As many as 40,000 child porn pages blocked every day by BT

It has been revealed today that every day there are about 35 000 to 40 000 attempts over the BT Retail broadband network to access child pornography sites.

Over 58 Million attempts to access Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) blocklist sites are made every year, according to figures that have been extrapolated from the entire broadband market in the UK. The IWF have said that at any given time there are between 800 and 1200 URL link on it typically, although this list is not published.

In response to an inquiry from an IT news website the figures were recently release by BT. Judging how many attempts had been made to access sites containing child pornography by real people, either by mistake or on purpose, was difficult due to the use of UK proxies from overseas and the use of botnets, according to a spokesman.

Whenever a URL is entered that is blocked a system that returns a 404 error is used by both large ISPs and BT Retail, although no reports are made to authorities or records kept of the attempts to access child pornography sites.

?The number has stayed roughly the same [in recent years] even though use of the internet has increased,? said a BT spokesman.

Since 2004 BT have had a system in place. The implementation of the IWF blocklist by the end of 2007 was something the government had said that it want back in 2006, although this had not been done by the smaller ISPs that hold around five percent of the market. The smaller ISPs argue that anyone who is determined to access child pornography will find ways round the system so blocking does nothing to resolve the issue.

A proposal granting the power to force ISPs to implement blocklists on child pornography was discussed recently in a meeting attended by European home affairs ministers.

Broadband Expert