Another day, another its all about kiddie porn line from the censorship lovers, this time its Child Wise CEO Bernadette McMenamin in the Oz (link).
According to McMenamin
IT is beyond belief that some representatives of the Australian internet service provider industry are reluctant to install filters that would prevent access to child pornography.
Surely any decent person would do all they can to protect children. However there exists a small but vocal group in Australia which is opposed to the federal Government?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s proposal to introduce mandatory ISP filtering to block child pornography and other illegal content.
Notice once again that the backers keep talking about child pornography but not the actual plan, which is to block a whole lot more than that, and content outside of porn as well.
No reasonable or sane person believes in child pornography, but lets be very, very clear on this point: kiddie porn is ALREADY illegal to distribute and even view. If they know where this stuff is hosted, why wouldn’t the Government, in conjunction with overseas countries work to get it taken down and the sickos locked up (or castrated)?
Then there’s the other places argument
Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the United Kingdom have ISP-based filters in place blocking child pornography to the majority of Internet users in those countries. Reports show that these filters are very effective
Correct, but again, they block child porn only and I believe in the case of England we’re talking a couple of thousand websites, NOT millions as the Australian Government is proposing to block on anything and everything they deem we shouldn’t be viewing.
Small scale filtering works because the number of sites blocked is so small that it has no major affect of internet access speed, indeed implementing it would be fairly easy. Under the Australian Governments proposal our speeds would drop between 17% and 78% simply because every time you typed in a web address it would have to be checked against a database of millions of sites, not a short list as is the case in England.
I’m still very, very much against the current Government’s internet censorship proposal, but if it were a block kiddie porn only model I’d reconsider my opposition.
(thanks to Bryce for the link)
As I argue in my blog, It seems to me that if one is really interested in tackling child porn, one should not be *blocking* access to it, but *monitoring* access to it.
A single hit on a blocked website is not convincing evidence of guilt. Repeated access to a range of sites on the list would be. It might not be enough on its own to obtain a connection, but could motivate more detailed investigative work.
Of course, tunnels and anonymous proxies defeat the monitoring approach, but censorship actually forces the traffic underground. At least a monitoring only approach stands a chance of catching some people.
So the question has to be: if you are serious about tacking child pornography, why advocate a policy censorship over a policy of monitoring. Monitoring has to be more useful from a law enforcement perspective.
jon.
apologies for typo above:
connection -> conviction
To anyone who wants to implement this policy should go live in China for a month and see how they like it. If their site is on a shared server there is a reasonable site that it is blocked. Accessing sites outside of China is definitely a lot slower because of the filtering done. I heard Rudd in an interview in China and he kept talking about “biotechnology”. Does anyone in the government see how internet businesses can be set up so easily, compete on the world stage and make money other than just digging up something out of the ground? Just talking of blocking websites in Australia shows how far Australia is behind technology-wise. Anyone in the world knows how blocks and filters can easily be circumnavigated.
I think it is bizarre that the people driving this initiative have not researched the matter or even thought it through for a moment or two.
Blacklists always end up blocking things they should not and failing to block those they should. Who gets to decide what goes on the blacklist? How do incorrect things get taken off the blacklist? How do they speed up the blacklist checking? Not to mention the whole slowing the internet down for everyone in Australia thing.
If anyone really wanted to share illegal or ‘immoral’ data then peer-to-peer wireless networking would be the way to go. Or the evildoers could set up a virtual private network that does not traverse the open internet. Blocking by means of a blacklist of urls as proposed would do nothing to stop this kind of file sharing.