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Leaked Document: Copyright Industry Wants a Great Firewall of Britain

Drew Wilson — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 03:50:36 +0000

Website blocking has certainly been discussed in the US with the PROTECT IP act first propsed last month. While the senate has approved the bill, it seems that the US isn't going to be the only country debating the prospects of filtering the internet.

A document labelled confidential was recently sent to James Firth's blog and ultimately posted on Open Rights Group detailing a proposal by some industry interests to pressure British ISPs to participate in a "voluntary" site blocking system. The documents describe this system as an "approach to inhibiting access to websites that are substantially focused upon infringement of copyright." There's plenty of reason to be concerned and one of the main reason to be concerned is that public policy is being decided behind closed doors. This isn't too dissimilar to when copyright organizations tried pushing for many controversial provisions in the Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Everything about it was being planned behind closed doors. The only reason anyone heard about it early on was because Wikileaks blew the lid off of the secrecy surrounding ACTA back in 2008. This led to a major outcry from individuals and human rights groups alike to question the bill. It seems this "voluntary" Great Firewall of Britain won't be any different. Many of the criticisms directed at ACTA could be directed at this proposal including, "Was the proposal so bad that they had to hide it to avoid any kind of scrutiny?" There are other reasons to be concerned besides the questionable action of keeping this secret. Firth provided the following quote and response:

"Evidence should also be submitted to show the urgency with which the measures are sought to inform any balance that needs to be struck by the expert body and the Court between the need for swift action and the need for sufficient evidence."
This is very worrying indeed. Whilst the document talks about evidence gathering, "prior notification and liberty;" it also talks about a turn-around time quick enough for "live events" and a balance between swift action and evidence. The language used reads like copyright protection is being sold as more important than due process under law. In any case, I can't imagine a technical solution that would allow ISPs to implement an effective block within the time scale of a "live event", irrespective of the time it takes a court to act. So it's not surprising that digital rights champions the Open Rights Group were locked out, despite hearing of the meeting in advance and putting in a request to attend

The Open Rights Group also expressed deep concern for this proposal:

The documents, sent to James Firth's blog, set out a dangerous voluntary scheme that would involve 'expedited court procedures' and a 'balance' between evidence and speed of action. Definitions of what content is to be judged blockable is scarce. References to exactly how such blocking would work, and the consequences, are non-existent. The case for blocking is left unmade, with no analysis about the effects of such measures. There is cursory reference to the rule of law and proper oversight. The proposal, if it is the genuine proposal, adds up to a dangerous revocation of the rule of law where lobby groups would decide what you are allowed to see and read.

The Open Rights Group then referenced a recent Rapporteur which sounded an "alarm" over such measures. They also encouraged British citizens to contact their MP to get them to "sign EDM 1913, which calls for the government to take on board what the UN have said and reconsider the Digital Economy Act and its many proposed website blocking schemes." The full document is currently being hosted by the Open Rights Group for those interested in reading the proposal. I doubt that an ISP could ever prevent every user from accessing a blocked website. All it really takes it the right proxy to access it. Do you think website blocking will ever be fully possible or is it a bad idea? Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

School Porn Filter Defeated by Third Grade Students

Drew Wilson — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 07:03:58 +0000

Net filtering has been brought up a lot in recent months. But how effective are different kinds of filtering technology? As one school found out the hard way, such technology can be surprisingly easy to defeat.

