The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF)

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) was established in 1996 by a non-governmental charitable body based in the United Kingdom. It offers an online service for the public and IT professionals to report content on the Internet that is considered"potentially illegal". The IWF operates in informal partnership with the police, government, public and Internet service providers. Originally formed to police child pornography online, the IWF's remit was later expanded to cover racist and criminally obscene material. IWF work in partnership with the online industry, law enforcement, government, the education sector, charities, international partners and the public to minimize the availability of this content, specifically, child sexual abuse content hosted anywhere in the world and criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK.

The IWF is an independent self-regulatory body, funded by the EU and the wider online industry, including internet service providers, mobile operators and manufacturers, content service providers, filtering companies, search providers, trade associations, hardware manufacturers, and software providers and the financial sector as well as other organizations that support us for corporate social responsibility reasons.

The IWF help internet service providers and hosting companies to combat abuse of their networks through national ‘notice and take-down’ service which alerts them to potentially illegal content within remit on their systems and provide unique data to law enforcement partners in the UK and abroad to assist investigations into the distributors of potentially illegal online content.

The IWF is governed by a Board of Trustees, which consists of an independent chair, six non-industry representatives, and three industry representatives. The Board monitors and reviews IWF's remit, strategy, policy and budget to enable the IWF to achieve its objectives. The IWF operates from offices in Oakington, near Cambridge.

IWF are referenced as a national and international model of self-regulation and are committed to sharing good practice with relevant agencies, authorities and governments around the world. The IWF is a founding member of INHOPE, an association of Hotlines around the world, and it's made a significant contribution on the Protection of Children on the Internet. IWF Chief Executive is a member of the Executive Board of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety.

Despite success in almost eradicating such content from being hosted on UK networks indecent images of children are still available around the world so the commitment by IWF members to voluntarily prevent the accidental download of such content by working to deploy a list on their services has been welcomed in many quarters. This industry-led initiative has gathered pace since 2004 and more of IWF members have chosen to make use of this service, namely, Internet service providers, mobile operators, search providers and filtering companies. National and international law enforcement agencies and Hotlines who are members of INHOPE can also have access to the list.

As a result of work by IWF analysts, potentially illegal child sexual abuse content URLs are regularly added to IWF list. This list is dynamic and comprehensive: updated twice a day. The Protection of Children Act 1978 as amended in the Sexual Offences Act 2003, makes it an offence to take, make, permit to be taken, distribute, show, possess with intent to distribute, and advertise indecent photographs or pseudo-photographs of children under the age of 18. The ‘making’ of such images includes downloading, that is, making a copy of an indecent image of a child on a computer so in the UK accessing such content online is a serious criminal offence.

IWF systems and processes in compiling this list are periodically inspected and validated by eminent independent professionals and found to be consistent with best practice. There is a procedure whereby the website owner of any blocked URL has the right of appeal. The URLs are assessed according to UK law, a process reinforced by reciprocal police training with each image being categorized in line with criteria set out by the UK Sentencing Guidelines Council. Details of every URL with child sexual abuse content are passed with accompanying intelligence to IWF Hotline and law enforcement partners around the world so they can investigate the hosting of such content in their countries under their own legislation.

Blocking facilitated by the use of IWF list applies only to URLs related to child sexual abuse content on publicly available websites. IWF have no role in the investigation of suspects therefore tackling the distribution of child sexual abuse content through other channels such as peer-to-peer is the role of our police partners.
www.iwf.org.uk , www.itpro.co.uk