How to stop people circumventing your filter

So the ISPs have started blocking your secret blacklist by poisoning the DNS for all the domains in it. Since it's easy to use another DNS server, though, the ISPs have started discarding all traffic to to all IP addresses on the blacklist. Things seem to be going well for about six hours until a news story airs of a teenager using a proxy server to access some of the hideously violent and massively illegal material on the blacklist (for example, one of the several sites that were last year added to the blacklist for containing nudity).

You're the Communications Minister and your reputation is on the line, so you can't back down. This only shows, you tell the press, that the ISPs aren't co-operating and we need to go further and employ the dynamic filters that your trials showed to be so effective. You ask the public: You do think our children are worth protecting, don't you? ISPs are directed to put the service in place, and are given a few months and token payments to do so.

In the meantime, the blacklist is leaked and your media advisors are falling over themselves blaming extreme cyber-libertarians and ISP wreckers for publishing the Official Aussie Government List of the Nastiest Sites on the Net.

Once the dynamic filters are in place, the media is full of reports of slowdowns, technical glitches and massive overblocking. Your own daughter complained that she couldn't do research for a school assignment because a Wikipedia article was blocked. But you stick to your guns. The technology will improve, you say. It's worth it for the kiddies and to stop the pedophiles ("you don't want pedophiles to have kiddie porn, do you?").

Shortly thereafter comes the story on the current affairs show where a kid uses a free VPN to get around the dynamic filter. Don't teenage boys have anything better to do?, you wonder naïvely. You add the VPN site and encrypted proxies to the blacklist, but they keep cropping up faster and faster. Those extreme cyber-libertarians keep telling people how to get around the filter. Well, you say, the Australian people support your mission, and what's the point passing a filtering law if you don't try and enforce it?

How do they stop people getting around filters in Scandinavia? Oh, they don't. The filters aren't mandatory. What about Iran then, or China? The answer, you discover, is to criminalise it. People don't like to be lawbreakers, especially when the Government is watching and harsh penalties are involved.

As you reach for the phone to get the bureaucrats researching the appropriate criminal sanctions, you can't help but stop for a moment and wish that you'd never started with this whole bloody filter in the first place.

Mark Newton, form letters and making the case

When you sit down opposite someone who is a genuine and committed campaigner against child abuse, you're already at a bit of a disadvantage. Because you disagree with them about censorship, say, there's the temptation (or the necessity) to demostrate that you're not for what they are primarily against; that you just differ on the means and the acceptable costs of achieving the outcomes we all want.

As frustrating as that can be, it's even worse when someone who should know better tries the same cynical tricks tricks with malice aforethought. It'd be a bit naïve to expect a real nuanced debate on the issues with a child-safety crusader, but we expect much better from our political leaders. When you write a letter or speak to a someone whose job it is to debate and implement policy, you ought to be able to get a straight answer. But this has been next to impossible on the subject of Internet filtering. Make an insightful challenge to one aspect of the policy and you will hear back: "Labor went to the election with a comprehensive policy on cyber-safety, one aspect of which was Internet filtering..." You will then be told it works in Scandinavia, and if you're lucky, you will hear an implication that those against filtering don't care about children.

One outspoken critic of the scheme, Mark Newton, has been trying to break through the noise. His well-researched letter and a subsequent meeting with his MP failed to elicit a good response. His recent followup is an excellent example of clearly setting out the reasons the filter is doomed to be a fiasco. Will the Government finally feel the need to make a reasoned response? The magic 8-ball says "Don't hold your breath." Check out the letter here.

We're not giving up. We think the message will be heard amongst the public and in Canberra: We want to protect kids, but this will not work. Trying it "just in case" has enormous costs to our budget, our civil liberties, and our competitiveness in the digital economy. Censoring the Internet is not the solution. Let's work together to find a better way.

(By the way, for those of you who were wondering, the pollies hear from us at EFA too. We just have to be a bit more discreet.)

Mark Pesce and EFA's Dale Clapperton on Australia Talks

Mark Pesce, along with EFA's Dale Clapperton will be discussing the cleanfeed on ABC Radio National tonight on the Australia Talks call-in show from 6pm AEDT (Sydney time).

A link to the podcast will appear here tomorrow, but if you can listen live and call in!

Edit: A very interesting show, though I for one was not impressed by the proponents of the filter whose arguments, though well phrased, didn't progress much beyond "porn is bad, and we should do whatever is possible to stop it, regardless of whether these nerds say it can work or not." Good work by Dale and Mark telling it how it is.

Listen or download audio of the show.

