Firewall of Lies
Alexandra Roach | September 18, 2009
The glaring technical flaws of the proposed mandatory internet filter scheme are bad enough, but it is the lies that have been used to sell it which should alarm us the most.
American Senator Boise Penrose once stated that “public office is the last refuge for the incompetent”. Harsh words, but few in the political sphere have done much to contradict such assumptions.
By now, most Australians have heard at least whispers of the Rudd government’s plan to censor the internet access of all Australians.
As it currently exists, Australian internet access is ruled by classification and self-guidance. Currently, Australians are still trusted to navigate the internet by themselves without Big Brother Rudd’s guidance.
But in a misguided and incompetent attempt to block the spread of child pornography, the Rudd-led Australian Labor Party (ALP) has taken millions in funding away from the Australian Federal Police’s crack anti-paedophile unit, and put it into a $43 million plan for a mandatory internet filter for all Australians.
Many of the problems with mandatory filtering have been discussed. The inefficiency of filtering technology is a serious problem; as are the ‘bottlenecks’ that will occur as Australia’s internet traffic simultaneously attempts to squeeze through the filters put in place by Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, has been the main spokesperson in regards to the scheme. The old adage of “don’t shoot the messenger” has certainly been ignored in his case: the blame for the unpopular scheme, though likely not to be entirely of his making, has been placed squarely on Conroy’s head.
The fact of the matter is, Senator Conroy and the ALP have tried to sell Australians a lemon of a policy by lying about it. That the policy being proposed is one which involves government-controlled censorship of the internet is of particular concern.
In fact, the whole process began with a lie.
While spruiking the National Broadband Network (NBN), promising ninety percent of Australians connection speeds one hundred times greater than those currently available, Kevin Rudd mentioned that the Government, “will require ISPs to offer a ‘clean feed’ internet service to all homes, schools and public internet points accessible by children, such as public libraries.”
‘Offer’ is the keyword. Nowhere is the true scope of this scheme mentioned: mandatory restrictions on everyone’s internet access, whether wanted or not.
How exactly the NBN’s high speeds will be reached through a filter that may slow the internet by 87%, and block hundreds of thousands of innocuous websites with the slight margin of error that exists within internet filters is unknown.
However, the ALP has provided other filter factoids.
Conroy stated that, “the Government is committed to tak[ing] an evidence-based approach to implementing its cyber-safety policy…trials will provide valuable information to inform our approach.” However, the value of the recent trails have been called into question.
During the recent trials, in which nine of Australia’s four-hundred-and-twenty-one ISPs participated, “marginal” speed problems occured. However, one small ISP had only fifteen people participate. When the speed bottlenecks with fifteen people involved, it is not a positive sign.
The results of these trials, due months ago, are yet to be released.
Conroy said the filter will only block what the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) catalogues as ‘illegal’ material that is refused classification. These banned sites would consist of child pornography, bestiality, incest and rape.
However, when ACMA’s ‘blacklist’ was leaked in March, only fifty percent of blacklisted sites contained such content.
The blacklist is compiled mostly via public complaint: a single complaint can lead to a site being blacklisted.
This system is open to abuse by members of the public; evidenced by the relatively innocuous sites and legally-viewable pornography on the leaked list. There is no public access to the list, no avenue for appeal, and seemingly little review of its contents.
Such a panopticon could be terribly abused by politicians. If you knew someone was circumventing the filter to view legal, yet blocked, material, would you inform on them? More to the point, would those in power ever abuse such a system to their own ends?
If Australia adopt this scheme, we will join the ranks of China and Saudi Arabia as the only countries in the world where the government does not trust its own citizens with internet access.
But perhaps the biggest lie of all occurred in the Senate. On October 20th, 2008, Conroy stated that “Sweden, [Britain], Canada and New Zealand” had mandatory internet filtering.
None of these filters are mandatory.
When Greens senator Scott Ludlam accused Conroy of “misleading” the public, Conroy had no response:or apology.
In an attempt to ‘improve’ society, Conroy lied.
In regards to the internet, the road to hell may be paved with good intentions. One wonders why those with good intentions but little knowledge don’t just leave well enough alone.
Alexandra Roach has an abiding love for and interest in politics, and certainly believes in the public keeping a watchful eye on politicians. She is a Masters of Media Practice student at the University of Sydney and contributor to on-campus publications such as ‘The Bull’. Alexandra is planning a career in the media.
