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Thai Minister: Web Filtering Plan “Doesn’t Work”

Jared Moya — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 18:20:40 +0000

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. jared@zeropaid.com

EU Web Filtering Debate Heats Up With IT Group Denouncing It

Drew Wilson — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 08:10:50 +0000

There's already been a lot of talk about a possible web filter in the EU and now the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), a group representing a number of IT related companies, have come out against it.

There's been a lot of discussion in Europe about the possibility of an EU-wide filter. Such topics such as a mandatory blacklist have been in discussions for some time amongst EU nations and the consensus amongst those who know a thing or two about the internet for the most part has remained that such a filter would never work in the long run. Now that there is word of a potential EU-wide filter, the discussion can only escalate from here. Proponents argue that it's suppose to stop child abuse and child pornography. If websites were blocked, then access cannot be gained and therefore it would stem such illegal content. It sounds very simple, particularly if you don't know exactly how the internet works. "There is a real danger that this proposal will have unintended consequences," Ed Black, president of the CCIA said in an interview. "We oppose this idea partly because it is an inefficient way to combat online child abuse, but also because it builds on efforts by governments around the world to block what they don't like on the Net," he said. Computer World is already reporting that the European Commission has already poured €300,000 to lobby in favour of proposed laws that would put an EU-wide filter in place. Whether Black knows it or not, there are already unintended consequences happening. During a talk in Sweden, an anti-piracy organization made a very disturbing comment that "child pornography is great" while hoping to incorporate copyrighted material in to the filter. Believe it or not, there is already precedent on a mass scale filtering system. Every filter has essentially ended in disaster one way or another. For instance, and perhaps the most famous example, the Great Firewall of China. While China has been trying to crack down for some time on what is being discussed on the internet in their own country with, ironically enough, aid from technology sold by US firms, the filter has yet to be completely successful with dissenting voices still making it out of China through programs like Adopt a Blog and heavy encryption. The US government has been a vocal critic on China's human rights record. In Australia, there's been numerous attempts to filter the internet. The last time Australia's government successfully put in place a filter to filter out porn, it ended in total disaster. It sparked one of the most a very famous headline, "Teen cracks AU $84 million porn filter in 30 minutes". Since then, the idea of an Australian wide filter which would capture way more than child abuse (as advocates for the filter so often claimed) has been fiercely debated. In 2009 amidst a renewed effort to implement such a filter, the Australian blacklist leaked with definite evidence that abuse had occurred when sites as innocent as a dental clinic wound up on that blacklist. Thailand also had it's attempt to filter the internet. You'd think that a filter might be more successful in a country like Thailand considering how much governmental control there is. That sense of power came crashing down in 2008 when the entire Thailand blacklist leaked in 2008. The reasons why web filtering will never work became very apparent when it was debated in Australia. The scope, as one filtering company found, was particularly difficult. It may be possible to get some form of success on internet sites through direct keywords, but throw in any other protocol such as p2p traffic or even some messaging systems and the filter runs in to serious trouble trying to catch and block everything. Throw in a little encryption and it's pretty much game over for the filter. From a technical aspect, it's pretty much impossible to filter anything online because there will always be a way to circumvent it one way or another. The internet was initially designed to be a communication system that would survive a nuclear strike. It's unlikely, unless every ISP in the world were to shut down, to significantly change the ability to transfer data from one point to another. It's also politically bad news. If child abuse can be filtered, what about political speech? That was an issue for debate in every known web filtering case. Someone from the Electronic Frontier Australia once pointed out that even if the current government wouldn't do anything wrong with the filtering, what about the next government or the government after? Do you really trust every single subsequent government that they would be ethical with a web filtering system if it was ever possible to construct an effective one? It's the duty of the government to protect its citizens for both today and for the future - even from future potentially worse governments. It is bad for business as well. What would happen if it was possible for one business to ruin another business through the filtering? It doesn't necessarily require government interference, but rather a shady employee with a willingness to profit. It is socially unsound because it places an overwhelming amount of trust onto a set of individuals. It's impossible to really find anyone or any group that can be completely trusted. The British population in 2007 found the issue of trust to be in the spotlight when the tax arm of the British government lost the identities of nearly half the population of Britain. To say the least, there was horror and anger over that fiasco. It's impossible to find any entity that can be trusted with such a large burden of responsibility. The bottom line, in every angle you look at this, if you think carefully on it enough, such a system fails whether it's philosophically, practically or technically for instance. The only real good thing an internet filtering system is for is probably political suicide. 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.

Thai Internet Website Blacklist Leaked

Jorge Gonzalez — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 03:57:35 +0000

It may be another way to prove the futility of an internet blacklist mandated by the government.

With governments like Britain and Australia pushing for blacklisting websites under the guise of “protecting the children”, it seems as though the leaking of Thailand website blacklist couldn’t have come at a better time.

The report from Wikileaks coupled with a link to the proof that the blacklist was leaked says that over 1,203 webpages were blocked for political reasons. Of the web pages blocked, over 800 were YouTube clips as well as an additional 200 mirrors of the videos in question. Some of the videos in question were US presidential candidate campaign videos. The reason the websites were blocked was because they supposedly violated the “les majeste” law, or, criticizing the King.

When it comes to censorship, China has been the most heavily criticized because of the infamous “Great Firewall of China” A number of criticisms were the fact that keywords like “democracy” would trigger such censorship in the first place, though large companies like the BBC have also been blocked as well. This latest turn of events might put the censorship spotlight on Thailand, but it should be noted that it really proves how futile it is to create blacklists to control what citizens view online – a growing trend in non-Asian countries as well these days.

Update: It appears as though Denmarks secret website blacklist was also leaked on Wikileaks. While it seems like it’s more honest in blocking legitimately illegal content, Wikileaks notes that there is no real oversight to prevent legitimate websites from winding up on there including a Dutch transport company’s website. Wikileaks notes that the Thailand case proves that it’s entirely possible for any given government to use the blacklist for purely political reasons rather than to “protect children”. The list is from February of this year.