Censorship

Operation titstorm anti censorship


Fight the australian censorship! PLEASE FEEL FREE TO MIRROR! alan.thompson@aph.gov.au david.kenny@aph.gov.au roxanne.missingham@aph.gov.au judith.konig@aph.gov.au Therese.Lynch@aph.gov.au liz.bryant@aph.gov.au nola.adcock@aph.gov.au judy.hutchinson@aph.gov.au terry.crane@aph.gov.au bronwyn.graham@aph.gov.au jane.romeyn@aph.gov.au

Australian Censorship Protests


So it would be great if we could get some more ad-like videos made that people could put on their blogs etc. highlighting the Government’s proposal to put a mandatory filter across all Australian ISPs. I think there are a number of ways we can attack this issue, but we have to overcome people’s perception that this is protecting their children. I wanted to get across that in fact what we are stunting innovation and education in Australia and turn the fact that this is “good for our kids” on its head (it’s late cliches and badly formed sentences are allowed). Let me know what you think of this approach 🙂 Be nice, I know it’s YouTube! For more information – please go to www.keepyourfilteroffourinternet.com Please note, though I am on the AWIA committee and helped put that site together, this is a personal video. PS All images used in this video are used under creative commons. Links to original images can be found here: www.flickr.com www.flickr.com www.flickr.com www.flickr.com www.flickr.com

The Role of the ISU and Saudi Censorship

You may not be surprised to learn that Saudi Arabia is amongst the leaders in filtering and censoring the internet. A rather strict political and religious regime combined with lots of cash to spend on filtering technology meant it was always on the cards.

The department who are in charge of ensuring that the citizens of Saudi Arabia don’t access anything their rulers don’t like is called the ISU ( Internet Services Unit). THeir official remit is quite benign – blocking anything that is against the Qu’ran and pornography. Unfortunately this scope seems now to have been extended to include lots of other topics – freedom of speech, womens rights, any non-muslim religions and loads of humanitarian websites. The other main category that keep the ISU busy is any web sites that says anything negative about the Saudi Royal.

The technology used by the ISU is based on quite an old technology called Smartfilter – recently bought by McAffee. It’s not actually that smart compared with some other products but it is quite effective against most users. The filter is just a large list of URLs from a central database, supplemented by all the urls added by the ISU including all the ‘free speech’ sites.

You can actually beat internet filtering like this fairly easily by using a VPN based function, or sometimes just a simple proxy will work. However remember Saudi Government take their spying quite seriously and have recently installed hidden cameras in many internet cafes. Alas the internet is not quite as free in some countries as others, who knows what will be accessible in Saudi in a few more years.

Learn all about the issues across the world about online privacy protection.

Internet Filtering Increases Across the World

There have been lots of surveys and research into the growing menace of internet filtering. I say menace because although there are obviously web sites that nobody should encourage or even allow – filtering does very little to tackle the real issues behind these web sites.

Casually blocking and pretending these sites don’t exist is not the way problems are solved, and the huge irony is that the people who do wish to access criminal sites will almost certainly be able to use the various work arounds that are available. In effect Internet filtering usually ends up filtering people who have no intention of visiting these sites in the first place – in essence an exercise of futility. Whilst the filtered site grow and flourish away from the eyes of governments and states who are best placed to make more direct action against them.

What has also somewhat lagged behind the increases of filtering our internet access is awareness of the practices. The internet is increasingly part of all our lives and the idea that what we are allowed to access is being decided on by our governments is not very popular.

At the very core of this change, is what is specifically monitored, our internet identity if you like – the IP address of our connection. This is linked specifically to our location, and is what is used to track, monitor and filter what we see, and who keeps a record. Obviously it’s not unique to an individual, but it is linked to the person who pays the ISP or cable bill – if you pay the bills then it’s linked to you. Which is why all across the world, people are being incorrectly sued, jailed or monitored because someone else is using their IP address either legitimately or via other means.

Your IP address is your identity online and if you value your privacy it’s essential that you take steps from it being recorded and logged by every site you visit and by which ever intelligence agency wants access to it – that’s most of them. Here’s one way to hide your IP address from all these people.

This can effectively change the way you use the internet. Not only will you stop an entire list of everything you do online being created at your ISP (yes everything!), but you will also be able to bypass the various commercial based filtering that blocks you from accessing sites based on your location. So you can then watch the BBC from outside the UK, Hulu from outside the US and lots of other fun sites that your location might stop you viewing.

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 Aussie proxies perhaps.


What we’ll end up with is more pointless censorship on the average, law abiding internet users.