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Bourkie
September 19, 2009 at 1:45 pm
All over the place Alexandra…
Soz Alexandra, but you are all over the place with this article, and it lacks sadly in accuracy.
First the AFP has never been so highly funded as they are today, and it is their internal rsponsibility where they allocate their resources. They have significant additional funding for this purpose, and can easily delegate double the funding to the child abuse fight, and as far as their budget docs relate, they do. You are quoting some old and smally red herring there.
Secondly it would appear that you have little or no idea of how the tested or proposed filtering technologies have performed and do perform… No bottlenecks, no squeeze today…. The Poms are running much larger users numbers through their filter systems than us here in Oz and do not have any performance issues, so I am not sure where you come up with your "inefficiency" claims from? The absolute vast majority of the traffic doer not even go through the ISP filter systems at all, never see them or traverse them. Who is feeding you this misleading story?
Your statement on the speeds / slowdown rates and accuracy are agin totally not applicable to the mandatory blacklist filter systems, but were worst case trial results from dynamic non-blacklist restricted filtering systems. A fully different filtering process that has little or nothing to do with the mandatory filtering systems planned and recently tested. And it is pretty weak to dismiss all recent test results because one ISP only had 15 people on the test? So how many did the rest have and what were their results Alexandra? Care to share?
Care to share the performance stats and results from theUK
BTW, I believe that you should get a better understanding of how the ACMA system works. Tha ACMA system blocks single URLs, not sites. There is a significant difference between blocking a single webpage and a site. And what then, BTW, is wrong with a single complaint, if it is accurate and identifies a webpage with prohibited content, with that causing a blacklisting? It is not a matter of a complaint automatically causing a blacklisting…
And then, well you keep comparing the old blacklist system with the newly planned and changed system, as if they are identical? You might want to follow the planning and realise that the old (current) system is simply not good enough and is being changed. Check that and come back to us all please.
There has been censorship inAustralia
But the real beauty of a statement you have is the Conroy, in our democraticAustralia
Assuming that only the people with same views as yourself have knowledge of a subject matter is a pretty narrow assumption in itself…
Let’s see what comes out of this process, and let’s also refrain from the naive positioning that we only accept a system when it has been proven perfect, otherwise we would not have any media studies and an Australian media system at all…
True?
JDNSW
September 20, 2009 at 5:59 am
A few corrections
The proposed censorship system has major shortcomings not covered in this article.
Perhaps the most telling ones are that it simply will not do what the government is telling the public that it will do.
The planned filter, as Bourkie correctly states, will block URLs not sites. Now if we look at a couple of numbers – Conroy is on record as saying that the maximum size of the blacklist will be 10,000 URLs, approximately ten times the size of the current list. Now last July, Google proudly announced that they had indexed one trillion URLs, increasing at around a billion a day. If we compare these numbers, it is apparent that the planned blacklist will cover a microscopic proportion of the web, 0.000001%. Now it seems to me that this means either the proportion of “unwanted” material is so low it is not worth worrying about, or the filter is so close to ineffective that it is useless. In either case, spending tens of millions of dollars just to trial it is just plain ludicrous!
Secondly, the filter will be trivial to bypass, only filters the web, not the other 60-80% of internet traffic, and will apparently be totally ineffective when IPv6 is introduced within the next couple of years as this requires end to end encryption.
Thirdly, any blacklist system with the internet ignores the fact that the internet is dynamic – a URL can lead you to one lot of content but a few seconds later can refer to totally different content. A complaints based system that demonstrably can take months to come to a decision is ridiculous for this.
As Bourkie comments, there has been censorship in Australia for a long time – but as far as I am aware, this is the first time there has been a proposal to censor a communication channel akin to the Post Office. And the history of censorship in Australia is hardly one to be proud of.
Conroy is on record as stating that the basis of the blacklist will not change, although he is also on record as saying that it will change to “refused classification” only. So which do we believe? He has vaguely suggested that the list will be compiled by the Classification Board, but how a secret list fits with this organisation, which publishes the title and reasons for everything that it classifies is not clear. For that matter, he talks about “bringing the internet into line with other media”, ignoring the fact that the internet is a communications channel not a medium, and ignoring the fact that no other “medium” has secret censorship.
