Conroy backs down on net filters

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Hai Linh Truong

By Asher Moses | The Sydney Morning Herald | July 9, 2010

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has capitulated to widespread concerns over his internet censorship policy and delayed any mandatory filters until at least next year.

Academics, ISP experts, political opponents, the US government and a broad cross-section of community groups have long argued that the plan to block a secret blacklist of “refused classification” web pages for all Australians was fraught with issues, for example, that blocked RC content could include innocuous material.

Having consistently ignored these concerns, Senator Conroy today announced that implementation of his policy would be delayed until a review of RC classification guidelines could be conducted by state and territory censorship ministers.

This is not expected to begin until at least the middle of next year.

“Some sections of the community have expressed concern about whether the range of material included in the RC category … correctly reflects current community standards,” Senator Conroy said.

“As the government’s mandatory ISP filtering policy is underpinned by the strength of our classification system, the legal obligation to commence mandatory ISP filtering will not be imposed until the review is completed.”

In the meantime, major ISPs – including Optus, Telstra and iPrimus – have pledged to block child-abuse websites voluntarily. This narrower, voluntary approach has long been advocated by internet experts and brings Australia into line with other countries such as Britain.

“It will be just child porn, and that will be consistent with best practice in Scandinavia and Europe,” Peter Coroneos, chief executive of the Internet Industry Association, said.

But the government does not seem to be backing out of the deeply unpopular mandatory filtering policy altogether, as it has today announced a suite of transparency and accountability measures <http://www.dbcde.gov.au/all_funding_programs_and_support/cybersafety_plan/transparency_measures> to address concerns about the scheme.

These include:

• an annual review of content on the blacklist by an “independent expert”.
• clear avenues of appeal for people whose sites are blocked.
• content will be added to the blacklist by the Classification Board, instead of the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
• affected parties will have the ability to have decisions reviewed by the Classification Review Board.
• people will know when they surf to a blocked page as a notification will appear.

“The public needs to have confidence that the URLs on the list, and the process by which they get there, is independent, rigorous, free from interference or influence and enables content and site owners access to appropriate review mechanisms,” Senator Conroy said.

One of Senator Conroy’s strongest political critics, Greens communications spokesman Scott Ludlam, took the move by the government as a sign the critics were winning their battle to have the policy modified.

“A review of the RC is helping; that’s a good idea. I think the fact that ISPs are putting their own initiatives forward voluntarily is also helpful,” Senator Ludlam said.

“[But] if we’re still pursuing mandatory ISP-level filtering then obviously we’re not there yet. All we’ve got today is a useful acknowledgment of some of the flaws in the system and I’m hoping that they take this period to reflect on the overall objectives of the scheme.”

He said even if the policy was narrowed to encompass just child-abuse material, major issues remained, such as that the filters are easy to bypass and will not block even a fraction of the nasty material available on the web. There was nothing stopping future governments from expanding the blacklist to cover other types of content.

“I don’t interpret [the move] as killing it but I do interpret it as trying to neutralise the issue in the short term as far as the election is concerned,” said Colin Jacobs, spokesman for the online users’ lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia.

“They’re tinkering around the edges with the classification scheme without having a rethink around how you apply a system that was designed for books and movies to the internet.”

The Safer Internet Group, which includes state schools, libraries, Google, iiNet, Inspire Foundation, Internet Industry Association, Yahoo and the System Administrators Guild of Australia today welcomed the new approach the government was taking on cyber safety.

Google, which has been at war with Senator Conroy over the policy, said it was “heartened” to see the government had taken into account “the genuine concerns expressed by many” on the RC category.

“While we’re yet to see full details, a voluntary proposal by ISPs, limited to child abuse material, is consistent with the approach taken in many of Australia’s peer countries worldwide,” Google Australia managing director Karim Temsamani said.

“Our primary concern has always been that the scope of the proposed filter is far too broad. It goes way beyond child sexual abuse material and would block access to important online information for all Australians.”

Simon Sheikh, chief executive of the online activist group GetUp!, said the delay on the mandatory filters was proof that the government had heard the voices of the hundreds of thousands of Australians prepared to vote on this issue.

“But a delay is not enough – the Government needs to announce that they will either scrap, or change the policy to an opt-in model, so that Australians themselves can judge how best to protect their children online,” he said.

