The partnership, termed “Project Cleanfeed Canada,” binds Canadian ISPs with the Manitoba-based Cybertip.ca and will attempt to block child porn websites that are posted on foreign servers.
“With child abuse and the Internet, there’s no one foolproof solution,” said Lianna McDonald, executive director of Cybertip.ca. “It’s not the be-all and end-all solution, but it’s a way to stop people from viewing children being sexually abused.”
Cybertip.ca has been involved in tracking and blocking child porn sites hosted within Canada. It is also a centralized Internet portal for reporting online child exploitation.
The Cleanfeed project will be based on what British Telecom has accomplished during the last two years in the U.K. That company claims its filter system turned down about 35,000 hits per day to more than 6,000 blacklisted websites in 2005 alone.
The leading Canadian ISPs, including Rogers, Telus, Bell Canada, Shaw, Sask Tel, MTS Allstream and Videotron, intend to join with Cybertip.ca to block between 500-800 offending sites from access by their Canadian customers.
Details of how the automated technical system will filter the sites were not disclosed by the companies for security reasons, but they admitted that some of the process will depend on reports from the public on sites considered offensive or illegal. After investigating these sites, Cybertip.ca will inform the ISPs which sites and IP addresses should be blocked.
Cybertip.ca already has a list of offending websites, which it will share with ISPs immediately. The list will be updated daily and will prevent both intentional and accidental viewing of the sites, McDonald said.
Since its launch in 2002, Cybertip.ca has shut down more than 1,100 websites and is responsible for almost 20 arrests.