So the question has to be asked – ‘Why does this censorship have to be secret?” The answer of course, is simply because it will not work! It has to be secret to stop anyone from going and looking at what is blacklisted!
Given that the proposed censorship will not do what it is sold to do, and that it has major downsides such as blackening Australia’s reputation as a democratic country, and degrading internet services, quite apart from wasting money, you have to ask why the government is so eager to continue? The only practical use for the proposed small secret blacklist is to hide from naive internet users a small number of URLs – and history tells us that whenever secret censorship is introduced, what will be hidden is what is offensive or embarrassing to the government of the day; and even if you are certain that the present government would not do this, can you be certain that no future government would?
The only people to benefit from this scheme will be the vendors of censorware, who stand to make a fortune, probably more than they manage to sell to countries such as Iran. It would be interesting to know whether any under cover donations have been made!
As for the trials that Bourkie is so lauding – the methodology has already been roundly condemned by some of Australia’s top statisticians (not double-blind, self selected participants), and Conroy has stated that Enex’s technical report will not be made public (Enex have stated that their reports are written so as not to reveal any commercial in confidence data), but will be rewritten by his department. Even if this rewritten report is an accurate reflection of Enex’s nobody will believe that! So not only Alexandra, but nobody else will have any sure idea how the filtering methods worked in the tests.
hello
September 20, 2009 at 5:48 am
Bourkie
The Poms are running much larger users numbers through their filter systems than us here in Oz and do not have any performance issues, so I am not sure where you come up with your "inefficiency" claims from?
The poms have had performance issues. They tried to block a single wikipedia page, causing all wikipedia traffic to traverse the filters and creating mayhem for all UK internet users. Eventually the IWF was forced to relent and remove the page from their blacklist. Senator Conroy has many such pages on his blacklist, is he happy to be dictated to by hardware limitations? What about Australian internet users, as the UK has proven that these events are unpredictable?
And it is pretty weak to dismiss all recent test results because one ISP only had 15 people on the test? So how many did the rest have and what were their results Alexandra? Care to share?
I’m inclined to agree that Conroys tests are quite irrelevant if Conroy wants to remain true to his promise of evidence based policy. They were performed on ISP’s most ppl had never heard of and on a voluntary basis. However this wont’ matter a great deal as we will never get to see the actual report – it’s being laundered through Conroy’s dept to produce his own report.
Tha ACMA system blocks single URLs, not sites. There is a significant difference between blocking a single webpage and a site.
I suggest you have a look at ACMAs blacklist, there are several such sites on their list.
Especially as the Censorship Board is now oversighting the blacklist?
Is this yet enshrined in legislation? Conroy has uttered so many lies and false promises i’d take nothing until it’s on paper.
But the real beauty of a statement you have is the Conroy, in our democratic Australia, shoudl apologies for somehting he has been accused of. Not proven guilty, but simply becuse he has been accused?
Considering Conroy has mooted the idea of a 3 strikes rule, which is a variation of exactly that – an accusation of guilt is enough, I think this would be entirely appropriate. After all, it would surely be at least 3 times that the Honourable Senator has mislead not just the public but parliament on this subject by now.
neil_mc
September 20, 2009 at 10:39 am
Quick points
Just some quick points on Bourkie’s comments:
"No bottlenecks, no squeeze today…. The Poms are running much larger users numbers through their filter systems than us here in Oz and do not have any performance issues"
There is some truth to that, but it is not applicable to what is being proposed for Australia even after the list contents and processes are revised (if in fact they will be). The IWF list as used in the UK has less than 1000 URLs and by reasonable accounts they do attempt to target only the worst of the worst content (not consensual bondage adult porn like we are going after even in the "new list").
The filters in the UK are low latency and low impact because traffic is only routed to a filter if an IP address is seen that is a host for a blacklisted URL. Most of the really abhorrent content isn’t going to be found on http (which we are targeting) but any that exists isn’t likely to be on a really high volume host. An indication of how fragile this sort of filtering can be is the Wikipedia incident in the UK. We’re about to take that scenario and run with it from day 1, but worse.
If the list is to be revised to be only Refused Classification material as Conroy is now claiming that includes material that is on hosts such as Youtube and there is no getting away from that. The leaked blaclist contained a RC youtube clip relating to euthanasia. I can easily find hundreds more that qualify on youtube. Why is youtube a problem? If a single Youtube URL is on the blackist then all youtube use that is hosted from the same IP as the banned clip must go through the filter. So 1 url blocked = massive amount of youtube content forced through the filter.
