the book "Pornland."

"Iceland is going to be the first country with the guts to stand up to these predatory bullies from L.A. (in the porn industry)," she said. "It is going to take one country to show that this is possible."

But opponents say the project is both misguided and doomed.

"I can say with absolute certainty that this will not happen, this state filter," said Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir, a prominent advocate of online freedom.

She is confident those drafting the anti-porn measures will see the error of their ways. They may also run out of time — Iceland is due to hold parliamentary elections in April, and the unpopular coalition government could be thrown out.

Jonsdottir said the key to protecting children and others from hardcore harm is for citizens to better inform themselves about the Internet and how it works.

"People just have to make themselves a bit more knowledgeable about what their kids are up to, and face reality," she said.

Gunnarsdottir, the political adviser backing the ban, just hopes the emotional debate around the issue will cool down.

"I think we should be able to discuss the Internet with more depth, without just shouting censorship on the one hand and laissez-faire on the other hand," she said.

"Is it freedom of speech to be able to reach children with very hardcore, brutal material? Is that the freedom of speech we want to protect?"

___

Lawless reported from London. Jill Lawless can be reached at http://Twitter.com/JillLawless

Wife: NYC Cannibal-Plotter Viewed Disturbing Porn

By LARRY NEUMEISTER and TOM HAYS Associated Press

NEW YORK February 25, 2013 (AP)

Struggling to stay composed, the estranged wife of a New York City police officer testified Monday that she was shocked to find he had visited a website featuring a photo of a dead woman and other gruesome images — a discovery that led to a federal prosecution accusing him of plotting to abduct, torture and eat dozens of women.

"It was porn. It was disturbing," Kathleen Mangan told a Manhattan jury about the darkfetishnet.com site.

"I know S&M is popular with 'Shades of Grey,'" she said in reference to the popular book series by E.L. James, "but this was different."

When her testimony was interrupted by a break, Mangan dropped her head and started sobbing. Her husband, Gilbert Valle, also looked upset, rubbing his brow and putting his head in his hands.

Mangan, 27, was the first government witness in the unusual federal case against Valle, who's accused of conspiring to kidnap a woman and unauthorized use of a law enforcement database that prosecutors say he used to help build a list of potential targets. A conviction on the kidnapping count carries a possible life sentence.

The online discussions of cannibalism — what Valle claims was harmless fetish fantasy — was instead a dangerous plot by a would-be killer to target "very real women," a prosecutor said earlier Monday in opening statements.

"Make no mistake," Assistant U.S. Attorney Random Jackson told a jury. "Gilbert Valle was very serious about these plans."

AP

FILE - In this Oct. 25, 2012, file courtroom drawing, Federal Defender Julie Gatto requests bail for her client, New York City Police Officer Gilberto Valle, right, at Manhattan Federal Court in New York. The New York City police officer accused of kidnapping conspiracy admits to thinking about abducting, cooking and devouring young women. His own lawyer has shown prospective jurors a kinky staged photo of a woman trussed up in a roasting pan to test their tolerance for the officer’s "weird proclivities." (AP Photo/Elizabeth Williams, File)

Defense attorney Julia Gatto argued that her client "never intended to kidnap anyone." She added: "You can't convict people for their thoughts, even if they're sick."

A college graduate and father of a young child, Valle appeared to be leading a normal life before "things got bad," his wife said. "Weird stuff started happening."

She testified her husband began asking questions about where she liked to jog, what the lighting was like and whether other people were around.

Once Mangan reported his strange behavior to the FBI last year, agents uncovered "a heinous plot to kidnap, rape, murder and cannibalize a number of very real women," Jackson said.

The officer had attempted to contact potential victims, including a New York City elementary school teacher, to learn more about their jobs and residences, the prosecutor said. His Internet research also included the best rope to tie someone up with, recipes, human flesh, white slavery and chemicals that can knock someone out, Jackson said.

Gatto countered that there was "no proof of a crime here. The charges are pure fiction."

Valle, she said, had always been aroused by "unusual things" including the thought of a woman boiled down on a platter with an apple in her mouth, his lawyer said. He found a home at darkfetishnet.com with its 38,000 registered members, where regulars discuss "suffocating women, cooking and eating them," she said.

The defense has denied that Mangan was a potential victim. Valle had made clear that his wife "was unavailable for any kidnapping fantasy," the defense has said in court papers.

Valle, 28, a baby-faced tabloid sensation known as the "Cannibal Cop," is expected to take the stand to make the case that it was all role-playing fantasy.

The defense also is planning to show jurors the videotaped testimony of darkfetishnet.com co-founder Sergey Merenkov in which he describes the site as a "social media network."

Merenkov called the site "a clone of Facebook, but it is oriented to people with fetishes that are not considered standard."

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Turkey, Qatar denounce Syria's war on own people

GENEVA (Reuters) - Turkey and Qatar accused Syria on Monday of attacking Syrian towns with bombs, shells and Scud missiles and called at the main U.N. human rights forum for perpetrators of atrocities to be brought to justice.

Britain and Switzerland urged the United Nations Security Council to refer war crimes in Syria to theInternational Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecution.

"The (Syrian) regime has lost its legitimacy. It is no longer governing. It is surviving by oppression, terror and massacres," Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu declared in a speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

"Today, the regime is waging a brutal war against the Syrian people through indiscriminate air bombardments and Scud missile attacks against urban areas," he said. "We have to make sure that all perpetrators will not go unpunished."

Qatari Foreign Minister Khalid bin Mohamed al-Attiyah said that "massacres and atrocities" committed by the Syrian regime and its loyalist forces through the use of heavy weapons, including Scud missiles that caused massive destruction in Aleppo, and internationally banned weapons used against unarmed civilians, were in flagrant violation of international law.

"We call on the Security Council to assume its moral and legal responsibilities to stop this humanitarian disaster as well as the atrocities and other crimes perpetuated against the Syrian people and to bring those responsible for these crimes to justice," he told the Geneva forum.

PRESSURE BUILDING TO REFER SYRIA TO ICC

An estimated 70,000 people have been killed in the nearly two-year-old conflict between President Bashar al-Assad's forces and rebels fighting to topple him, the United Nations says.

More than 900,000 Syrian refugees have fled abroad, including some 185,000 in 17 camps in neighboring Turkey.

U.N. investigators said a week ago that Syrian leaders they had identified as suspected war criminals should face the ICC. [ID:nL6N0BI4H5]

"The atrocities in Syria remain foremost in our minds. We cannot stand by and allow this situation to continue," Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, a minister in Britain's Foreign Office, told the Geneva forum. "Those responsible for the worst violations and abuses must be held to account, including through the ICC."

Swiss Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter acknowledged that the Security Council remained divided on whether to refer Syria to the ICC, but said that pressure to do so was building.

"Combating impunity is indispensable if we are to build sustainable peace in Syria and elsewhere," he told the talks.

Russia and China, both permanent council members, have shielded Syria by blocking Western efforts to take stronger U.N. action, such as sanctions, against Syria to try to end the war.

More than 50 countries asked the Security Council last month to refer the Syria crisis to the Hague-based ICC to send a signal to Syrian authorities. The letter, sent by Switzerland, was signed by Britain and France, but not the United States.

U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay criticized the council on Monday for not referring the Syria crisis to the ICC "despite the repeated reports of widespread or systematic crimes and violations".

(Additional reporting by Emma Farge; Editing by Jon Hemming)

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