De-hyping the blacklist

Most of us have been pretty sceptical about Minister Conroy's constant references to child pornography and "illegal" material. In many cases, it has been seen by us and others as a deliberate attempt to confuse the issue and paint the anti-filtering forces as soft on kiddie porn. For the sake of argument, though, what if we gave Senator Conroy the benefit of the doubt, and assume he's sincerely motivated by a desire to clamp down on this stuff. How does the scheme hold up?

The arguments that filtering will not stop or even slow the trafficking in child pornography have been made elsewhere many times. (Basically, most of it isn't traded on the web; the web sites that do pop up wouldn't be added to a blacklist until too late; and when that happened, the filter could simply be bypassed.) Ignoring these fatal technical objections, what are we left with?

The cornerstone of the filtering pilot is the ACMA blacklist. This blacklist is compiled by the bureaucrats at the Government media authority, not by police or experts in the field. The blacklist is small - 1300 URLs - and not particularly dynamic. Sites are only added when somebody complains about them. It's therefore pretty hard to see how anyone could represent such a small and constantly outdated list as an effective weapon against child pornography.

What really belies the Minister's rhetoric, though, is the fact that the blacklist is not just child porn - it may not even be primarily child porn. Anything rated RC, X or in some cases R18+ goes on the list. As our analysis shows, given that child porn is the most likely to be removed by web hosts, the list is probably by now mostly legal, adult pornography.

Something to think about the next time we hear the Minister ask rhetorically why filter opponents hate children.

Read our analysis of the blacklist here.

MMM's The Spoonman on Filtering

MMM in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney last night aired a long show dedicated to examining the clean feed filtering scheme. The Spoonman examines the plan in detail, and interviews experts from around the country. EFA's Chair, Dale Clapperton, provides a long interview covering a wide range of issues.

Listen here.

Edit: Transcript here (thanks to Lauredhel).

Cleanfeed live pilot to go ahead

The Government has announced its filtering pilot is going ahead, and has called for ISPs to participate. The Expression of Interest document requires ISPs to filter the ACMA blacklist, with optional extensions such as dynamic filtering.

A few things are worrying in this document. For instance, one of the criteria tested are circumvention

The Pilot will seek to the test the ease with which different filtering solutions can be circumvented and the capacity of filters to provide warnings on circumvention attempts.

Besides the technological issues here (there will be no way to prevent circumvention), this opens up worrying possibilites about the criminalization of using circumvention tools, or at least adding them to the blacklist themselves. I can tell you some other countries that do that, and I'll give you a hint - it's not the UK or Sweden.

This also doesn't address any concerns whatever about what material will be blocked. The ACMA blacklist, often held up by Conroy as a list of horrible and illegal child pornography, forms the basis of this pilot. But the ACMA aren't police - they are not in the business of seeking out and blocking illegal material. Their list is driven by complaints from the public, and extends to a much wider range of material than child pornography. Their annual report from the last year indicates that out of 796 URLs added to the list in that year, "RC – Child – depiction" was given as the reason for 421 of them. That's all well and good, but what about the remainder? These were made up RC, X and R-rated material, most or all of which would be legal to view and even purchase. Just today, the Minister referred to "other unwanted content" when referring to the list. If you suspect that you want different content options to the Minister, then you should be worried. The list will be secret, so it's unlikely there will be a mechanism to get harmless content removed.

The Department would no doubt say that this is their way of consulting with Industry to find the most practical solution (whether or not you think a problem exists). The more cynical, however, might observe that the Government doesn't really know how to accomplish what they want to do, so they are asking the ISPs to bear the cost of figuring out what they can get away with. Presumably the pilot will find that filtering is expensive, ineffective and unpopular. Will the Government then see reason?

I'm not ready to place any bets.

Filter vendors lining up for their piece of the pie

An article by Luke Coleman in today's Communications Day (subscription required, though the article might show up there after a delay) details how ISPs are already being lobbied by filtering companies, all eager to cash in on the anticipated government-mandated bonanza.

Internode carrier relations manager John Lindsay says "many" vendors have contacted his company, and that based on their pricing the cost of filtering software alone would exceed the Government's budget by 50%.

The article suggests that service providers with smaller market shares may be hit the hardest by the scheme. Since the filter vendors often use a sliding scale in pricing their licenses, smaller ISPs may be have to bear a disproportionate share of the burden. Exetel technology director Steve Waddington said, “If the cost turned out to be in the range of a dollar or more per customer, I don’t see any option but to pass the cost on. The net profit from an average ADSL customer is well less than $4 per month, and for some plans less than $2. I think we would have to treat such an imposed cost as another form of tax we collect for the government.”

You can't blame the filter companies for getting excited. They are in a pretty small club of those who are.