If you don’t believe me on this have a read what the vendor has to say:
http://tinyurl.com/mhyx2l
That was from an Australian ISP trial back in May that used a part of the IWF list. In summary such a filter can’t handle the traffic that is passed to the filter as a result of a single URL from a high traffic site making it onto the list. Peter Mancer called it a theoretical problem because sites like Youtube remove illegal content quickly. The thing is our Refused Classification is so narrow in Australia it covers material that sites like Youtube won’t ever take down. When pushed on the issue Mancer said that they’d need to whitelist such entries if that occurred. So will the government accept products that exclude bits of the blacklist that the filter can’t handle? (I’d think not)
More recently there was a vendor white paper from the ACMA blacklist trial where the issue came up again:
http://www.watchdoginternational.net/images/listwhitepaper_3.pdf
Issues identified included the Youtube example and others which tripped the filter up. This is specifically a problem for the high performance blacklist filters like Netclean Whitebox. Another filter in the trials was Marshall8e6 which is popular in the corporate environment. This product scales up to the tens of thousands of customers and all traffic goes through the filter. In the trials the number of customers who chose to participate in the trial would probably not have tripped these up. They aren’t going to fit for the mandatory filter for our top 10 ISPs though.
"And what then, BTW, is wrong with a single complaint, if it is accurate and identifies a webpage with prohibited content, with that causing a blacklisting?"
It’s a secret list that even if limited to RC captures Youtube videos on euthanasia and graffiti.
"And then, well you keep comparing the old blacklist system with the newly planned and changed system, as if they are identical? You might want to follow the planning and realise that the old (current) system is simply not good enough and is being changed. Check that and come back to us all please."
I found that a bit humorous. The planned new system would never have seen the light of day if it wasn’t for the embarrassment of the actual blacklist contents when it leaked and if the government wasn’t facing pressure on the stupidity of blacklisting playboy type nudity(absolutely in the current list) and some shocking mistakes . Conroy talked vaguely about new processing by the classifications board and other measures to improve trust in the process. He committed to it still being a secret list.
Where is this new scheme up to 6 months later? Senator Ludlam got a wishy washy response from Conroy in question time last week. It’s still a vauge notion of maybe an expansion of the classification board’s role. Maybe involving a parliamentary committee and maybe restricted to RC material (which is already extremely broad and mostly legal to possess and view). Sorry if I don’t sound enthused about the "new system". It’s no more than a bit of waffle right now. For now we can only focus on the framework in place that the Senator had been assuring us previously was robust and fit for the purpose.
"Especially as the Censorship Board is now oversighting the blacklist?"
They aren’t. That’s a big maybe. Conroy has been caught backtracking and outright lying (with evidence) that I’m surprised about the amount of faith you have in that. Even if the CB had the job there are so many issues that I could continue for many thousands of words. (quick example of the work of the CB: photographs of men inserting a forearm into another mans butt got a PG rating. Elderly citizens who want to drive forward the debate on euthanasia inc via Youtube = RC)
"Let’s see what comes out of this process, and let’s also refrain from the naive positioning that we only accept a system when it has been proven perfect, otherwise we would not have any media studies and an Australian media system at all…"
Okay…. lets just let them proceed with an expensive wasteful and counter productive process and just trust them to patch it up later. Sorry. No thanks. They’ve done nothing to date to deserve that level of faith and trust.
Bourkie
September 21, 2009 at 11:17 am
Response to neil_mc
You bring up some very pertinant points Neil, and they do need further scrutiny on both sides of this contentious proposal.
I guess first of all there are a lot a maybe’s, and deciding on the merits of a proposal on a pool of "maybe’s" and speculation is seldom going to bring a good result.
The censorship board will have the oversight in the future, Conroy needs to do that to get his senate numbers… He may appear dumb to many, but some still underestimate his political nouse and his ability to succeed. Just look at Coonan, who belittled him during the election and came a distant second to him in the preferred stakes, and Conroy is powering ahead with the NBN and Telstra split. The majority of Aussies see those two issues as far more critical than the filter question, whether we like it or not.
