Thongchai Sangsiri, charged with overseeing Thailand’s Web filtering regime, tells an audience that the plan has “become a burden on ISPs” as the length of the Blacklist grows, and that he’d rather see filtering left up to parents and teachers at the local level. Critics like the Freedom Against Censorship Thailand note the irony of its own site having been blocked for more than six months now even though it doesn’t host any “illegal or even uncivil content.”
With the US govt mulling a Web filtering regime of its own with the Combating Online Infringement & Counterfeits Act (COICA) it’s worth noting that in Thailand, where a similar plan has already been put in place, the top govt official in charge has admitted it “doesn’t work.”
Thongchai Sangsiri, director of computer forensics within Thailand’s Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT), and charged with overseeing the Web filtering regime, told a an audience at a recent gathering at the Asia-Pacific Telecommunity cybersecurity forum that blacklists are too lengthy and have proved quite difficult for ISPs to properly handle.
He said that Web filtering was a job best left up to parents.
“We would like [to] leave parents and teachers to decide what to filter … because [the current system] is too much to handle,” said Sangsiri.
“The blacklists grow with many, many websites to become a burden on ISPs. Blacklisting doesn’t work.”
Freedom Against Censorship Thailand, a Thailand-based group opposed the Web filter, submitted a letter recently to the country’s Prime Minister which also criticized the ineffectiveness of the filter, pointing out the irony that’s its site has been blocked for more than 6 months now.
It reads:
Our website Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT) has been blocked since May 9, more than six months. We host no illegal or even uncivil content.
It is ironic that an anti-censorship website should itself be censored by government.
What does a citizen do to get their website unblocked? I have been in contact with your ICT minister, your deputy prime minister will not return my calls and the military authorities at your CRES and CAPO are simply unreachable by the ordinary citizen.
In the US the COICA would try mandate similar blacklisting efforts by forcing ISPs to “prevent the importation into the United States of goods and services offered by an Internet site dedicated to infringing activities.” The Bill would give courts the power to order ISPs to prevent access to infringing websites by US citizens if the site is found to illegally offer copyrighted material.
“Senator Leahy is leading the government into the swamp of trying to decide which websites should be blacklisted and which ones shouldn’t, and they’re going to discover that the line between copyright infringement and free political speech can be awfully murky,” notes the EFF, one of the COICA’s most vocal critics.
Sangrisi added that he thought the whole Web filtering plan was simply a way to make the majority of the public think the govt was actually doing something about perceived problems on the Internet.
“The majority of the public will think the government is doing something; for public image it is good,” he said.
Precisely. With the COICA US copyright holders like the RIAA or MPAA will think they’ve blocked access to foreign streaming and file-sharing sites when all they’ll have managed to do is force people to reroute their traffic via proxies, VPNs, etc..
A coalition of businesses has been trying to play up the supposed positive benefits of the COICA like the protection of American consumers and jobs, but both are unlikely to happen as a result of the Bill’s passage.
Even if all of the illicit file-sharing sites in the world were eliminated this very moment, all we would see in the US is a shifting of revenue from other sectors of the US economy where file-sharers currently spend the money that would have otherwise been spent on accessing copyrighted material. There is no magic pot of revenue to be tapped.
The Thai blacklist should also serve as a cautionary tale for Australia which has been mulling a Web filtering plan of its own for some time now. Australian Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy has argued the plan is essential to protect “all that is good about the Internet,” but critics like the country’s Liberal-National Coalition have countered that the “best internet filter a child can have is a parent that is engaged in what their children do and see on the internet.”
The COICA currently under consideration in the US Senate is obviously slightly different from either of the aforementioned Web filtering schemes, but its inevitable failure will be the same nonetheless.
All Internet users have to do is encrypt their traffic or route via Tor or proxies to bypass any filtering regime. If the Chinese people have been able to defeat that country’s Great Firewall of China then why do the COICA’s sponsors expect a far more modest US proposal to any more successful?
Our National Security Agency has already “yelled” at France for passing the “Creation and Internet Law” which it says will only encourage Internet users to arm themselves with same encryption tools used by criminal networks, making their job of detecting threats and illegal activity that much harder. The COICA is sure to encourage the same practice, especially VPN services that have the dual benefit of file-sharing anonymity.
Stay tuned.
