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Porn website requests from British Parliament allegedly in the thousands

Mardi 26 juin
Derrière les drapaux, on apperçoit le célèbre Big Ben, situé au coeur de Londres. Le parlement britannique a décidé de rebaptiser le monument en l'honneur de la reine Elizabeth. Désormais, il faudra parler de la Tour Elizabeth.

(Photo: REUTERS/Paul Hackett)

As if British Prime Minister David Cameron wasn’t having a hard enough time selling his pornography-blocking plan already, some recently released information about the activities of those in the House of Parliament may make his job even tougher.

Following a Freedom of Information request by Huffington Post UK, it was found that there had been attempts to access pornographic material by users of the Parliamentary Network servers more than 300,000 times. That network is used by the approximately 5,000 people on the parliamentary estate, BBC reports, and is made up of MPs, staff members and their visitors.

According to the information obtained by Huffington Post, the peak number of attempts to access pornographic websites on the network peaked last November (for the one year period under scrutiny) with 114,844 requests.

Here’s the month-by-month breakdown:

May 2012: 2141

June 2012: 2261

July 2012: 6024

August 2012: 26,952

September 2012: 15,804

October 2012: 3391

November 2012: 114,844

December 2012: 6918

January 2013: 18494

February 2013: 15

March 2013: 22,470

April 2013: 55,552

May 2013: 18,346

June 2013: 397

July 2013: 15,707


Unsurprisingly, parliamentary officials were quick to refute the numbers, with a House of Commons spokeswoman saying that the numbers are not actually an accurate reflection of the number of times these websites were accessed.

“We do not consider the data to provide an accurate representation of the number of purposeful requests made by network users,” the spokeswoman said, according to BBC. She further explained that the number of requests was likely due to the ways certain websites act, like issuing a pop-up advertisement, which would be recorded as a request for material. The spokeswoman declined to answer when it was suggested that normal mainstream websites do not typically issue pop-up windows that would lead to material which could be considered pornographic. She did however add that officials do not want to restrict the ability of Parliamentarians to carry out research.

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The issue of accessing pornography in the UK was put in the spotlight when Cameron announced back in July new measures that would have service providers block access to pornography unless a customer explicitly opts in to access it. The measure was considered a means to protect children from inappropriate images and “corroding childhood,” as Cameron put it.

Similar measures to have customers opt in to explicit content have been considered in Canada too, according to Tom Copeland, chairman of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers.

“The discussion has gone on forever and a day,” he said to The Canadian Press. “Mostly it starts around child pornography and what can be done to combat it and whether or not Internet service providers can play a role, or should play a role.

"And then every once in a while somebody decides, 'Well, we need to take this further, it needs to include general pornography sites' —which aren't illegal — 'it needs to include hate sites.' It needs to include any number of sites that somebody all of a sudden has a burr in their britches about.

"And generally the industry has said we can't possibly block all of these sites."

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