Most responses from politicians are wishy-washy (at least the perception is) to contrahents until legislation is drafted and tabled. Almost always and from all parties. No one commits till the policy or the law is drafted. That is our challenge with our system, but does alow pollies to come to their senses prior to enacting laws at times. Two sides to that coin. May happen here with Conroy as well.
The old system of creating and managing the ACMA blacklist was and is a dud, a management failure. But Conroy is not going to be seen as responsible for that, he inherited it and will change it in his own good time. Some keep attacking Conroy for that blacklist, but the Libs will be the last to try and smear him on that, as they had it for a decade and put in all the procedures that run it today…
On the performance side, the actual filtering does not represent a challenge anymore Neil. The proposed BGP rerouting model takes care of the speed issue, as even with 10,000 URLs on the new blacklist that is still only around 0.000728% (one in 137,000) of the routable IP addresses on the web today. (assuming an averaged 4 IP addresses related to each URL on the blacklist: 40,000 IP address exceptions mapped to the BGP tables). If the BGP tables reroute based on an IP address in a range, then that is still only a miniscule amount of traffic redirections. Sure the 8E6 and Netclean systems have their limits in the tests, and the 8E6 was never conceptualised for telco and carrier environments. The Netclean can run good telco/carrier numbers in real environments, and already do, and do not forget that the content does not go through the filter boxes, whether YouTube or whatever Neil. Just the URL request goes there in this scenario. That is upwards of 200 bytes per request, as opposed to 2MB to 20MB per clip. No comparison. YouTube is not a URL request intensive site actually, with long viewing periods interspersed with address requests.
The technical model scenario has already been modified after the UK experiences. The actual content is delivered directly to the end-user, not via the filter boxes. The amount of traffic generated by Youtube "GET" requests is piffling for a telco grade filter box… YouTube generates massive content traffic, but only from a relative small number of URL requests. (No, I have no relation with Netclean at all….)
The Wikipedia incident was a blip in the great scheme of things… Yep it demonstrated a weakness in the Wikipedia system which they have since addressed, but at the end of the day we all have to adapt our online systems to the infrastructure in place, all of us. Wikipedia had a system that tripped up on the Cleanfeed system, and they have modified their system to comply in the meantime. Did millions of users go off the air? Was Wikipedia off the air, or just the ability to edit?
As the Poms have experienced, errors can be made at the ISP as well as the blacklist levels, however most of these are already known and resolved today. The "oracle" issue is a potential bugbear, but won’t stop the system working or being used. Even Richard Clayton, a fine and pragmatic fellow, discuss ways of negating the "oracle" scenario. No internet system is perfect and almost if not all systems have their weakness somewhere. Did Australia throw Primus out of the market when their power systems failed for the second time? Did Telstra go broke after major internet access systems failed and left users with no net access or email access at all? Nope.
You are quite correct on the issue of the effectiveness of the current ACMA blacklist, that is pretty lame and needs to really improve. But still no reason to not proceed in the broader public’s view, even with the some of the URL controls as weak as water to date. That is something that needs to be gotten right in their view, not discarded, otherwise we could discard 60% of all private business and government controls that we have today…
Good old Conroy, he gets the stick… I am often mystified by his statements and they need backgrounding before it becomes clearer. I cannot help thinking that his advisors have an issue mentoring him for public debate. He is though now pushing some strong national projects, and has bargaining chips galore. His opponents naturally attack him daily, but they all fall into line when the chips hit the poker table… I would not count your senate votes yet Neil on filtering legislation, real and measurable opposition to this project is not yet tangible enough. Xenophon will trade his vote, Fielding is already over there and a couple of Libs are also already filtering supporters and will negotiate. Minchin is jumping up and down today, but will also negotiate for more important concessions when the time comes.
Calling him too openly and too often on "outright lying" does not win votes Neil, it makes the callers look very partisian and not open to discussion, and continually slanted and one-sided in their positioning of his statements. He is going far too well on the bigger national telecoms issues for the public to believe that he is lying all over the place on this one, as important as the question is.
neil_mc
September 21, 2009 at 11:43 am
“The censorship board will
"The censorship board will have the oversight in the future"
That was never on the cards until the current blacklist was exposed in public. It’s still not a certainty. If it happens it removes the situation with the ACMA guessing what the CB might decide but it’s still a secret list that if narrowed to RC is extremely broad. It is in the many millions of potential URLs. (btw in Senate estimates Conroy declared faith in the ACMA making judgements on what the CB would do. It has since been proved that the ACMA got it very wrong when content was later submitted).
