Plans to filter the internet

I've blogged before the Australian Labor Government's proposed plans to filter the internet (for example, see here and here), but I've come across a few other interesting articles and blog posts over the last few days that I think contribute to the debate over the proposal.  Yesterday's The Australian had a few interesting articles on the debate.  For example, Karen Dearne and Fran Foo gave more information on the proposed plan:

"Admittedly, it will be difficult, but that's the intention," Senator Conroy's spokeswoman said yesterday. "Obviously there are many sites out there and they change their names. It's going to require a fairly vigilant monitoring system and it's not going to be 100 per cent foolproof."

...

The internet regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, has struggled to stem the flow of prohibited web content, as most of the material is hosted offshore. Moreover, it can only act on complaints.

In 2006-07, there were only 602 complaints, resulting in five take-down orders over locally hosted content; 494 overseas-hosted items were referred to internet filter makers for inclusion in their products.

The US is by far the largest source of illegal and offensive material. In 2006-07, it accounted for 53 per cent of the total, according to ACMA, followed by Russia at 11 per cent.

ACMA's Donald Robertson confirmed there were "currently 1000 pages on the blacklist".

"We're also part of an international network that generates 300,000 investigations per year into offensive and illegal internet pages," he said. "The majority of these investigations relate to child pornography."

Senator Conroy's spokeswoman said the blacklist would be expanded through liaison with the Australian Federal Police, and international agencies such as Interpol and the FBI. She said technical difficulties would be resolved in filtering trials being conducted by the ACMA in Tasmania. "We have a lot of experts coming to us saying, this can be done," she said.

"We'll be testing the best overseas models, the best advice and the best new technologies." Three previous trials by ACMA -- in 2001, 2003 and 2005 -- all found problems, including filters allowing banned material through and wrongly blocking legitimate content. A test of six filters recorded a relative loss of network performance ranging from 18 at best and 78 per cent at worst.

Read more here.  Fran Foo also had a separate piece on some potential problems with the plan:

THE controversial internet filtering scheme proposed by the federal Government requires a drastic upgrade as it currently would only block a tiny proportion of illegal pornographic websites.

In its current form the scheme would block only about 1000 websites containing child and extreme pornography.

Industry estimates of child pornography sites range from 100,000 to above 30 million.

According to the proposal, first mooted by the Coalition government, the Australian Communications and Media Authority would need to greatly expand its list of banned websites.

Local internet service providers would then have to adhere to the list by blocking the websites in question.

If internet users wanted to have access to certain listed offensive websites, they would have to contact their ISP directly.

At the moment, the ACMA list had 1000 websites, spokesman Donald Robertson confirmed.

One of the drawbacks of the blacklist system is that list is compiled by ACMA based on complaints by the general public. The agency would not move to investigate an illegal website unless it received a complaint.

According to South Australian internet service provider Webshield, ACMA should purchase available software that blocks millions of illegal websites instead of relying on the public.

Webshield managing director Anthony Pillion said: "We have been filtering undesirable websites for three years and we use an American-made software program which has been very effective."

Mr Pillion, who counts 1000 schools and parents as customers, said the software his company employed blocked access to an average of 30,000 websites a second without any sacrifice to broadband performance.

"We use three layers of filtering and there's about a 10-millisecond gap ... it's unnoticeable," he said.

The ISP-based internet filtering plan has drawn the ire of privacy advocates who claim the government is delving into internet censorship while the nation's largest ISP, Telstra BigPond, says parents should be solely responsible for their children's internet activities.

Read more here.  However, The Australian also published an opinion piece from Bernadette McMenamin, who is the CEO of Child Wise, an Australian-based organisation working to prevent the sexual abuse and exploitation of children in Australia, Asia and the Pacific:

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’s proposal to introduce mandatory ISP filtering to block child pornography and other illegal content.

Let’s put this argument into perspective. Child pornography is one of the fastest growing online businesses generating approximately $US3 billion ($3.43 billion) each year. It is estimated that 100,000 commercial websites offer child pornography and more than 20,000 images of child pornography are posted on the internet every week.

...

In my experience and according to our research, Australians do care and want something to be done. In late 2006 Child Wise commissioned AC Nielsen to conduct a survey of 1497 Australian internet users over the age of 18. The key outcomes of the survey were that: 83 per cent believe that ISPs should block all child pornography, 76 per cent would change to an ISP that blocked child pornography and 64 per cent are not confident that home-based internet filters are effective. Surprisingly Child Wise has also received calls from child sex offenders who support mandatory ISP filtering stating that this blocking mechanism would have reduced their desire to abuse children.

So what could possibly be the arguments against ISP filtering from elements of the ISP industry and extreme civil rights groups. Well they have stated that it may “slow down the internet”, “is expensive to use” and the clean feed system which is being used in the United Kingdom has faults, despite blocking access to hundreds of thousands of child pornography images. Do they care more about profits than the protection of children?

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, with the UK system operated by British Telecom blocking over 35,000 attempts per day. During 2006, the Norwegian system blocked 1.7 million attempts to access child pornography. The Swedish system blocked 15,000 attempts during its first few weeks of operation which resulted in a 40 per cent drop in reports of child pornographic sites to Sweden's internet hotline.

While no ISP filtering system is perfect at least these countries have introduced measures to counter the demand for child pornography. As a parent and a child protection advocate I call on all Australians to support the federal Government’s mandatory ISP filtering initiative to block child pornography. It may not be a perfect system but at least it will block access to thousands of child pornographic sites, reduce the demand and protect many hundreds of thousands of children from being exploited in this insidious global child sex trade.

Read more here. 

Another domestic contribution that I think adds to the debate is that of Senator Andrew Bartlett, who wrestles the complexity of the issue without resorting to more extreme and unhelpful rhetoric that likens Australia to China or wonders if Skype, email and blogs will be banned.  Here is a part of what Senator Bartlett has had to say on his blog:

There is little dispute that exposing children to explicit pornography is potentially harmful to them. Indeed, I’m not very comfortable with the notion that the ocean of pornography that exists these days is a good thing in general. However, a government putting constraints on freedom of speech and freedom of access to material by adults is something that in my view can only be justified in the most clear cut of circumstances. There already exists one such example - ironically enough, given Conroy’s comment, this is child pornography. There is pretty much universal support on making it completely illegal to access (and provide and produce) this.

If significantly reducing the chances of children getting access to pornography can be done in a way which (a) actually works, (b) doesn’t open up the chance for governments to censor or stop access to other information, and (c) doesn’t seriously impact on the performance and profitability of the internet, then I’d support it.

From what I’ve seen to date of the government’s plan, I seriously doubt (a), am concerned about (b), and don’t really know about (c).

Read more here.

That said, probably the most informed and relevant discussion of the complexity of this issue that I have read, comes (perhaps unsurprisingly) from the OpenNet Initiative Blog, which is a blog dedicated to investigating state-based internet filtering and is a collaborative partnership of four leading academic institutions: the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme, University of Cambridge, and the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University. 

Rather than cut and paste part or all of what is a detailed analysis of the issue and quite a lengthy post, I would encourage anyone interested in this issue to visit and read Australian Filtering Announcement Raises Questions and Ire. 

However, it would be remiss of me not to note at least one weakness in the analysis offered by the OpenNet Initiative Blog, namely that Australia doesn't have a First Amendment right to free speech that would see an Australian court strike down mandatory filtering laws.  That means if these laws were to be stopped on free speech grounds, it would have to be done at a political and legislative level, and not at the judicial or constitutional level.