Law Enforcement Disempowerment Not Just Rhetoric

One of the key pieces of rhetoric from opponents of the proposed ISP level filtering scheme is that the money is better spent enabling law enforcement officials to do their jobs through better resourcing.

This argument is compounded by details such as the Labor Government's recent removal of $2.8m from the increased funding for OCSET¹ (The Australian Federal Police's Online Child Sexual Exploitation Team) but the insistence that it is still able to grow the team by about ninety members². But does the proposed introduction of a mandatory filter actually directly indicate that less effort will be dedicated to law enforcement measures?

There are two points that suggest that it does.

The first was raised by Jon Seymour recently on an EFA Stop Censorship mailing list, his point was the "principle of least farce", whereby;

"When confronted with a moral panic, a Government should choose the option least likely to cause farce or, if all options will cause farce, the one likely to cause the least farce."

Jon has explained how it's likely that when a Government would want to deal with behaviour that is ostensibly morally offensive, it's much more satisfactory to have it curtailed through pre-vetting a person's behavior and preventing it than it is to withstand a media trial after someone is arrested by law enforcement. People for some reason are more satisfied with the idea that a course of action is impossible - depsite the civil liberties concerns - than they are seeing people who do the wrong thing brought to justice.

The second point is slightly more technical. We have seen this week that several ISPs in the United Kingdom have blocked access to a Wikipedia article after it was discovered to contain album cover-art of a prepubescent naked girl. Among the typical furore an interesting technical problem has arisen; Wikipedia is now faced with a situation where vast swathes of people who view and edit wikipedia, appear to come from a single IP address - that of the proxy servers deployed by their ISP.

Under normal circumstances, IP addresses are somewhat unique (with exceptions of multiple users at a given school or business in some circumstances), but should the Wikipedia project wish to block or restrict users they are constrained to blocking all of them.

So what happens in this scenario if an ISP user deliberately exhibits illegal behavior that the police wish to discuss?

With large sections of the Australian Internet likely to come from a relative handful of IP addresses, the job of law enforcement officials becomes more complicated. They may discover and blacklist a website, proceeding to investigate people who have previously visited it and find that only a handful of IPs were accessing the site (yet many visitors). The process of dutiful law enforcement now has an extra-complicated step where the ISP needs to be contacted and instead of identifying an IP address, attempt to match up the user IP addresses access through the filter to the offensive site - likely matching time and date stamps on both systems and calculating time differences and the like. The law enforcement procedure is more drawn out, more prone to error (including "technicalities" that see actual offenders walk free) and ISPs are given another serving of the increasing public pressure for them to actively participate as enforcers of what is done with the service they provide.

It's difficult to think that with the added benefit of keeping criminals out of the media and having child protection activists ask in the wake what the Government is doing to protect children (ironic, given that these stories display exactly that), a Government takes protection of children seriously when it reduces funding for law enforcement while simultaneously obfuscating and complicating the procedures that they need to follow. It makes sense to reiterrate; if the Government is serious about protecting children from abuse, the millions of dollars earmarked for the production of a confusing technical landscape for law enforcement, is better used as the funds to clear a cheque directly into their hands.