5 Concerns About Australia's New Net Filter

daria42 writes "As you might have heard, this month Australia gets a new Internet filter, using Interpol's blacklist of 'worst of the worst' child pornography sites. In general, it seems like most people don't object to the idea in principle, but concerns are being raised around the transparency of the scheme, which so far has no civilian oversight, unclear backing legislation and an appeals process which does not exactly inspire confidence. Why is it those who want to implement this kind of filtering never quite address these sort of concerns up-front?"

Comments

The quick answer:

[gcnaddict]

They're not network engineers. They just don't get it.

Have you heard most laypeople give theories on how computers and the internet work? They assume it's all magic, which probably explains why things like transparency and oversight end up being an afterthought.

Re:The quick answer:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that it is rather worse than that:

They aren't network engineers, true, so why did they skip all the politician-stuff that they do know how to do(legislation, process, etc.) and skip right to making demands on the network side?

I'm just going to go out on a limb here and suggest that they have no interest in there being any sort of oversight, due process, or other such inefficient meddling with their precious little plan.

Re:The quick answer:

[Anonymous Coward]

You're assuming the lack of oversight and transparency is a bug, not a feature.

Re:The quick answer:

[dov_0]

The other angle is that Australia has always had censorship. Radio and TV are censored. Video games were logically censored to keep things in line with alread excepted policy. I'm personally surprised that censorship of the Internet has taken so long. I used to run a PC repair business and every customer with children and some without were concerned about what is available on the internet and many asked me to install Net Nanny or some other similar service. Any internet filter that filters out things like child porn and bestiality will be, except for some vocal small groups, quite popular here.

As for the 'oversights' outlined by the parent, Australians trust our governments a lot more than people in the US. Up until not too many years ago all of our public utilities were government owned, we have free government run or supplemented health care, education and payments and job training for the unemployed. It is quite natural to us that there should be censorship and I think the majority if Australians would be quite happy for the government to be doing it without questioning things too much.

Re:The quick answer:

[arth1]

Any internet filter that filters out things like child porn and bestiality will be, except for some vocal small groups, quite popular here.

It's the word "like" that should raise a flag. What, exactly, will be censored, and who decides it?

This quote seems on topic:

"The big problem with pornography is defining it. You can't just say it's pictures of people naked. For example, you have these primitive African tribes that exist by chasing the wildebeest on foot, and they have to go around largely naked, because, as the old tribal saying goes: "N'wam k'honi soit qui mali," which means, "If you think you can catch a wildebeest in this climate and wear clothes at the same time, then I have some beach front property in the desert region of Northern Mali that you may be interested in."

So it's not considered pornographic when National Geographic publishes color photographs of these people hunting the wildebeest naked, or pounding one rock onto another rock for some primitive reason naked, or whatever. But if National Geographic were to publish an article entitled "The Girls of the California Junior College System Hunt the Wildebeest Naked," some people would call it pornography. But others would not. And still others, such as the Spectacularly Rev. Jerry Falwell, would get upset about seeing the wildebeest naked."
-- Dave Barry

Why indeed.

[Meshach]

Because by flying the "We are protecting the children" flag they can be immune it criticism. Anyone who opposes is a supported of child porn.

Just like any one who opposes the massive privacy breaches in the USA is in support of the terrorists.

Re:Why indeed.

[JaredOfEuropa]

To those who use the child porn argument in discussions about censorship, I'll go so far as to turn the "we need censorship to fight child porn" argument around, and say that we should legalize the distribution of child porn, if that is what it takes to safeguard the Internet from censorship".

Not saying of course that we actually should; there are far better ways to ensure our freedoms on the 'net. It's a statement to emphasise the fact that if freedom from online censorship and effective persecution of child porn peddlers are mutually exclusive, then I'll choose freedom every time without a shred of hesitation. This is one of those principal rights not worth sacrificing for some practical considerations, however important those may be.

I don't understand...