"No one commits till the policy or the law is drafted."
The "policy" has existed since Beazly was leader. It morphs and shifts with every embarrasment. The new theoretical bits were reactionary after Conroy’s assertions on the mechanisms were proven false.
"The old system of creating and managing the ACMA blacklist was and is a dud, a management failure. But Conroy is not going to be seen as responsible for that, he inherited it and will change it in his own good time. Some keep attacking Conroy for that blacklist, but the Libs will be the last to try and smear him on that, as they had it for a decade and put in all the procedures that run it today…"
He can only get so far with that. He voted for parts of that legislation. Labor also introduced the online MA15+ restrictions last year (which Conroy also supported). That’s taking Libs blacklist and extending it to lunacy.
"On the performance side, the actual filtering does not represent a challenge anymore Neil. The proposed BGP rerouting model takes care of the speed issue, as even with 10,000 URLs on the new blacklist that is still only around 0.000728% (one in 137,000) of the routable IP addresses on the web today."
Vendor’s participating in the most recent "live trial" experienced serious issues with our current blacklist. Labor suggested that it might be restricted to 10,000 URLs while claiming that they would reduce the scope to RC only which is many orders of mannitude beyond 10,000 URLs and includes people painting trains and miserable old people discussing a dignified end to life.
"Good old Conroy, he gets the stick…"
He does. I tend to hold Labor accountable for it though. The policy goes back a way even if it didn’t get much airing pre-election (and changed 2 weeks before the election).
"Calling him too openly and too often on "outright lying" does not win votes Neil, it makes the callers look very partisian and not open to discussion"
A lie is a lie. There’s nothing partisan about it. I’m a life long labor supporter so it’s not a partisan thing. I’m not anti everything Labor or Conroy does (NBN, Telstra and some bits of Cyber Safety are fine with me).
"He is going far too well on the bigger national telecoms issues for the public to believe that he is lying all over the place on this one"
Again not partisan or exaggeration. A lie is a lie. Like "we are only targeting illegal material" and "we never suggested that we would filter P2P or that it is even possible" or "the blacklist is more than half child abuse material" (before it leaked and he changed is tune). These are pure facutal when it comes to the lies, not a partisan rant.
Bourkie
September 21, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Some good points Neil…
You make some good points, let me research those.
You can bet your bottom dollar that the CB has oversight in the future, that is one hot potato that Conroy does not want to be juggling. CB in, public perception fixed. Public perception fixed, one or two additional senate votes…
Lies have degrees too Neil. People lie to us every day, in many ways. We could spend all day every day pulling pollie and people’s statements apart. Google tells us we have 200 billion URLs, so how is 10,000 URLs "an extension to lunacy"? A matter of perspective I guess. I also never read that Conroy was committed to filtering P2P, only that he was going to trial P2P filtering technologies. Sure it is an assumption that he would try filtering P2P, but that ain’t gonna work in the forseeable future in any case I continually read…
I am not challenging you personally on these issues, it is the overall picture I get when I read all I can on the three sides of this drama, and then cross-reference them to the available data from other countries. I generally have a low trust level on political announcements, just looking for what the probable outcome will be and what today’s systems can deliver. And BTW, I do respect your openess and position on being a long term ALP supported but dead set against this proposal. No suggestion of partisianship on your behalf in the light of that.
The trials here recently do not seem to equate to the real operational user numbers in Australia, but then it looks like they never were going to. What were the actual serious blacklist issues that the vendors/ISPs had in your view?
Bourkie
September 21, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Forgot to mention….
Soz Neil, forgot to mention… I am not a Labour voter and cannot remember the last time they got my vote. Just cannot see the Libs and co defeating them on this atm.
neil_mc
September 21, 2009 at 11:27 pm
Your’re right, I am dead set
Your’re right, I am dead set against this proposal.
I’m not counting senate votes before they hatch either. I don’t think positive press around the NBN is going to give them a free pass for this though. There has been tons of press and commentary around this and very little of it paints the idea in a positive light.