“When it comes to protecting our children online we need investment in education, home-based filters and the federal police. These investments will better equip parents to protect their children at home, and better equip police to combat the issues at their source.”

Internet’s not special, says Communications Minister

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Digital Reflections

by Asher Moses | Sydney Morning Herald | April 1, 2010 |

Web experts recoiled today at communications minister Stephen Conroy’s assertion that the internet is not “special” and should be censored like books, films and newspapers.

In an on-camera interview with Fairfax Media’s national Canberra bureau chief, Tim Lester, Senator Conroy dismissed the torrent of criticism directed at his policy as “misleading information” spread by “an organised group in the online world”.

Asked what percentage of all of the nasty material on the internet his filters would block, Senator Conroy dodged the question, responding that his filters were “100 per cent accurate – no overblocking, no underblocking and no impact on speeds”.

But Mark Newton, an engineer with ISP internode, said: “Censorship will not catch a single pedophile, will not cause a single image to disappear from the internet, will not protect a single child.”

Senator Conroy also brushed aside concerns from leading academics and technology companies that the plan to block a blacklist of “refused classification” (RC) websites for all Australians was an attempt to shoe-horn an offline classification model into a vastly different online world.

“Why is the internet special?,” he asked, saying the net was “just a communication and distribution platform”.

“This argument that the internet is some mystical creation that no laws should apply to, that is a recipe for anarchy and the wild west. I believe in a civil society and in a civil society people behave the same way in the physical world as they behave in the virtual world.”

Newton said this was a “gross oversimplification”, pointing out that Australia Post and Telstra’s telephone network were also distribution platforms but were not censored.

“Why should the internet, a distribution platform for all manner of intangibles, be censored as if it was a movie theatre? It makes no sense, the model doesn’t fit,” he said.

The Greens communications spokesman Scott Ludlam was also quick to ridicule Senator Conroy, saying books and films were distinctly different because they are “dicreet, physical packages of content”, whereas the internet is dynamic and has “a trillion web pages already indexed and an unknown amount more added every day”.

“To characterise sustained opposition by individuals and groups as diverse as EFA, Google, SAGE, Yahoo, Save the Children, Reporters without Borders, Justice Kirby, Choice Magazine, leading online academics and industry associations and the United States Department of State as ‘an organised group in the online world’ is a remarkably naive misreading of how unpopular this proposal is,” Senator Ludlam said.

University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt said the difference between submitting a book for classification and having an organisation classifying and blocking websites without anyone’s knowledge was that, in the book case, “it is well known that the book was censored and there can be a debate about the correctness of the decision”.

Landfeldt said it was true that the filter system would block all websites it was told to block but the trillions of pages on the internet means the government will not make the internet a safe place for children and will only be able to stop access to “a small minority” of web pages.

Senator Conroy said the aim of his policy was to “ensure that particularly children … don’t stumble across this material”, which he described as being child pornography, bestiality, extreme violence and pro-rape websites.

He neglected to address widespread concerns that the “refused classification” rating also applies to sexual health discussions, euthanasia material such as the Peaceful Pill Handbook, historical war footage and instructions in minor crimes such as graffiti.

Senator Conroy admitted that his filters would not do anything to stop the spread of child pornography on peer-to-peer file sharing networks, and that they will “slow down the internet” if applied to high-volume sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia.

He mentioned he was in discussions with Google over a way for the company to apply the filter to YouTube but Google has already rejected these requests.

“If we know there are 355 websites today that have child pornographic images on it, should we say well we’re not going to do anything about it?,” he said.

Colin Jacobs, spokesman for the online users’ lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said this comment ignored evidence that the overwhelming majority of child pornography was traded in others ways such as by peer-to-peer. It also ignored the fact that anyone who wanted to bypass the filters could do so quite easily.

Senator Conroy has been on the attack against Google after the search giant issued a withering critique of his policy. After questioning the company’s credibility in an ABC Radio interview on Monday night, he fired off another broadside in yesterday’s interview.

He said Google already censored more material than the Rudd Government was proposing to block with its filters, pointing to its blocking of R-rated and X-rated material on YouTube and its censorship of search results in Thailand that are critical of the Thai king.

