How exactly would this reporting take place? European officials don’t explain in their three-page Sunday statement, but one of the signatories was Gilles de Kerchove, the EU's Counter-Terrorism Coordinator.
The Belgian official endorsed a 2013 quixotic EU-funded plan called CleanIT, which spent €400,000 ($473,000) to hold a bunch of meetings and produce a final report without creating anything concrete. And while CleanIT is not mentioned by name in the new statement, the reporting description sounds very much like it.
As described on its own website (which hasn’t been updated in nearly two years), the CleanIT project wanted to develop a flagging system for “terrorist” content. It wouldn't be mandatory, but Internet providers would be encouraged to take down or block the flagged material. The aim was to create “a non-legislative 'framework' that consists of general principles and best practices… to counter the illegal use of Internet.”
That left obvious questions: who is a terrorist? What's a terrorist website? Would there be an appeal process? No one was really sure with CleanIT, and the new plan being outlined leaves out those details for now, too.Even if all the debates about speech and law can be worked out, there are practical concerns with a reporting mechanism. What happens if a banned site simply moves its hosting outside the European Union—to Switzerland, Iceland, Serbia, Russia, Turkey, or even farther afield, to the United States or Japan? As an example, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s site is hosted in Russia (as of October 2014), which would be untouchable under this scheme.
Ars' Monday e-mail to But Klaasen, the Dutch national coordinator for counterterrorism and security who headed the CleanIT project, bounced back. If we can contact someone from the old project to comment on this new proposal or the similarities between the two projects, we will update this post.
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