If you've been following some of the copyright debate, you might have come across a few articles discussing the idea of filtering technology to stop copyright infringement. Recently, there was a an opinion by Advocate General Cruz Villalón in Europe who said that ISPs shouldn't be forced by national courts to filter the internet. In the US, there is a similar debate with the more recent news commenting on how the US is decrying other countries over net filters while trying to implement their own - namely the Combating Online Infringement & Counterfeits Act (COICA). Multi-national corporations such as top members of the RIAA and MPAA might argue that content filtering at, say, the ISP level, might be an option to supposedly stop copyright infringement. COICA is a bill which demands ISPs implement a blacklist filter which, among other things, sets out to block domain names at the request of rights holders. A lot of arguments have flown over the years over such technology be it an infringement on civil rights, false positives, protecting jobs, etc. One point that sometimes crops up is whether or not such technology is even effective at all. Most who are familiar with technology, outside of people selling such technology, would likely say that filtering technology is not all that effective at deterring whatever said filters set out to block all of the time. That's certainly what made a recent news story surrounding a school and its porn filter all the more interesting. A school porn filter differs from a nation-wide porn filter in several ways. From a security standpoint, it's a smaller audience on a smaller network which, conventional wisdom would suggest, would be easier to manage. How did the filter fare? Not so well evidently. According to the New York Daily News a group of third grade students from a Queens elementary school were caught and suspended for looking up elicit material on school computers. The students were suspended, City technicians were then called in. They wiped the computers and installed filtering technology on the computers. When the students returned, the filter was easily bi-passed when they Googled "Hot girls". What ensued wasn't all that surprising:

"The concern here is that a Department of Education filter shouldn't fail the [test of] 'Are you smarter than a third-grader?'" said City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Astoria), who is looking into the matter. "As a parent, I hope that something like this never happens again," he added. PS 85 Principal Ann Gordon-Chang said it was an "isolated" incident.

Since then, new filtering technology was installed. The case is eerily similar to the infamous case in Australia that no doubt continually haunts pro-filtering advocates. In 2007, a 16 year old Australian cracked a government mandated country-wide $84 million porn filter in 30 minutes. This does raise some interesting questions. Are younger kids becoming more tech savvy? Is filtering technology flawed? More importantly, if filtering technology can't keep a handful of third grade students from surfing for porn on school computers, how can filtering technology be used to stop a whole nation of people from committing acts of copyright infringement? I think that the idea of filtering for the purpose of stopping copyright infringement, even in this day and age, is a deeply flawed concept. Rights holders will not gain what they hope to gain and a lot of people stand to lose a lot when it comes to basic things such as free speech. This story alone is just another example of why the former part of this argument is true. [Hat Tip] Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

Australian Net Filter Dead?

Drew Wilson — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 04:56:11 +0000

Not a lot of news is happening in Australia lately regarding the mandatory web filtering. So we decided to find out if anything has happened lately. Turns out, Australia has had an election with some rather historical results that could see to the demise of the net filtering plan.

Hung parliament. The last time Australia had one of those was 1940. Still, it's a term that Australians will now have to get use to now with no one winning a majority government. The results say that the Labour Party won 72 seats. The coalition, Australia's other major political party also won 72 seats. That left four other representatives to decide which side they choose to support - thus holding the balance of power. Two of those independents decided to support Labour while the other two decided to support Coalition - thus resulting in a dead heat according to ABC news. The Coalition, suggests Electronic Frontier Australia, is against the internet filtering plan, so since the two sides are on equal footing, I would imagine it would require support from both sides to pass such a filter. From EFA:

The upshot of all this is that without The Greens' support, filter legislation would not be passed in the House of Representatives, let alone make it through a hostile Senate where both the Coalition and Greens would vote it down. It therefore looks very unlikely that, even if the country independents were to make internet censorship a high priority, filter legislation could go anywhere.

So it sounds like the Australian internet filter, the one that would filter out "inappropriate content" and the one that could possibly even filter file-sharing content (though this was a matter of debate), is officially dead. It seems that a minority government is one very effective way of blocking legislation like this. Canada knows all about avoiding a Canadian DMCA. An election killed the first full iteration of the Canadian DMCA - known as Bill C-60 in the Liberal party government. Later, the Conservatives version of the Canadian DMCA, Bill C-61, suffered the same fate by dying on the order paper thanks to another election. Successive minority governments, including the current one in Canada, has historically been the number one killer of bad copyright legislation so far. It is entirely possible that the same kind of thing will happen in Australia for now. The news is, no doubt, welcome to human rights groups in Australia who fought long and hard for roughly two years. After Australia delayed the filtering plan, it seems that this was the last decision that would ultimately kill it for now. Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

Aussie Govt Filters Plans for Web Traffic Monitoring

Jared Moya — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:06:18 +0000

Govt fears releasing information on its controversial plan to store traffic history for all Internet users could "lead to premature unnecessary debate and could potentially prejudice and impede government decision making."