“Google are welcome to their view but Google have got to be prepared to be consistent,” said Senator Conroy.

Jacobs said suggesting that enforcing YouTube’s terms of service was equivalent to state-sponsored censorship was “at best misleading”. Senator Ludlam said Senator Conroy’s attacks on Google were “a deliberate misdirection of the debate”, while Jacobs said they “smack of a personal vendetta”.

Senator Conroy also rejected concerns that the government was creating a new mandatory censorship mechanism that would be prone to abuse by future governments.

“I think in Australia we have a vibrant democracy and anyone who wanted to try to expand beyond existing banned material – RC – would have one hell of a fight on the floor of Parliament,” he said.

Asked whether it was a fact that the blacklist, a catalogue of some of the worst websites, was likely to leak at some time in the future, as has occurred in a number of other countries, Senator Conroy responded: “so the alternative is just to leave them out there and do nothing?”.

He said he realistically would not expect to see legislation enabling the filters to be introduced before the second half of the year, after which it would “go through an open and transparent consultative process”.

“For $44 million, we’re buying ourselves an initiative which will have no measurable impact whatsoever,” Senator Ludlam said.

“In exchange, we establish the architecture for future governments to abuse the loose and undefined ‘RC’ category to add a creeping range of material to the list. Once this architecture is established, the idea that its scope won’t be expanded by future governments is a gamble we don’t believe we should take.”

Google and Yahoo raise doubts over planned net filters

By BHRP

BBC News | February 16, 2010

Google and Yahoo have joined two Australian organizations calling for a “rethink” of the country’s controversial internet filter plans.

Flickr Creative Commons | Digital Reflections

The Australian government has announced proposals to introduce a mandatory filter which would block all RC (Refused Classification) content.

The groups argue that the subjects covered by RC material are too wide-ranging for a blanket ban.

They also warn that the filter will not “effectively protect children”.

Will Australia join China in filtering the Internet?

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Alex E Proimos

While the rest of the world enjoys the epic battle between internet search giant Google and Communist colossus China over internet censorship, Australian free speech activists are this week attempting to shoot down their own government’s compulsory web filter plans.

Any Australians choosing to log on to the internet today instead of spending Australia Day on the beach would have found many of their favourite websites faded to black. Displayed against the dark background is a message opposing the Federal Government’s censorship plans, under which a secret blacklist of objectionable websites would be ‘refused classification’ and Internet Service Providers would be forced to block them.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Labour government says the aim of the filter is to protect children. China frequently defends its own web censorship, dubbed the ‘Great Firewall of China’, as filtering out violent and pornographic material.

The organisers of the Great Australian Internet Blackout say the filter plan will not work and is a waste of money. They also question what future Australian governments might choose to deem ‘RC’. “Although the Government claims the scope is limited, there are no guarantees on what this or future governments will do with the blacklist once it’s in place,” says the campaign’s spokesman Colin Jacobs.

It will not even protect children, they say: “The filter isn’t a ‘cyber safety’ measure to stop kids seeing inappropriate content such as R and X rated websites. It is not even designed to prevent the spread of illegal material where it is most often found (chat rooms, peer-to-peer file sharing).” Child welfare groups agree and say it would give parents a false sense of security.

Inevitably the list of over 2,000 websites was leaked last year to wikileaks.org and was found to contain such objectionable content as online poker sites, a travel operator, a dentist and Wikipedia pages as well as fetish, satanic and Christian sites.

Iarla Flynn, head of policy at Google Australia wrote last month (before Google’s announcement that it would no longer censor its Chinese language search engine) that the company agreed that child abuse material ought to be screened. “But moving to a mandatory ISP 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.”

Although there are ISP filtering regimes in place in Italy and Germany, they are limited strictly to child abuse and illegal gambling websites. Australia’s law would be “the first of its kind amongst western democracies,” says Flynn.

With Australia’s Green Party opposed, the Labour government will have to rely on the support of the opposition Liberal Party, which is yet to take sides in the RC debate. Could the Liberals be swayed by the blackout protest? Whether or not Australia takes its place aside the likes of China, Iran and Saudi Arabia in ‘protecting’ its citizens from the internet hinges on that question.

2009 Unprecedented Year For Online Repression

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Zensursala

by Clothilde le Coz, Reporters Without Borders

2009 was an unprecedented year for online repression.

