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.