The Australian govt seems to be going out of its way to prove the public's worst fears about its plans to expand law enforcement powers on the Internet. Aside form its “voluntary mandatory” ISP filtering regime of all “inappropriate content” and “offensive and illegal material,” which was recently put on hold for at least a year, the govt is also moving forward with plans to force ISPs to retain the web browsing history of all Australians regardless of whether or not they've been suspected of a crime. Worse still, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, a document it obtained under the country's freedom of information (FoI) laws outlining those plans is heavily censored preventing the public from determining what exactly it has in mind. It was circulated among ISPs for what it claims are "consultation purposes and is not for further distribution." ISPs were sworn to secrecy over the exact nature of its content. The Attorney-General's Department legal officer, Claudia Hernandez, explained in the decision letter says that although she recognizes the importance of the "public's right to participate in and influence the process of govt decision making and policy formation, given the early stage of this consultation, the premature release of the proposal could, more than likely, create a confusing and misleading impression [of the document.]" "In addition, as the matters have not been settled and proposed recommendations may not necessarily be adopted, release of such documents would not make a valuable contribution to public debate," she adds. "Rather, I consider that the release of such documents may lead to premature unnecessary debate and could potentially prejudice and impede govt decision making."

It's a curious line of reasoning. Never before has the govt proposed such far reaching censorship plans, and to suggest that making the consultations public "could be misleading" and cause "premature and unnecessary debate" is insulting. How can its own written words be "misleading" and how can it argue that public debate of such an important topic could be "premature" or "unnecessary?" "This excuse is extraordinary," says Green Party communications spokesperson Senator Scott Ludlam. "Why is the Department making such an effort to keep this information hidden?" The Attorney-General's Department has also been in talks with the country's ISPs to implement a traffic history regime for individual subscribers that also has the Green Party concerned. The party has expressed dismay at the Federal Government's refusal to reveal details of consultations with industry over plans to force Internet Service Providers to store web browsing histories of all Australian internet users. "The Government has denied web browser history would be required to be logged, saying it would only be data about a communication not the content of the communication," it says. "This is defined as: This includes information about the identity of the sending and receiving parties (A and B parties), when a communication started and stopped, and the type of communication. Surely this constitutes web browsing histories by anyone's language?" With the document already having been distributed among ISPs for discussion it's hard to figure out why the govt insists on the document remaining secret unless it knows it contains proposals the public will find unsettling like data retention. "We have to turn the age-old question back on the government: if you don’t have anything to hide, then you shouldn't be worried about people having insight into the consultation," says Electronic Frontiers Australia's Colin Jacobs. "This is a very sensitive and important issue. It raises huge questions about privacy, data security and the burden of increased costs to smaller internet service providers. What really needs to be debated is what particular information they want, because that's where the privacy issue rears its ugly head." Exactly. Being that the proposals have such implications for all of the Australian public keeping their details secret only makes people even more wary of what they are and poisons the whole debate. If the plans are as important as the govt says they are then surely the public would have to agree, and if they don't then it's the govt's duty to begin making the case for why they are. Stay tuned. jared@zeropaid.com

Aussie Net Filter Still Moving Forward

Jared Moya — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 18:10:42 +0000

Minister for Communications Stephen Conroy more determined than ever to implement controversial "mandatory voluntary" Internet filtering system.

