By straxd

So Australia’s apparently getting filtering technology that’s mandatory for anyone who accesses the Internet.  Links about it are growing. Some examples are here, here and here.

In summary, it’s basically the Great Firewall of China but marketed slightly differently for the discerning Australian audience. Notice how Senator Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (yes that is his title), says; “I was wondering if I could get the questions without it being accused of being the Great Wall of China” but not actually providing to us all the differences between China and what’s planned here.

Of course when we’re thinking technically here, what they’re planning won’t work – we know that. It’s simple enough to use a proxy or, if you want to be really clever, tunnel through an encrypted connection to somewhere with more freedoms of the Internet like Iran or Afghanistan. If they think this is going to do anything to stop child pornography then they’re either stupid or misguided. [DD Note: what..you give them two options?]

A kid with a half hour’s free time could break their last filter so I doubt an ISP based firewall will take that too long. After all a simple google search gives you more than enough information; http://www.google.com/search?q=getting+past+content+filters (though they’ll probably block stuff like this. ). If they’re going to trumpet child porn as an issue, then this is supposed to stop adults. Who writes these business cases?

So, of course, even though this censorship filter does absolutely nothing to prevent child porn, anyone who is against the censorship filter must support child porn: http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/biztech/government-gags-web-censor-critics/2008/10/23/1224351430987.html. It’s an old political tactic – call your law (which just happens to give you more power) “the anti-baby-killing bill” then loudly cry that anyone who doesn’t support it must support killing babies. (Damn those anti-American Dixie Chicks for not supporting the just and right war against Iraq).

Implementing good security in systems involves thinking of how the system can be abused. Often laws can be abused in a multitude of ways. The politicians who are trying to get the laws passed say that the laws aren’t intended to be used that way. They might even be telling the truth but that doesn’t really matter. It is said in the same way that web developers don’t intend for users to insert SQL injections into fields and app developers don’t intend for people to insert more than 256 characters into a variable.

In this case, the firewall can be abused by banning all access to anti-government material (calling it incendiary or even terrorism), filtering out all material promoting the opposing party, filtering out legal material that individuals in the government find morally objectionable (for instance, if the individual is a creationist then filtering out all material on evolution), or simply covering up a company’s failure for the few minutes required to sell stocks.

Since the government is expecting false positives (3% could be acceptable according to our communications minister, though they haven’t actually sat down to decide how many false positives would be allowable), it’s probably not really going to be noticed if someone does any of this. I can think of many lucrative ways to use this filter, and other than ethics (after all, we know relying on people’s ethics, especially when they’re working in the government, is asking for trouble), what is stopping the people in charge from inserting what they want into the blacklist?

I think a link to this site is a good way to end this post: http://netalarmed.com/

[DD Note: Once you head down certain paths where freedoms are curtailed, it's rare that you ever go back. It generally only gets worse and more scarily as mentioned by straxd becomes something that those in power can abuse for their own purposes and gains].