Editorial: ISP filtering policy is not evidence-based

Yesterday, 4:30 pm

Simon Wright

The Federal Government%u2019s proposed ISP-level filtering policy is costly, complicated, and will be completely ineffective. In the coming weeks, the Labor party is tipped to unveil the legislation that will compel Australian Internet Service Providers to filter the entire world wide web, with the intention of blocking access to specific web pages.

The principal objection I have is that the policy mandates that ISPs spend a huge sum of money to deploy and maintain masses of new infrastructure. Whether this burden is passed onto Australians via taxes or via increased ISP fees, we will end up paying for it. We will end up paying, and it won't do anything.

Sure, the technology works as specified; that much has been ascertained. The problems lie in the policy itself.

It is widely assumed that the filter will make life difficult for people trading in material such as child pornography, but in reality, it will have no impact on child pornography rings. Indeed, Stephen Conroy himself admits the policy "is not targeted at the people perpetrating it".^[1] He rightfully acknowledges that people knowingly seeking the material can bypass the filter or use non-web systems like peer-to-peer.

The goal, according to Conroy, is to protect the general public by minimising inadvertent access to so-called 'refused classification' material. However, there's no evidence that any inadvertent access is taking place; the infinitesimal trickle of complaints to ACMA is hardly evidence of a national crisis. It must also be noted that the Internet is brimming with legal adult material that -- if inadvertently accessed by children -- has just as much potential to cause distress.

This is not an "evidence-based" approach to policy.

Any claim of a mandate is clearly invalid, as the current policy differs greatly from what the Labor Party took to the last election. There was no mention of a mandatory filter whatsoever.

The original policy called for dynamic filtering by default, with an option to opt out. Because of this, when the minister called for live trials, it was widely assumed that it would fail spectacularly. After all, dynamic filtering is horrendously inaccurate. Relying upon fuzzy algorithms to police the Internet is a fools errand, and would put Internet-enabled industries across Australia at grave risk.

Of course, by the time it got to the trial, the policy was so watered down that it was limited to filtering pre-defined list of URLs, which comprise 0.000001% of today's web (that's ten thousand pages out of an estimated one trillion), to say nothing of the millions of new pages created every minute. This weak set of requirements was of course technically achievable, but in terms of fulfilling the policy's goals, a comprehensive failure. The resulting Enex TestLab report is the answer you get when you 'ask a stupid question', and is therefore irrelevant.

A criticism of the filter is that because its scope is so narrow, its capability so limited, it could only handle a fraction of the internet content the Government might wish to be filtered. It doesn't apply to email. It doesn't work with high traffic websites. It doesn't apply to websites that require a password. It doesn't apply to any website that turns on secure HTTP.^[2] It doesn't apply to bit torrent. It doesn't apply to instant messaging.

What's left is 'refused classification' content publicly available on a regular web server, which often means websites that have been unwitting victims of hackers and vandalism. In addition, it may include web pages that discuss issues such as euthanasia, abortion and safe drug use -- politically charged topics that don't enjoy the same near-universal outrage as child pornography.

For anything to be blocked, the URL must pass through the Australian Media and Communications Authority (ACMA). Eighteen months ago, Google said it has counted over "a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day." With such rapid change, how can the Government even claim to block one percent of "bad" content with a human edited blacklist? And if the filter will be so ineffective, how can it be justified?

'So you're saying we shouldn't even try at all then?' Conroy might retort.

Not only is that an incredibly bad argument^[3], it's also dead wrong. The Government is already directing much-needed resources to the Federal Police, who, in association with the relevant international organisations, can directly target the real-world social networks of child pornography. The broader Internet industry -- along with a dedicated task force of the Federal Police -- have already got effective, working policies and procedures in place.

Whirlpool's survey indicates that our community would like to see Government focus its efforts on educating parents (83%) and children (65%). While some effort has been made in this direction already, a much greater emphasis on cyber-safety education and engagement programs would have a very real and positive impact on our youth.

I also think there's also a role for the Government to incentivize ISPs to offer parents the choice of configurable content filters running at the ISP. If parents want to provide a comprehensively filtered experience to their children, the choice should be there -- a choice that shouldn't rely on dealing with desktop filtering software which requires a level of technical knowledge to install securely.

The policy is opposed by so many business and consumer groups, that one wonders if there's any support for it outside of the Government and the under-informed general public.

The child protection group Save the Children oppose the filter as being ineffective in protecting kids from online dangers. The statement was co-signed by numerous civil liberties groups and the National Children's and Youth Law Centre.