Australian Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy is still doing all he can to sway a skeptical public that mandatory Internet filtering is in society’s best interests. First proposed as a voluntary effort to “protect children,” the plan quickly spiraled into an all out attempt make it mandatory for ISPs to filter the Internet of all “inappropriate content” and “offensive and illegal material.” It quickly deteriorated from an attempt to somehow safeguard children from things like child pornography to things like legal pornography, gambling, and even P2P traffic, making Australian citizens rightly upset. Critics of the proposal include US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who told an audience earlier this year of the US’ commitment to online freedom. Tech giants like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, have also expressed their concern, fearing "arbitrary executive decision making," the fact that "mandatory filtering of all RC material could block content with a strong social, political and/or educational value, " and the "false sense of security" it may give parents. Proponents like the powerful Australian Christian Lobby however, have been "disappointed" that the govt has yet to implement the filter. The filter is to be included in the govt's $128.8 million Cyber Safety legislation, which was supposed to have been passed before June, but has now been delayed until the later this year so the govt has a chance to further review and fine-tune it. "'This is a policy that will be going ahead,'' says Senator Conroy. ''We are still consulting on the final details of the scheme. But this policy has been approved by 85% of Australian ISPs, who have said they would welcome the filter, including Telstra, Optus, iPrimus and iiNet.'' However, at least one of those ISPs -- iiNet -- strongly denies that it "welcomes" the filter, and emphasizes that it only welcomes the fact the govt has made efforts to clarify its filter plans, and opened up the process for public review and comment. iiNet has called the plan "ridiculous" from the start, and even offered to be involved in filtering trials to give the govt “hard numbers” to show just “how stupid it is.” It knows, as many rational people do, that website filtering will do little stop pedophiles and criminals. "The reality is pedophiles and criminals do not use public websites to distribute their illegal content and the planned Government filter is currently only proposed to block website addresses or 'URLs' - so it won't prevent this kind of activity," it says. In fact, it also warns that it may give parents a false sense of security that the govt has made the Internet safe for their children. "We've always said the best protection against illegal activities of this kind is education and optional software filters at the computer level," it adds. "We have supported and continue to support Government and industry initiatives to make these kinds of protection mechanisms more readily and affordably available to those that want them. That's a much more effective and appropriate response. Parents should always be the first line of defense when it comes to protecting their children from harmful material on the Internet not the govt, a point which 86% of respondents in a recent Galaxy Research opinion poll agreed with. Stay tuned. jared@zeropaid.com

Professor – Unfiltered Internet Has No Place in a Democracy

Jorge Gonzalez — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 06:21:09 +0000

Says people like the Electronic Frontier Australia are a bunch of extremists.

It may be difficult for some to read what this professor has published in Australian IT without noting a certain amount of irony, but a he has essentially said that the internet doesn’t belong to people who have “Libertarian” beliefs. It does seem to highlight how heated the web filtering debate in Australia has become.

He starts out his article by saying that the internet filtering technology in Australia as proposed by the Australian government was to stop children from looking up porn on the internet. This may be news to a number of people who are watching the filtering debate unfold in Australia given that the first things we’ve heard out of the country’s government revolved around child pornography, not children watching pornography; that is, of course, if you take what the government says as fact of course.

He continues his piece saying the filtering debate is little more than filtering porn and how opponents are arguing that there is nothing wrong with children having free access to it. All this ignoring any hint that the debate has gone well beyond this into things like, “is it possible, let along right, to have these filters block all forms of p2p traffic?” or how do these filters plan on avoiding blocking legitimate sites like Wikipedia as has happened in England for instance.

Afterwards, he goes as far as to say that the people at Electronic Frontier Australia “represents the most extreme strand of internet libertarianism“ He uses porn as a red herring to support the internet filtering movement with the following:

Fortunately, we do not live in the type of society favoured by organisations like Electronic Frontiers Australia. We live in a democracy where citizens ask their governments to impose restrictions on certain types of content that are regarded as harmful to individuals or to the community more broadly.

He acknowledges that there are grey areas in the debate, but says that, for the most part, most kinds of content is either “black” or “white” and says this:

I have no in-principle objection to censoring the internet in the same way we censor other media, and I suspect most Australians would agree. Certainly, most parents of teenagers agree.

