Taking paedophiles offline

Last Modified: 04 Apr 2008
By: Benjamin Cohen

Leading figures in the dark over government proposals, Channel 4 News at Noon reveals.

The government has announced new measures to take paedophiles offline - vowing to patrol the internet to protect children from predators.

But critics say the proposals are unworkable, providing false hope to worried parents.

The government claims to be working with the internet industry to track sex offender's emails but Channel 4 News at Noon has learnt that the chair of the government's own industry task force, and industry leader, didn't know in advance and was not consulted on today's announcement.

What the government appears to be promising is that sex offenders will be required to give all their email addresses to the police or face up to five years in prison.

Ms Annie Mullins, chair of the Home Office Task Force on Child Protection on the Internet and head of Content Standards for Vodafone told Channel 4 News at Noon that the government had not consulted its own taskforce before announcing the plan, stating:

"This measure is not mentioned in the guidance and it is something that we have only learnt about in the last day or so, so we haven't had a full discussion with government or full briefing on the range of thinking that they are having on this.

"So we are waiting for more detail and we're waiting to talk to government further about this matter."

What the government appears to be promising is that sex offenders will be required to give all their email addresses to the police or face up to five years in prison.

The email addresses would then in theory be used to track or block access to social networking sites used by children, but Peter Sommer, Professor of Information Systems at LSE, plus advisor and expert witness for the government, has also told Channel 4 News at Noon that this is "poorly thought-out" and "may not be affective" stating:

"They (the government) now feel that they have to show some action and what they have come up with is some very very hastily and poorly thought-out ideas which may not be affective at all.

"For example, I would like to know how much additional resource the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Agency is going to be getting for their additional work".

Professor Sommer goes as far to say that this proposal could simply misled the public as in his words "If you don't provide the additional resources it is simply misleading the public to think that they are going to get protection that way."

Even Home Office Minister, Vernon Coaker didn't sound entirely sure of proposals telling the programme that: "There are issues to be worked through.... the task for us - working with industry; working with law enforcement; working with children's charities - is actually to come up with a system that will actually make that work."

Yet industry-wise, Channel 4 News at Noon has learnt that world's largest email providers and a signatory to the home office's guidelines didn't know about the plan until Channel 4 News told them yesterday

Moving forward, Mr Coaker told us: "I don't think that anyone would actually say that the principal of trying to do more to protect children by assuring that we share email addresses where we can, that anyone would be against that".