Great Firewall of Australia: What’s not mentioned makes it even more scary
The article above by Duncan Riley on The Inquisitr sums up much of the problems surrounding the Australian Government’s “filter”. I’d like to add my two cents worth, with a few analogies mixed in.
Firstly, is this about censorship, or child porn? It’s either one or the other, it can’t be about both. The Minister needs to decide once and for all which of these two reasons he has given are the true and total motivation. It must be one or the other. For example, the police are absolutely clear that targeting speeding is about saving lives, not revenue raising. Now this could be debated at length, but the police have always said that there is only one reason to target speeding, and that is to save lives – which of course is the politically and socially acceptable reason to be targeting it. Fair enough. If they were to say it were about both – well that would be ridiculous, because the revenue raised depends on people speeding, (otherwise no fines can be handed out), speeding which would keep people’s lives at risk, therein creating a conflict of interests. To continue the analogy, if the police expanded their targeting, to include cars painted particular colours, certain makes of car, if they prevented people travelling particular roads because they caught somebody speeding there once, all to “save lives”, people wouldn’t stand for it at all. If the police started stopping people using “the fast lane” on the freeway, the freeway would slow to a crawl, and there would be a huge outcry. Rightly so.
I work for an organisation that used to have a web filter. This filtered all web traffic except “approved” sites for 250 users. I had 4 helpdesk staff who spent 60% of each of their days approving websites for business use. I turned this ridiculous situation on it’s head. I turned off the filtering, and turned on logging. We have a code of conduct that everybody has signed agreeing to abide by. My helpdesk staff are now freed to work on real problems. If an employee’s manager requests web traffic logs for a particular period, it can be provided, as long as a process is followed, whereby the manager makes a request through their Director for the logs. In this way, IT are not the “policy police”, instead focusing on the technology. The managers manage their staff, and request information only where enough suspicion or reason is provided to a higher authority. This sounds pretty similar to me to the due process of the legal system, whereby a citizen is presumed innocent, where suspicion rises about an individual, the law enforcement bodies apply for access to higher levels of information, and based on the strength of the case, the higher authority may or may not grant access to information and or premises. Having changed our practices regarding internet usage, there have been two requests for access, one was granted, and one was denied. I have been through the raw logs looking at what has been accessed, and found no porn, nothing illegal at all in 12 months. There is an increased use of social networking, but these are not illegal, and are only “unwanted” by those not using them. In this analogy, my helpdesk staff were freeing websites from false arrest every day, whilst end user’s poor performance was going largely unnoticed. Now, focus has shifted onto the poor performers (or “criminals” in the analogy), and all users are presumed innocent. The Directors are the judiciary in the analogy, ensuring fairness in pursuing individuals, and that privacy is not breeched. Where is this check and measure in the Minister’s filtering proposal? It seems to me that there is an assumption of guilt in the approach used in this filtering, everything will be checked and filtered all the time. In addition, to take the “child porn” aspect further, if it is merely filtered, what happens to the perverts looking for this stuff? Nothing. Or are identifiable logs being kept of access attempts, and perverts will be visited and arrested for attempting to view something that was filtered? Where does it stop? Will I get arrested for attempting to view a preview of the latest edition of Playboy on their website, even though I can go to the newsagent and buy it? Taking this thought one step further, isn’t this then protectionism of print media and affiliated businesses?? Perhaps protectionism of the paper industry? Logging? You see where this goes. As soon as you start arbitrarily filtering based on a closed set of criteria, it is manipulated, and benefits somebody, anybody but the people it was designed to protect.