For the first time since the Internet emerged as a tool for public use, there are currently 100 bloggers and cyber-dissidents imprisoned worldwide as a result of posting their opinions online in 2009, according to Reporters Without Borders. This figure is indicative of the severity of the crackdowns being carried out in roughly 10 countries around the world. (In one example, Burma handed out long prison sentences to online dissidents.)

The number of countries pursuing online censorship doubled in the past year — a disturbing trend that suggests governments seek to increase their control over new media. In total, 151 bloggers and cyber-dissidents were arrested in 2009, and 61 were physically assaulted.

The crackdown on bloggers and ordinary citizens who express themselves online comes at the same time that social networking and interactive websites have become extremely popular, not to mention powerful vehicles for free expression.

China Still Leads in Online Censorship

China was once again the leading Internet censor in 2009. Countries such as Iran, Tunisia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Uzbekistan also blocked websites and blogs, and engaged in surveillance of online expression. In Turkmenistan, for example, the Internet remains under total state control. Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer is still in jail, while the famous Burmese comedian Zarganar still has 34 years left on his prison sentence. These are but a few examples.

The list of approximately 120 victims of Internet censorship in 2009 also includes leading figures in the defense of online free speech, such as China’s Hu Jia and Liu Xiaobo, and Vietnam’s Nguyen Trung and Dieu Cay.

People are usually targeted because they speak out on political matters, but the global financial crisis is also on the list of subjects likely to provoke online censorship. In South Korea, a blogger was wrongfully detained for commenting on the country’s disastrous economic situation. Roughly six people in Thailand were arrested or harassed just for making a connection between the king’s health and a fall in the Bangkok stock exchange. Censorship was slapped on media in Dubai when it came time for them to report on the country’s debt repayment problems.

Overall, wars and elections constituted the chief threats to journalists and bloggers in 2009. It is becoming more risky to cover wars because journalists themselves are being targeted for murder and kidnappings. It’s also just as dangerous for reporters in some countries to do their job at election time. Journalists have ended up in prison or in a hospital thanks to their election reporting. Violence before and after elections was particularly prevalent in 2009 inside countries with poor democratic credentials.

Iran Election Crackdown

Iran saw the most violence, censorship and arrests due to an election. Its elections this past summer saw more than 100 arrests, and many prison sentences handed down. The country, which is on the Reporters Without Borders list of “Enemies of the Internet,” has also deployed a sophisticated system of Internet filtering and monitoring, especially in recent months. The country’s main ISPs depend on the Telecommunication Company of Iran, which recently came under control of the Revolutionary Guard, and does not hesitate to flout international treaties or to restrict the free flow of information.

Within hours of the announcement of President Mahmoud Ahmadinedjad’s election “victory,” journalists were being arrested by the intelligence ministry, Revolutionary Guard, and other security services. Most were taken to Tehran’s Evin prison. At least 100 journalists and bloggers have been arrested since June, and 27 are still being held. Today, Iran is one of the world’s five biggest imprisoners of journalists.

Since the election, national and international media in Iran have been subject to massive and systematic censorship that is without precedent. For the first time since the 1979 revolution, the security services are vetting the content of newspapers before they’re published.

The Iranian regime’s offensive against online free expression took a new direction in December after Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi announced he was going to prosecute two conservative websites for “insulting” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Meanwhile, several Internet service providers cut access to prevent political opponents from disseminating information during opposition demonstrations on December 27. After the demonstrations, the intelligence ministry and Revolutionary Guard began rounding up government opponents and journalists, arresting an estimated 20 people in the latest wave. Those targeted included a dozen or so journalists and cyber-dissidents. Alireza Behshtipour Shirazi, the editor of Kaleme.org (opposition leader Mirhossein Moussavi’s official website), was arrested at his Tehran home and taken to an unknown place of detention.

Trouble in Democratic Countries

Democratic countries have also enacted online censorship. Several European nations are working on new steps to control the Internet in what they say is a campaign against child porn and illegal downloads. Australia is also planning to set up a compulsory filtering system that poses a threat to freedom of expression.

Communications minister Stephen Conroy announced in December that, after a year of testing in partnership with Australian Internet service providers, the government will introduce legislation imposing mandatory filtering of websites with pornographic, pedophilic or particularly violent content.

