UK 'blacklist' of terrorist-supporting websites should be developed, Government says

The Home Office wants to filter out content available on public computers, such as in schools and libraries, the report said.

A specialist police unit, set up last year to investigate illegal internet content, could help identify websites that should be barred, the report said.

"We... believe the CTIRU (Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit) can play a significant role in developing an unlawful [website address] blocking list for use across the public estate," a Home Office strategy report (116-page /714KB PDF) into preventing people being drawn into terrorism said.

The Home Office said that the CTIRU had removed material from the internet 156 times within 15 months. It said that many more websites exist with terrorist content on them and said that there was no system in place to help gauge how effective the filtering was, the report said.

" We do not yet have a filtering product which has been rolled out comprehensively across Government Departments, agencies and statutory organisations and we are unable to determine the extent to which effective filtering is in place in schools and public libraries," the Home Office report said.

"Given the scale of the challenge, the inception of CTIRU was late (and we have no data at all on the number of interventions made before it was created) and the number of referrals to the CTIRU is still not yet sufficient: the numbers of websites which have been disrupted so far is a fraction of the problem," the report said.

An existing list of banned sites containing depictions of child abuse, operated by the Internet Watch Foundation, should be incorporated into the UK's own list, the report said.

The Home Office will work with "the filtering industry" to ensure that the material is not available to internet users in public buildings.

"We want to explore the potential for violent and unlawful [website address] lists to be voluntarily incorporated into independent national blocking lists," a new Home Office strategy report into preventing people being drawn into terrorism said.

"We want to ensure that users in schools, libraries, colleges and Immigration Removal Centres are unable to access unlawful material," the report said.

"This work will require effective dialogue with the private sector and in particular the internet industry. It will also require collaboration with international partners: the great majority of the websites and chat rooms which concern us in the context of radicalisation are hosted overseas," the report said.

Existing UK terrorism laws allow the Government to charge website owners with encouraging terrorism and publishing terrorist information if they do not remove unlawful content, the report said.

"TACT (the Terrorism Act) provides that those served with notices who fail to remove, without reasonable excuse, the material that is unlawful and terrorism-related within a specified period are treated as endorsing it," the report said.

"The serving of notices was intended to achieve the rapid and effective removal of material. Notices can be served on anyone involved in electronic publication or dissemination," the report said.

The Government will step up its programme to educate people who work where public computers are available about what to do if they come across terrorist content, the report said.

"The objective is simply to better enable communities to alert the authorities and the industry to content which is harmful and possibly illegal," the report said.

The Government will work with the internet industry to promote the creation of mechanisms that allow users to flag up illegal content, the report said.

"We will encourage more user regulatory measures such as terrorist video referral mechanisms, clearer and more visible acceptable use policies and stronger enforcement of user referrals which highlight breaches," the report said.

The Home Office said it would "step up" its efforts to work with the US to make sure that web content promoting terrorism was deleted from US computer servers.

Self-regulatory measures should be explored with other EU countries to tackle terrorist use of the internet, the report said.

The Home Office announced the measures in a new counter-terrorism strategy, which it said updates an existing plan to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism.

The strategy said the Government was "absolutely committed to protection of freedom of speech" but that the measures meant intervening to stop people moving from extremism into terrorist activirty.

The new strategy will be coordinated from and by the Office for Security and Counter-terrorism (OSCT) in the Home Office and will be led by the Home Secretary, the report said.