[AngryDeuce]

Why can there not be a public list of blocked websites? And how hard is it to set up some sort of oversight that allows for an appeals process for wrongfully blocked addresses?

I know the answer is most likely "because they don't care" but still, have they even tried to come up with a reason for these shortcomings? Or is it pretty much just going to be one of those "well, if you're against this you must be for child porn, because we live in a world that has no gray area whatsoever" that is so typical in cases like these?

Re:I don't understand...

[MichaelSmith]

Why can there not be a public list of blocked websites?

Because the web sites are not blocked in any effective way and such a list would just be advertising for their services.

Re:A better question

[gerddie]

A music-industry speaker at an American Chamber of Commerce event in Stockholm waxed enthusiastic about child porn, because it serves as the perfect excuse for network censorship, and once you've got a child-porn filter, you can censor anything:

"Child pornography is great," the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. "It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites". The venue was a seminar organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Stockholm on May 27, 2007, under the title "Sweden -- A Safe Haven for Pirates?". The speaker was Johan Schlüter from the Danish Anti-Piracy Group, a lobby organization for the music and film industry associations, like IFPI and others... "One day we will have a giant filter that we develop in close cooperation with IFPI and MPA. We continuously monitor the child porn on the net, to show the politicians that filtering works. Child porn is an issue they understand," Johan Schlüter said with a grin, his whole being radiating pride and enthusiasm from the podium.

Source: http://boingboing.net/2010/04/28/music-industry-spoke.html

Because They Do Not Want Oversight

[ohnocitizen]

They do not address the issues of oversight and transparency because they want neither. They are using the horrifying crime of child sexual abuse as a shield to deflect objections to censorship, and it has worked. Governments the world over want more oversight and control over what their citizens do. In some cases (China) they simply implement that control to their heart's content. In others, like the USA, I am sure our own government will be watching how the public reacts intently - with an eye towards similar measures here at home.

Lots oppose on principle

[tdelaney]

Trust me - lots of us oppose this on principle. However, there is a massive amount of fatigue regarding this issue - every objection raised to it is either ignored or labelled as "supporting child porn".

As a result, the only way we can see to oppose it is on technical and transparency grounds. It's still being ignored, but at least we're on unassailable technical footing here - the filter is useless for its stated purpose (preventing people inadvertantly finding CP) and is trivial to bypass in any case (as admitted by Optus). And because the blocklist is private, it could be easily expanded to cover anything (for those people not technically-minded or politically-minded enough to change their DNS settings).

I chose my ISP (Internode) for several reasons - one of which being Simon Hackett's oft-stated position that they will not filter anything unless required by law.

Re:Lots oppose on principle

[Enter the Shoggoth]

Trust me - lots of us oppose this on principle. However, there is a massive amount of fatigue regarding this issue - every objection raised to it is either ignored or labelled as "supporting child porn".

As a result, the only way we can see to oppose it is on technical and transparency grounds. It's still being ignored, but at least we're on unassailable technical footing here - the filter is useless for its stated purpose (preventing people inadvertantly finding CP) and is trivial to bypass in any case (as admitted by Optus). And because the blocklist is private, it could be easily expanded to cover anything (for those people not technically-minded or politically-minded enough to change their DNS settings).

I chose my ISP (Internode) for several reasons - one of which being Simon Hackett's oft-stated position that they will not filter anything unless required by law.

I'm a Telstra customer * - over the last few years whenever there's been an outage I've done a little digging and found that most of the time the outage co-incides with Telstra's DNS servers going down. The odd thing is that I haven't used their DNS servers in many years so I've been assuming that Telstra run a transparent proxy for http traffic and that the proxy is configured to use Telstra's DNS - therefore if the DNS goes down so does my ability to surf. I've cross checked this during outages by using other services (eg. ssh) and they've worked fine.

So can someone in the know explain another way for this to happen or is my guess correct and are they running a transparent proxy? If the latter is correct no amount of futzing with your resolver can bypass the filter (without resorting to a VPN). Or am I missing something blindingly obvious?