I have another take on this whole thing, and it starts with a fairly rhetorical question – is the Minister religious? I know the Prime Minister is, and most politicians are, if only to win votes of the religious majority. There are a couple of aspects to this I want to explore. Firstly, as an atheist, are anti-religious websites going to be filtered? Am I going to be targeted by police because of my anti-religious views (reference Duncan’s article and his mention of “inciting racial hatred”)? Further, there is a similarity between this approach to filtering and the take on morality that many religious people share. The religious view on morality is generally that without god or religion, we would have no morality, and therefore would descend into anarchy and debauched chaos. There are many rebuttals to this argument – not least of all being the number of devout religious people committing heinous crimes (i.e. Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Osama Bin Laden etc), (and the unfortunate lack of debauchery in my life!), but this is a similar view. Without the filter making sure we don’t look at anything “bad” (and we don’t know what is bad, we need the government to decide for us, but they will keep it secret from us) we’ll all be downloading porn. I suppose the Minister also thinks that gay is something you can “catch”? If I walk down the street today, there are windows I could throw rocks through, cars I could steal, men I could kill, and women I could rape. But I don’t. Why? Because it’s wrong, and I know it’s wrong, and it’s not something I would even want to do. I don’t need a law or a policeman watching my every move to prevent me doing those things. Similarly, the vast majority of people don’t need to have an IT department, a policeman, a web filter or a government standing over them to make sure they don’t look at child porn on the net. Just because a person can do a thing, it doesn’t mean they will, social conventions generally govern behaviour without the need for enforcement.
My final main point is about wasted or misdirected effort. The internet is full of many things it should not be. Some abhorrent, others simply unfortunate side effects of culture. The existence of child porn on the net is not in any way without it’s victims – the most important of which is of course the children depicted. However, these crimes have limited victims, in that the damage is isolated to the individual and their family. Right up front, I want to say that I do not in ANY way suggest that these crimes should go unpunished, that there is any devaluing of the victims involved or anything that in anyway downgrades the horrific nature of such a thing. What I will say is that the time, money and effort going into building a national filter may be better spent targeting the true crimes, of which child abuse and porn is only one. Does anybody truly believe that filtering all of our traffic will stop child porn? That paedophiles will simply give up and “return to a normal life”? For one thing, these people did not make a decision to be a paedophile, they didn’t wake up one day and decide that it was ok, they are sick and in need of help for whatever is wrong in their heads. Blocking their access to one small aspect of their sickness does not make the sickness go away. Until their sickness is dealt with, this problem will not go away. Will the filter block all zip files? Will it block anything that is encrypted? AES 256 bit encryption is readily accessible – does the Minister really thin that paedophiles will simply give up? I would wager that these people are already using encrypted zip files and SSL encrypted websites to share their illness with each other, so what would the filter achieve exactly? The very people it was supposedly targeting will continue with what they are doing, and the only people affected will be the innocents. Which of course brings us back to the question is this about child porn, or about censorship? There is a widespread scourge of the internet, that until now has not been fixed. Spam. Spyware. Malware. It is no longer true that viruses and malware are written by “bored misguided brilliant teenagers”. It is widely known that much of the malware today is written by professional programmers working for various organised crime bodies. That stolen credit card details are now sold in the thousands, and that organised crime is behind that too. It is also well known that when computers are infected with malware, many times the malware itself is downloading porn and other material, all of which profits some organised crime group somewhere, all the while slowing computers and the internet around the world, causing lost productivity in businesses, leaking of sensitive material, and growth of the profiteering anti-virus industry. If the Australian government wants to make a real difference to the law abiding citizens of the net, perhaps it would do better to narrow it’s aim at malware and the scum who use it to make money off other people’s computers. The time effort and money spent on this filter (which is bound to failure by the way) would surely be better spent on pursuing and treating paedophiles for their illness, and pursuing the organised criminals who profit from the malicious software they distribute. However, I suppose Joe Bloggs doesn’t understand malware, trojans, botnets and the like, so it’s easier to sell the idea of protecting against child porn – because nobody could be against that could they??
This whole thing smells of amateur hour, of a Minister who has an agenda, and is too afraid to spell it out, instead hiding behind the deflective notion of “protecting children from harmful internet content”, who is not aware of all the technical issues it raises, and the reaction overseas to this idea. As with prohibition in the US in the 1920s and 30s, preventing access to alcohol simply drove it underground, and allowed organised crime to prosper at incredible levels. Over restrictiveness of access to information will simply make dissidents out of mums and dads, who could potentially be made criminals for looking for information on abortions. Perhaps an alternative may have more success, where there is a nomination procedure for sites to be blocked, that is public and accountable, but to have a closed black list is surely illegal in itself, and must only be a short time away from being challenged in court. How about posing a question to the tech community - “How can we best protect kids from viewing adult material?”, instead of this totalitarian tool that is going ahead with trials without waiting for any kind of input from the community. Is this the beginning of the end? The government may as well stop progress on the National Broadband Network – nobody will be allowed to use the net anyway, so what’s the point?
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