Google Australia’s head of policy, Iarla Flynn, raised concerns, saying, “Moving to a mandatory ISP 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.” In a Fairfax Media poll of 20,000 Australians, 96 percent strongly opposed a mandatory Internet filtering system.

Yet that proposal — as well as many others around the world — continues to move ahead. Hopefully, 2010 will be a better year for free speech online.

Filter report reignites censorship debate in Australia

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Linh rOm

Kumar Parakala | October 20, 2009

The release last week of the ACS report on ISP filtering has reignited the debate about internet censorship, with the ACS e-security task force suggesting that, if mandatory internet filtering is to occur, then a multi-faceted strategy would be needed to ensure that children are protected from dangerous or inappropriate material online.

The ACS neither supports nor condemns internet censorship, but given the current government policy to introduce mandatory ISP filtering, we established the e-security task force late last year to examine the technical issues associated with this approach in an objective and balanced way.

The task force, which includes some of the nation’s leading e-security experts, suggests that if the government remains committed to this policy, then ISP-based filtering, while an important first step, will not be sufficient to achieve the desired result.

Filtering alone is unlikely to adequately address cyber security issues or significantly impact those who deliberately produce, distribute or search for illegal material, since there are too many technical loopholes that can be exploited to evade detection.

With the government seeking to deliver on its election commitment to require ISPs to offer a clean feed internet service to all homes, schools and public internet points accessible by children, it’s clear that a mix of technical and education-based initiatives will be needed.

According to the ACS report, the diversity and sheer volume of content and web sites on the internet, the determination of those generating malicious or illegal content and the need to balance e-security concerns with freedom of speech and censorship issues means that there is no one solution that will solve all filtering needs.

While acknowledging the value of filtering, the task force has also called for better education of both parents and children on using the internet, and greater transparency around blacklists and their criteria.

The issue of internet filtering has been a contentious one with many stakeholders protesting that any moves to require ISPs to introduce filtering will degrade network performance and increase costs to consumers.

Certainly these are valid concerns and the task force report provides substantial detail around the technical issues associated with the different types and levels of filtering.

Some of the challenges identified include:

• A lack of clear definition about the types of content that will be subject to filtering;
• The technical limitations of automated ways to analyse video, pictorial and audio content;
• The need for clear and consistent criteria behind content labelling and rating systems;
• The impact on network performance of content filters, depending on where they are placed within the network architecture;
• The need for consistency in the blocking of content and how to avoid overblocking or underblocking;
• The difficulty in maintaining up-to-date black lists, white lists, keywords and phrases because of the rapid rate at which new internet content is being generated;
• How to effectively manage user-generated material, which is created on the fly since it is practically impossible to accurately label or rate these sites and content; and
• The need for ways to deal with encrypted traffic and secure channels, as encryption impedes filtering.

The report called for the government to clearly define the objectives of any ISP filtering program and provide more information around desired performance standards, the type of material to be filtered, reporting processes and the type of traffic and filtering mechanisms to be used.

Task force spokesman and Director of Information and Networked Systems Security Research at Macquarie University, Professor Vijay Varadharajan, said we need to clearly understand what we are filtering and why, as well as having specific strategies for how this might best be achieved.

Different levels of filtering will act with varying levels of efficiency and have different impacts on performance. There are obvious technical issues relating to the filtering of certain types of content, such as SSL content, peer-to-peer traffic, internet chat rooms and instant messaging from social networking sites.

Many of these are popular ways for seasoned purveyors of illegal material to communicate and exchange files, he explained.

The six experts on the task force believe there is no single mechanism that can accurately filter out or block illegal material on the internet 100 per cent of the time. A successful approach would need to incorporate filtering technologies at the ISP, user and enterprise level, as well as increased professionalism and tighter controls around domain name registration, education at all levels of society and greater oversight by parents.

The growing importance of the internet at all levels of society makes it essential that we seek ways to protect users and promote greater confidence in the internet as a safe and effective platform for business, education and social interaction.

We look forward to working with the government to identify effective strategies and tools that will deliver the right level of protection without compromising performance or negatively impacting ISPs and other ICT businesses.

Kumar Parakala is chairman of the ACS. www.acs.org.au