* I'd love to go with someone else but given that I'm 6km from the phone exchange DSL seems rather pointless when compared to cable.

Where's the blacklist?

[zill]

Here's the interpol stop page.

I can't seem to find the blacklisted domains on Telstra and Interpol's sites. Is my google-fu too weak or is the list kept secret?

If it's latter, how am I supposed check whether my site hasn't accidentally ended on the blacklist? Use an Australian proxy?

I found it deeply ironic that the list of censored sites is itself censored.

Summary Inaccurate

[Techman83]

Summary slightly inaccurate, this is Telstra/Optus and a few smaller operations (who already offered filtering) who are enabling voluntary filtering. There are plenty of ISPs refusing to implement the filter until it becomes legislation and will fight it with everything they can before then. This will do nothing but make many more customers go to the smaller operators who have better customer service, better pricing etc.

The other stupid part of this is that it is DNS based and the work around is to use different DNS servers. Who actually uses their ISPs DNS servers? I haven't in years!

Re:Summary Inaccurate

[thegarbz]

Mod parent up. There is a lot of scaremongering on Slashdot about this internet filter as of late. It's almost like people think this is the same as the proposed filter introduced by the Labor party in the last election. It's not.

The Labor party's proposal was an Australian wide scheme. The Labor party's proposal would never pass the senate [greensmps.org.au] with too many people opposed to it in power. Finally most critically of all the Labor party's group dedicated to the implementation of this filter has been disbanded.

This is an implementation of a DNS blocklist by a few ISPs. Optus has been on the record that you do not need to use their DNS servers and doing so would b-pass the filters. iinet, Internode, and TPG all are not implementing this filter with iinet (Australia's third or second largest subscriber depending on how you read the numbers) is on the record as saying they will never implement a filter unless forced to by law.

Re:Summary Inaccurate

[bmo]

You seem to be missing the strategy that has been used over the past couple of decades.

Come out with something objectionable but aimed at what you want. Indeed, make sure it's objectionable. Get everyone up in arms.

Then roll it back to what you really wanted or slightly less, but an acceptable amount. This is called "compromise" but not really. Now you seem "reasonable" and your goal is achieved. Now the only thing left is to ramp it up and test the tolerance limits of everyone.

It's a cynical strategy, but it works.

--
BMO

Re:why filter?

[MichaelSmith]

if the sites are so bad why not go after the site directly instead?

Its not like Australia can send Seal Team Six to any country in the world to take out a web server.

Because they don't have to, Citizen.

[Gothmolly]

The government is there to protect you, whether you want it or not.

Arrogance

[Anonymous Coward]

Arrogance might be a factor. Here in Finland the ministers responsible never really even wanted public interest groups like Electronic Frontier Finland to participate in any discussions regarding laws like internet filtering or the infamous Lex Nokia that gave companies rights to monitor their employees' message traffic headers. In Finland all this culminated in a local Internet activist who publicly criticized shortcomings in the preparations of internet filtering getting filtered, labelled a paedophile and punished. This in turn led to a court case that ended in a decision that the police had greatly abused the rights given to them.

In Finland, the ministers seem to get more and more convinced that they don't need to listen to the citizens; that's when they're not completely bought or led like the minister responsible for our new, stricter, iPRED compatible copyright law...

Re:A better question

[NFN_NLN]

A music-industry speaker at an American Chamber of Commerce event in Stockholm waxed enthusiastic about child porn, because it serves as the perfect excuse for network censorship, and once you've got a child-porn filter, you can censor anything:

 

The speaker has a point but it is misdirected. This censorship is really a thinly veiled attempt at shielding domestically produced child pornography from competition. Because child pornography in general is illegal, it is impossible to impose trade tariffs without raising the alarm bells. It is also well known that cheap overseas labour can out-produce more expensive Australian labour in most non-technical industries.

