Update on the Australian Internet Filtering
There has been an update (28th, June 2011) on the Australian Government’s internet filtering scheme and I’m afraid it still suffers from the usual limitations of such censorship schemes. To be fair they have made a few changes after the huge wave of crticism from the initial prototype scheme which frankly was ill conceived, badly implemented and well pointless to be honest.
So what has the Internet Industry Association (Australian Internet body) come up with this time?
Well it’s probably not surprising considering the current economic climate that it’s definitely pretty cheap. In fact there is virtually no new equipment required, nothing more than a few tweaks to current infrastructure. It’s important to keep costs down when you’re doing something as pointless as this sort of censorship of course.
Now of course no-one can argue with the basic assumption that we should protect children and restrict access to child pornography. The scheme will effectively implement the blocking of a list of such sites provided by Interpol and the Australian Federal Police. The onus will pretty much be on the ISPs using the big stick of section 313 if Australia’s Telecommunication Act. It’s not much more than a basic framework of a big blacklist of bad sites which are blocked by the ISPs in their routing tables.
The sites will also be blocked by the even more pointless method of modifying DNS tables. Just to clarify this method involves changing the DNS tables on Australian servers so that the ‘bad’ sites don’t resolve to their correct servers properly. It’s a very crude method, easily bypassed and one I’ve never liked. Messing around with the way the internet works is never a good idea but of course as well as being pointless and easily circumvented – it does have the advantage of being CHEAP!
Needless to say this probably won’t end here – lists of stuff you can’t do rarely get shorter. We’ll probably end up seeing lots of committees and groups lobbying for other web sites to be added to the list. Just as now you see some web sites about evolution being blocked in restrictive Muslim countries.
It’s an almost complete waste of time in my opinion. It’s headline grabbing nonsense that has very little real affect other than allowing a Government to pretend it’s doing something about a problem. The blocks and filtering will only be effective against people who don’t want to access these sites anyway – the vast majority of us. These filtering techniques are so easily bypassed by anyone with a mind to, there are literally thousands of security programs, secure VPNs and private proxies that just make these methods completely ineffective.
The other main issues is that the vast majority of this material is not stored on standard web servers. It’s shared by email, P2P and FTP – it’s stored and distributed on private networks and areas like the darknet. None of these filtering will effect these distribution points. Censorship is being implemented against the wrong people – innocent users of the internet. It will have no effect on sophisticated rings of technologically savvy paedophiles across the internet.
But the real concern is that it’s simply posturing and blocking access to a problem rather than trying to solve it. It doesn’t help the victims by altering routing tables so that Australian citizens can’t access the material – it’s still there, the victims are still victims. This posturing would be better replaced by concerted efforts to track down arrest and bring to justice the people who are creating and distributing this material. It’s of course much more difficult to do but does actually have an impact. Of course it will create more demand for an Australian proxy perhaps.
What we’ll end up with is more pointless censorship on the average, law abiding internet users.
The Technology Lag of Internet Censors
It’s quite reassuring in some ways that the technology that those who wish to censor and filter access the internet have at their disposal is often someway behind. Wiretappers, content filters are far from cutting edge but nevertheless they are unfortunately getting much more sophisticated.
If any one has ever worked with or worse had to configure these content filtering devices, you’ll realise the huge amount of work that is involved even maintaining them. The false positives and perpetual complaints you get when even a minimal level of filtering is applied is extremely surprising. Sure you can block words or URLs or patterns but you’ll always end up blocking more than you intended.
Take for example using DNS modifications to restrict access to banned web pages, most of the Scandinavian countries do this routinely. But it’s a pretty hopeless way of restricting content in my opinion. Firstly all you have to do is point your client at a different DNS server and you’ve bypassed it, secondly reason is that if you use the DNS method to say block a bad page on Youtube that you don’t like, you’ll have also blocked the entire domain Youtube!
But my funniest internet censoring attempt has to go to the Republic of Yemen, they’ve used a pretty decent content filter called Websense, they have control of the two ISPs so they should be able to control pretty much everything. Yemen of course seeks to block loads of stuff but fortunately they’ve done it rather badly. You see they didn’t buy enough licenses for Websense, in fact no where near enough. So if you’re unlucky you’ll be subject to a backward, restrictive internet policy but when enough Yemen users are online you’ll get unrestricted access as when the user amount is exceeded then no filtering happens.
You have to smile 
Australian Internet Censorship Laws
The internet censorship regime was implemented in relatively recent years and has been the topic of many heated debates. The Australian internet censorship regime is comprised of both law and regulation. These are implemented at both commonwealth and State and Territory level. This is because the Constitution does not have the power to issue this regime independently.
The Commonwealth part of this regime applies to the any “objectionable” material or anything that is deemed unsuitable for children. If there is anything on the internet that falls into these two categories the sites will be issued with a “Take Down” notice. This will be issued by the government regulator OFLC. They will be given a time frame in which they are to remove the content.
The State and Territorial side of this regime then tag team with the Commonwealth and can prosecute the providers or creators of the “objectionable” material. The procedures however vary from state to state and territory to territory.
The Censorship regarding the internet has raised many questions about the restrictions and the impact that these have on free speech. In relation to any other parts of the western worlds, the internet censorship laws are the most restrictive. They operate in secrecy and withhold some information about how categories are judged. This has raised more that a few eyebrows with not only activists, but also the general public.
Having it in the law that the internet is restricted, filtered and monitored, creates some issues with the people who brought this regime in.
The Australian internet censorship laws consist of two filters. One of which is mandatory and prevents any “Unwanted” material to be viewed by the general public, along with filtering any illegal material as decreed by the internet laws. These laws are comprised of: The Protection of Children Act, 1978; Civil Government Act, 1982; Sexual Offences Act, 2003; Memorandum of Understanding, 2003.
No one is questioning the filter preventing the illegal content coming through; in fact this can only be a positive thing helping to squash such internet sites. The public, however, have an issue with the “Unwanted” aspect of the legislation. This has never been defined by the Telecommunications Minister and this dictates what the filter prevents the country from seeing. However there was no survey or vote taken place as to what the general public feel is “Unwanted”.
The law is there to safe guard the vulnerable and young, and ministers argue that it has been successful in this, although there is yet to be any formal evidence of this.