Internet Censorship

Speaking of willful acts of abject stupidity…

A six-month trial of Australia’s government-mandated Internet filters is to begin on Christmas Eve (while everyone’s attention is elsewhere?). And if you think this story is relevant only to Australia, think again.

If there’s one thing that assorted politicians, bureaucrats, dictators, warlords and mandarins from every corner of the planet have always lusted after, it’s the ability to control access to information. So if your locality isn’t already subject to a similar impost it soon could be.

THEY want that power and they’ll use the fear of widespread moral and social decline to misinform the populace in their favor — it’s up to YOU to stop them.

Although it has already been explained to the powers that be, by every engineer and technologist who knows anything at all about such things, that the proposed filter system ABSOLUTELY CANNOT ACHIEVE THE STATED AIMS, it would seem that our erstwhile Communications Minister is determined to publicly confirm his ignorance of such matters for all the world to see.

With a title like “Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy”, it would be reasonable for us to expect that Senator Stephen Conroy might have taken the trouble to gain some practical understanding of the technologies involved, but clearly he hasn’t.

OK, that’s not so bad — after all politicians are often appointed to portfolios of which they have little practical understanding. Their lack of personal expertise is supposed to be countered by providing them with a team of specialist advisers.

But it seems in Conroy’s case, this elected representative of the people has either surrounded himself with complete incompetents, or (more likely) has chosen to ignore the experts who are paid to provide him with sensible, workable options, and keep him clear of disasters.

The implications for broadband in Australia are completely unacceptable. There is absolutely no doubt that we are going to see large numbers of perfectly legitimate websites blocked. The government has already funded three earlier studies that showed ISP-level filtering to be ineffective and more costly than other alternatives. Thus Minister Conroy already knows the proposed system doesn’t work, but apparently he doesn’t care, so it should come as no surprise when he also ignores the significant negatives that are bound to come out of the upcoming six-month test.

And as if that’s not bad enough…

Initial tests have shown that the proposed filtering system will slow broadband speeds by between 30% and 87%. When considered in light of the fact that Australia already has one of the slowest broadband architectures in the Western world, it’s clear that the Australian Federal government has completely lost the plot on this issue.

One of the main driving forces behind this proposed impost is the self-described “family oriented”, near-fundamentalist religious crowd. In the mind of a politician any group that commands a bloc vote deserves the highest consideration, no matter that their position may be mindless, illogical, scientifically unsupportable and demonstrably unworkable. The religious ratbags vote as a group and, to a large extent, according to the dictates of their leaders, so they are accorded a degree of consideration quite disproportionate to their numbers. Here is an eye-opening report on the “support” that the government claims to have for filtering the Internet –  just take a look at where that support comes from.

The plan is to provide Internet Service Providers (ISPs) with a list of prohibited websites, and the ISPs will then be bound by law to prevent access to those sites. Initially the size of the block list is to be capped at 10,000 URLs, but you will not be allowed to know what’s on that list!

Admittedly many of the listed sites will doubtless contain content that no normal, sane person should miss if it disappeared. But there are reportedly a large number that contain various levels of adult content, much of a type that is quite legal in many parts of the world, and even broadcast on public TV in such enlightened countries as The Netherlands. It has been suggested, but is by no means certain at this stage, that Internet users will be able to opt out of the pornography filter, but all Australians are to be barred from accessing any sites deemed to contain “illegal content”.

Since we will not be permitted to know what’s on the list, it’s anybody’s guess as to what may be deemed illegal content as time goes on. The potential for freedom of information abuses, intentional or otherwise, is significant. Recently Great Britain’s Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) filtered access to the massive Wikipedia website for UK users because of a naked girl on the image of a music album cover. The UK has also blocked access to many Middle East news agency websites. Illegal content? Hardly, but doubtless considered politically sensitive. That’s plain, unmitigated censorship of what should be publicly available information.

The technology of filtering is very complex, and there are quite a number of different ways to go about it. But not only is every single one of those ways capable of being defeated, the very act of providing a dual filtering system (one mandatory, one voluntary opt-out) increases the complexity of implementation enormously.

Apart from the performance loss, one of the most undesirable side-effects of any filtering system is the high likelihood of blocking large numbers of quite innocuous websites that are not themselves on a block list, because they share an IP address with a listed URL.

The simple fact is that the Webmasters of undesirable sites have at their disposal an arsenal of complex, high-tech tricks they can resort to that will flummox a filtering system, and they can cycle through a number of different avoidance schemes faster than the ISP-based filter system can adapt.

Even from the end-user perspective, tech-savvy Internet users can circumvent most filtering systems.

In fact I’ll venture to suggest that no government is capable of defeating the efforts of the worldwide open-source community, should the geeks decide to cooperatively marshal their resources against Internet censorship, and develop and publicly provide filter-defeating technologies that can be utilized by anyone. The more governments that try to implement censorship by technical means, the more competent opposition will rise up with counter-solutions.

Keeping pornography away from the view of children, and preventing the exchange of child pornography by deviants, are both laudable aims. But even children’s welfare groups are opposed to the draconian and unworkable system proposed by the Australian government — another fact that Senator Conroy and his clique of right-wing urgers are choosing to ignore.

As with so many other issues in our society, Australian politicians at all levels of government constantly exhibit a penchant for easy-way-out, knee-jerk reactions that seek to place the burden on all members of society, rather than those responsible for unacceptable practices.

Reasonable intervention to restrict universally obnoxious practices such as child pornography is probably acceptable to the majority of the population of any country, providing that intervention can be effective and not have overwhelming undesirable side-effects.

But the Australian government’s Internet filter proposal does not qualify in any respect! That has been irrefutably demonstrated in past trials and will be proven again in the six-month trial starting Christmas Eve.

To the logical mind that should be the end of the matter. However Senator Conroy and his head-in-the-sand, censor-at-any-cost, religious-right supporters have so far demonstrated only an illogical determination to ignore the demonstrated facts in pursuit of their own flawed agenda.

Senator Conroy is clearly not demonstrating the objectivity that the responsibilities of his office demand, so Internet users must speak up.

I urge you click each of the following links and “sign” the petitions provided:

GetUp Petition

TigWeb Petition

PLEASE VOTE –  IT REALLY WILL HELP!

More information on Internet censorship from Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA).

[tags]Internet filters[/tags]