Australian based child pornographers were finding their margins dwindling so they used "special interest" groups to penetrate government and introduce laws to protect their business. It is obvious that anyone in support of the "Australian Net Filter" is simply disguising their interest in strengthening domestic child pornography. :)

Re:Grounds for lawsuit?

[jamesh]

I've thought about this too. I think one of the biggest fears of the implementer of such a filter is that they may then be held liable for the content they don't filter. I assume though that under the fluff, the charter of Telstra's filter is "to block sites on the Interpol 'worst of the worst' block list via a DNS filter". If you can access sites on the list without altering your DNS servers or having your DNS servers altered by malware then you may have a case. If you understand the underlying technology though, I think you'll realise they have themselves covered.

FWIW, I think that this filter is one of the best possibly outcome (ranking behind an opt in filter, or no filter at all). As long as they stick to blocking DNS records that i'm never going to use anyway and I could circumvent if I wanted to then it seems reasonable. If they had started doing deep packet inspection and modification then Telstra and I might have had a problem... if I was a Telstra customer.

There is always the danger of the "slippery slope", and it's probably quite real in this case, but Telstra is mostly a private company and customers can vote with their credit cards, and if the government mandated it then Australian's can vote with their votes. Another concern is that the big political focus over here at the moment is the carbon tax, so if the government was looking for some misdirection then a compulsory internet filter might be just the thing.

Misleading headline...

[jonwil]

The only ISPs to have signed up to the filter so far are the 2 big boys (Telstra and Optus).

A number of big ISPs (including the #3 provider iiNet as well as Internode and TPG) have specifically said they will not filter anything unless they are legally required to do so.

Anyone smart enough to care about the Internet filter should be smart enough to know that Tel$tra and Optarse are junk and should be avoided if alternatives are available (if you can get DSL from BigPond or Optus, you can also get DSL from better options like Internode, iiNet and others)

Wait. I'm confused.

[TrumpetPower!]

This is Interpol we're talking about, and the worst of the worst. And they've got a list of domain names they know to be serving this stuff up.

Why on Earth are they blocking access to these domains rather than busting down the doors of the sites where the servers are located?

I mean, really. It's Interpol. It's child porn. And the best tool they can think of is to set up a DNS filter?

What gives?

Cheers,

b&

Re:Wait. I'm confused.

[rust627]

Mod parent up

Interpol (international Police), have a list of websites that are known to be the worst of the worst child porn websites.
All DNS is in a central registry
somebody must have paid for the website to exist
follow the money trail to who owns the website and who hosts it
close down the hosting service (should not be too much problem here, International Police, and yes i know they do not have jurisdiction all around the world, but for areas they do not, they have sufficient political connections to be able to create political pressure), not just the site, the whole hosting service.
Arrest the people who are responsible for the site (Domain name owners, site hosting company).
Put the responsibility on to the ISP's that host.
If you own a bookshop and you sell pr0n, and someone comes to your shop and offers you to sell CP, you are expected to say no and report them to the local police.
So if you are an ISP and you knowingly host CP, why should the law be any different, you are an accessory (and a rather vital one).
Yes it would get messy in regards to what you can be legitimately be expected to know and not know about your customers sites, and yes some websites get hacked.
But the point is , they have a list of sites, they have also a list of who is hosting these sites, and they can trace who owns the site, so in real terms, what is the problem.
The reality is that for interpol to chase these people costs a lot of money, and apart from the occasional big news "child porn ring busted, 5,000 arrests in 6 countries" there is not much 'aren't we wonderful' PR for the politicians, where as here they can say publicly "look at what we are doing (think of the children)"

Re:A better question

[BitterOak]

Why aren't the authorities using their resources to actually find, arrest, and confine the people who actually produce child pornography?

Maybe the child pornography is being produced in a different jurisdiction than the authorities of whom you speak.

This filter is great!