It almost seems as though he isn’t aware of the fact that the internet functions drastically different from other forms of media. Can a television be encrypted in a way to view something to avoid censors like an internet service? Not really. Does internet content largely reside in Australian control? Hardly. A far cry from what can be said about Australian television which can technologically be more heavily regulated.

To his credit, he cites the fact that filtering could degrade internet performance by 87%, but dismisses the statistic as scare-mongering, using an unsited statistic that another filter would degrade performance by 2%. Where he got this statistic is unclear. He also doesn’t deny that 1 in 12 sites would be mistakenly blocked which, in and of itself, is quite interesting.

He concludes with, “the most revealing words in the Get Up statement are “our internet”. The internet does not belong to the net libertarians, who seem to believe they inhabit a cyber-nation that is beyond normal forms of social regulation. The net belongs to all of us and, like other forms of communication, is subject to our collective decisions.“

This might be true if Get Up said, “My Internet”, but who does the internet belong to? It’s a neutral medium that anyone with a connection can contribute to. How can one entity set the standards for everyone on a medium such as the internet. Someones standards in China may be completely different to that of someones standards in Britain. Considering the fact that filters being proposed don’t really have an opt-out system, it’s mandatory for every citizen.

No one is saying that all filters are bad, but what many find offensive is the fact that these new government mandated filters will be used on everyones internet connection. It’s the lack of choice in the matter. With this in mind, the professor almost insinuates that users shouldn’t have a right to choose what they see online. There’s a huge difference between someone wanting to put filters on their computer and a government forcing everyone to use their filter – regardless of what is being filtered. How exactly to you call removing a freedom of choice democratic? It’s far easier to call that a dictatorship more than anything else.

Australian Study – ISP Level Filters Improved, but Insufficient for P2P

Jorge Gonzalez — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 23:51:22 +0000

The timing couldn’t have been better. A new study coming out of Australia has concluded that content filtering technology has shown significant improvement, but couldn’t tell the difference between legal and illegal content over a file-sharing network.

In Britain, there is this distinct rush to implement mandatory content filtering whether ISPs want to or not. Many ISPs are quite reluctant to do so and, if this study, combined with the other studies conducted, are anything to go by, it’s not hard to see why.

The study (PDF) says the following:

ACMA considers that, under the conditions [a closed environment] created for the trial, the state of ISP-level filtering technology has significantly advanced, and stands in contrast with the state of this technology evidenced in the previous trial of filter products commissioned by NetAlert Ltd in 2005.

It’s a nice glowing review, but further down towards the end on page 51 shows something quite different:

The trial of the selected filter products against the scope criterion sought to identify the extent of the capability of ISP-level filtering products to recognise and block illegal and inappropriate internet content that is transmitted and delivered across the internet using non-web protocols (for example, instant messaging and file transfers), in addition to web content.

An evaluation of the scope of the internet filters fell outside the requirements of the previous trial. In the three years since the previous trial, however, analysis of global internet traffic indicate that non-web protocols – especially peer-to-peer traffic – contribute an increasing proportion of internet traffic.

All of the filter products have the ability to either block (turn off completely) or rate limit (slow down) a range of specific protocols. Some products offer control over a greater assortment of non-web content than others. None of the products have the ability to actively filter content transmitted using non-web protocols, except [two which were able to filter SMTP traffic - essentially e-mail - and one filter which was able to filter RTSP traffic]

This, of course, wasn’t the only study conducted on ISP-level filtering. Earlier this year, we reported on a study conducted by Internet Evolution which was also funded by the French record labels. Internet Evolution noted, “three vendors chose to exercise their right of veto because each of their results were – ummm… how to put this? – “not perfect” for various reasons.”

The study highlights that filtering technology was less than perfect. Once encryption was implemented on some of the protocols, some of the protocols fell off the filtering radar completely.

So where does this leave British ISPs being forced to filter their traffic? These two studies pretty much shows that the British ISPs are being forced to implement ineffective technology on their networks. Perhaps this could prove to be crucial information for the British government which is opening a public consultation on the matter.

(Hat tip: LawFont)