I called Labor’s addition of MA15+ for commercial material not behind an age verification system an extension to lunacy, not the 10,000 URLs. I don’t know why they tossed up that number because they never suggested that the worst 10,000 would be included and the rest would drop off or something. At the time they were talking of list expansion they were still committed to blocking RC, X, R and some MA content for everyone. That’s never going to fit into 10,000 URLs.
While still talking about abhorent content and using examples of child pornography, bestiality and rape like that’s their target. Unlike other nations who do this in some form, Labor has never said they’d restrict it to child abuse material. He’s reduced the scope to RC which is going to be in the many millions of URLs. Link takedown notices are also still on the table. If I link the Youtube clip on euthanasia here so you can see what I’m talking about the hosting company for this site can be thretened with $10,000 per day fines if the host is in Australia. That clip is still in the scope of the reduced list.
" I also never read that Conroy was committed to filtering P2P, only that he was going to trial P2P filtering technologies."
That’s a politician trying to have his cake and eat it too. His comments on P2P came after weeks of media pointing out that for all of this effort the government was going after a protocol where abhorrent child abuse images is rarely traded. After his blog comments and the release of the trial EOI there was press with headlines "Labor to filter Peer to Peer".
The level of disgust with Conroy comes from his avoidance of all questions in question time while accusing Ludlam of misleading the chamber for asking about P2P. Conroy’s answer wasn’t "we’ve ruled that out" or "we’re not convinced that it’s feasable". He launched an attack on the person asking about P2P as though he was making stuff up.
http://scott-ludlam.greensmps.org.au/content/media-release/fail-minister-shifts-goalposts-internet-filtering
https://broowery.com/content/conroy-misleads-senate
On the serious blacklist issues in the recent trial, I linked the whitepaper from Watchdog (vendor for Netclean Whitebox and 8e6). The youtube URL couldn’t be handled because of the volume of requests diverted to the filter (their solution was to whitlist such a URL). URLs with question marks were a problem (though apparently a software update resolved that) and very long URLs were a problem. This is the same BGP routing solution they are selling into the UK: http://www.watchdoginternational.net/index.php/uk-blacklist-filtering-service
On the idea of targetting http for child abuse material, even Watchdog used an article on their website that included this:
But Clayton also sugests that blocking Web sites is becoming quaintly old-fashioned.
"The IWF list is down to c. 400 sites (from 1500+, of which about 1/3 are ‘free’ sites – ie: a single phone call would remove the material)," he said by email. In other words, the Web may not be able to bypass the technology – but things like TOR, Freenet, closed peer-to-peer networks, and that wacky darknet-in-a-browser project showed off at Black Hat last week probably can because they were deliberately created to bypass the domain name system entirely. The Web is not the Internet. The Web may no longer be able to route around censorship, but the Internet still can in the time-honored way: by changing technologies. Originally, John Gilmore’s aphorism referred to…Usenet.
http://www.watchdoginternational.net/index.php/press-releases/52-press-releases-external/126-watchdog-filtering-expert-opinion-in-uk-press
If Labor really are going after the most abhorrent material by targeting http only then they are 10 years too late. The thing is unlike any other democracy they still aren’t limiting themselves to the most abhorrent material even after being forced to scale back from X, R and MA.
Also on my calling labor’s extension of the blacklist scope lunacy here is an example of what happens in the real world when enforcing that sort of stuff:
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2009/09/acma-killed-off-gift-this-movie-option-in-itunes/
In an attempt to tame the web, Apple have been forced to remove the "gift this movie" option for Australia. You can’t even gift a G rated movie. While the government are talking about applying standards more uniformly, "gift this TV show" is still available. Eg True Blood (one of my favs) can still be gifted. Apple have it at MA15+. The content is probably more like R18+.
You can still gift a movie from any country into Australia.
Nick Mallory
September 25, 2009 at 5:14 am
The proposal is wrong in principle
The technical complexities of this proposed system are beside the point, it’s just wrong in principle but sadly the parties which witter on most about freedom and democracy in theory are always those who stamp on its throat in practice, and Mr Rudd’s Labor government appears to be no different. The state should have no business in censoring the internet in this way. The proposal will be dropped as soon as they realise that they’ll lose a big swathe of the youth vote over it come the next election of course, but it’s dispiriting to see that the Prime Minister’s love of all things Chinese extends to blanket internet censorship.
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February 6, 2011 at 5:35 pm
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