Google Australia said "moving to a mandatory ISP filtering regime with a scope that goes well beyond [child sexual abuse] material is heavy handed and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information."^[4]

The NSW Director of Public Prosecutions slammed the policy. "Crime prevention methods need to be practical. The talk of filters and blocking mechanisms, ultimately in a society like ours, would have only limited if any success."^[5]

Even Labor senator Kate Lundy has been openly critical of the filtering policy, though not only do her proposed amendments fail to address the underlying problem of waste (ISPs will still be forced to deploy a huge amount of costly infrastructure) it compounds it with significant new complexities.

With such broad opposition and an election looming, one wonders how the policy hasn't already been scrapped.

Footnotes

[1] http://www.zdnet.com.au/blogs/twisted-wire/soa/Conroy-explains-his-magic-filt...

[2] Any website could use HTTPS security; it's relatively trivial to enable. While the filter could be applied to HTTPS protocol, this would require far more sophisticated filters, and would compromise the trust relied upon by Internet banking, e-commerce, and thousands of online systems that deal with personal details and finances. Indeed, were a filtering system to ever touch HTTPS, it would be slammed down hard by some of the biggest corporate entities across the world.

[3] Too often Governments will do *anything* because doing nothing -- even when nothing is the best response -- is a harder message to sell to the media. (One of my favourite quotes is from the author Peter Drucker, who said "there's nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all".)

[4] http://google-au.blogspot.com/2009/12/our-views-on-mandatory-isp-filtering.html

[5] http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/technology/26712-corporations-must-rep...

Under Sarkozy, France is moving to a more proactive enforcement model that removes or blocks content at the source, rather than being content to go after lawbreakers. As a consequence, however, France will now have one of the toughest censorship regimes of any robust democracy in the Western hemisphere—though Australia is giving France a good run for its money on the worldwide stage.

Journalists in neighboring countries have been quick to pounce. Germany's Der Spiegel wondered if France was becoming the "Big Brother of Europe" and notes that LOPPSI2 will give "the state unprecedented control over the Internet." The paper also suggests that the government is pushing the law because elections are coming up soon, and Sarkozy hopes that "fear of criminals will convince voters to come to the polling booths."

In the UK, feisty tech publication The Register also plays the Orwell card, saying that France "leapfrogs past Australia in Big Brother stakes" and that it's "becoming the first western country to make even Australia look liberal when it comes to state powers of Internet censorship." (The UK has a non-mandatory child porn block list run by the Internet Watch Foundation.)

As for France, plenty of heated opposition can be found there as well. Jérémie Zimmermann of Internet rights group La Quadrature du Net said last week, "Protection of childhood is shamelessly exploited by Nicolas Sarkozy to implement a measure that will lead to collateral censorship and very dangerous drifts. After the HADOPI comes the LOPPSI: the securitarian machinery of the government is being deployed in an attempt to control the Internet at the expense of freedoms."

Censorship... it's not just for authoritarian states anymore. Such issues are increasingly part of the discourse in democracies, including Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority democracy. The government there is working up Internet censorship rules to crack down on sites that offend "public decency," including pornography (child and otherwise).

"This difference is, of course, that the decision as to what is be viewed and what is not is moved from a choice made by an individual to a compulsion imposed by a government agency, without transparency to the individual that a decision is being made," the submission said.

"Use of compulsion rightly calls for special vigilance to ensure that denial of choice is fully justified. Special safeguards are appropriate and necessary where there is also no transparency to the user as to the decision that has been made."

"Google, like many other internet companies, has a global, all-product ban against child sexual abuse material, which is illegal in almost every country, and we filter out this content from our search results and remove it from our products,"

"But moving to a mandatory ISP level filtering regime with a scope that goes well beyond such material is heavy handed and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information."

Tags: Broadband,  Google,  James Riley,  YouTube,  Stephen Conroy,  Twitter,  Internet filter

It is vital that, not only Australian, but any internet user be aware of this information and all that relates to the current Federal Australian Government, and in particular Senator Conroy's plans, for the introduction of mandatory internet filtering for this country.

Any well versed internet user knows exactly what this means, and that no matter what system is put in place, it will not resolve the "problem".

Don't let it happen in Australia! Don't let it happen anywhere! Make them, force them, to deal with the real issues at hand and put in resources to ensure the safety of children etc. This notion is ludicrous, wasteful, laughable and deserves to be highlight exactly as that!

Currently we see a very public targeting of Google and YouTube, aligned with actions in China and Thailand (among others). Is this current Government also expending vast amounts of public resources targeting other services and companies (Microsoft? Yahoo? Facebook? Twitter? etc etc). If there exists a level of self-regulation on issues such as 'child pornography' as there appears to be to a degree, the issues raised by this current Government become even more watery and illegitimate.

Don't be fooled parents! Don't think that this will protect anyone! And don't be fooled that it won't slow networks, become political (think about it, all information about Abortion or Euthanasia will most likely be blocked...not just some, ALL!), and since our Government sites Thailand and China as case examples, its a dangerous path on which they walk.

Don't let it happen! Post your thoughts.

Sylvestor