[the_raptor]

Anyone who is against this filter needs to see the long game. This filter is great for the following reasons:

1) It is a CP filter. Any argument in future for a government backed filter because "think of teh children!" can be defused by pointing out we already have a voluntary industry filter. This is why the US movie industry has a self-regulated rating system.

2) It is trivial to get around. Even my mum could follow directions to circumvent this filter. It isn't going to cause traffic slowdowns or require expensive VPN's to foreign countries to get around.

3) There is no issue about the list being secret because anyone who tries to visit a blocked website will get a redirect telling them that it is on the block list. If this website is innocuous this information can be spread via social media and the like and used to harass the ISP's into unfiltering it. Corporations are a lot more responsive to public complaint then government departments.

4) The law IS unclear. This is great, as it means the authorities have no real ability to force ISP's to comply with this "industry" filtering agreement. Which means they can't just block new categories of content on a whim, or increase the sophistication of the filter.

In summary people against censorship should be for this filter because it is such a house of cards AND defuses the main argument the pro-censorship people use "do you want people to be able to view child porn?". Things will go to shit if the government is actually allowed to get really involved, because both main parties here have shown no fear of incredible infringements of civil rights (here in NSW we only just got our right of association back after legislation was struck down that prevented members of criminal motorcycle gangs associating with each other).

Re:Grounds for lawsuit?

[Penguinisto]

I hate to do this, but...

If you can access sites on the list without altering your DNS servers or having your DNS servers altered by malware then you may have a case

http://207.46.19.254/en-us/default.aspx (Microsoft's main site).

...just a quick note that DNS isn't exactly all that and a bag of chips when it comes to filtering something.

Filtering versus prosecution

[Adrian Lopez]

The problem with these kinds of filtering schemes is the fact that they rely on allegations of illegality rather than on judgments which establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the website's operators are doing something illegal according to local or international law. The latter calls for the government to make its case against the website's operators in a proper venue, allowing the website's operators to mount a proper defense. At that point the government may as well seek to shutdown the website altogether, which shouldn't be a problem if those accused are truly engaging in illegal (and unethical) behavior.

Bible

[Anonymous Coward]

the problem is there will always be a way for the false positives to block non-offensive sites ...

Child porn sites start using Biblical passages as euphemisms for certain things - "Lot's daughters" would be a wonderful search term for under age girl porn.

It'll get through the filters for a while and when it's discovered, Bible sites will be blocked and the Christian Fundies will start scaring the shit out of the politicians to remove the filters.

At least that's how it might go down.

Religion is a wonderful political weapon and it should never be put to waste.

Re:Bible

[RobertLTux]

or even better somebody will get/leak the blocklist and then arrange some sort of mirror for the content

Block List
or
Shopping List

YOU MAKE THE CALL!!

Re:Bible

[leamanc]

I'm not sure using deceptive text would work in this case. It doesn't seem to be automated like a spam filter. It's blacklist of the "worst of the worst" sites, according to TFA.

That makes it sound like somebody at Interpol is viewing the sites, rating them, and adding the "worst of the worst" to the list manually.

Re:Nothing to do with America

[TapeCutter]

Any kind of industry agreement in the US, which couldn't be "assisted" by the government like it is here in Australia, would last until one ISP figured they could make more money selling unfiltered access.

You do realise there are still plenty of unfiltered providers here in Oz, right?

Re:Nothing to do with America

[TapeCutter]

Oh and BTW: There is no explicit right to free speech in the Australian constitution (political or otherwise), however the high court in the erly 90's did rule that it is an implied right.

Re:A better question

[Ambvai]

When do we get to start saying '"Child pornography is great." --Johan Schlüter, Danish Anti-Piracy Group' as an argument?

My top 5 concerns about the new net filter:

[cyrus0101]

My top 5 concerns about the new net filter:
1) _______________everything______________.
2) _____________________________________________________
3) _______________________________is ______going________
4) _____________to ___________ be ____________________________
5) _______________ fine ____________________ .