&ot Journeys' End

Journeys' End

We walk many paths, many roads
Till death halts our steps.
Every day a new adventure,
A new journey of self discovery.

20080101

YAITM - Yet Another Incompetent Telecommunications Minister

It seems a competent telecommunications minister is hard to come by in Australia. Our new telecommunications minister, Senator Conroy,recently demonstrated that he does not understand a) the Internet; b) freedom of speech; c) the concept of the slippery slope.

Firstly, Senator Conroy’s lack of understanding of the Internet:

Senator Conroy says it will be mandatory for all internet service providers to provide clean feeds, or ISP filtering, to houses and schools that are free of pornography and inappropriate material. - ABC news, 31/12/2007

I would like Senator Conroy to explain how exactly ISPs are going do the above for sites which feature mixed content, such as many forums and discussion boards, youtube, and many other sites where content is primarily generated by users. If a discussion board is white-listed, what happens when inappropriate content is posted by a rouge party? There is no technically feasible way to block content on a per-page basis because of encryption and the difficulty automatically classifying content. For example, how can software tell the difference human anatomy and pornography? Further, the Internet is not just websites. There are non-http traffic such as IRC, bittorrent, newsnet, p2p, MSN, jabber, etc. How are ISPs expected to policy those?

Secondly, freedom of speech, a concept which the Senator does not appear to comprehend:

"If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree." - Senator Conroy

Here Senator Conroy equates freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then declares that since child pornography is evil, freedom of speech must also evil. This technique is called a Strawman Argument. It is at best a misleading way of arguing a point. Freedom of speech in no way justifies nor sanctions the creation or distribution of child pornography. Freedom of speech is not a free ticket to anarchy. I would have imagined a Senator would know this. In addition, Internet filtering you can opt-out of can not combat child pornography. Those who are going to look at child pornography are either going to a) subvert the system; or b) opt-out of it. Despite the fact Senator Conroy is using child pornography as a justification for censoring the Internet, it will do nothing whatsoever to curtail child pornography.

Finally we come to the slippery slope which Senator Conroy is happy to slide down:

"Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road," - Senator Conroy

If Labor is making no apologies for going down the Chinese road with regards to Internet filtering, what else is Labor not going to make apologies for? Will Labor also make no apologies to those who argue that governments which do not listen to their civil liberty groups’ concerns is heading down the despot road?

The Senator is, despite his failings, a politician. He is not without his tricks. He seeks to placate those of us concerned with our civil liberties both now and in the future by allowing us to opt-out. Except opting-out means our names end up on a list somewhere, a list some people will interpret as a list of naughty-people who look at naughty-things. Further, it creates a state of affairs where the average citizen only has access to parts of the Internet allowed by the Government. In North Korea a similar state of affairs exists, bought on by decades of suppressing free press and communication. It has led to the citizen of North Korea to regard their oppressed and dreary lives in a third world country the height of human civilisation, a paradise on Earth. Are citizens of Australia so trusting of the government that we will accepted censorship without seeing what is being censored first?

All in all, Senator Conroy is Yet Another Incompetent Telecommunications Minister. I wish that just for once the Telecommunications Minister has a degree in engineering. Then perhaps he or she will understand the futility of attempting to censor the Internet.


Cheers,
Steve

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posted by steve @ 1:32 AM  

20071224

Fitting A Round Peg Into A Square Hole

The Australian Government is busy fitting an outdated concept into the modern world - they want to censor the Internet the same way TV and movies are censored. The Communications Legislation Amendment (Content Service) Act 2007 (Content Service Act) was passed on 20th of July 2007. This Act inserts a new schedule for regulating all content services delivered via carriage services. This includes:

  1. Prohibiting access to X18+ and RC content;
  2. Prohibiting access to R18+ content, unless access is restricted;
  3. Prohibiting access to MA15+ content, unless access is restricted;
  4. Providers of hosting services, live content services, link services and commercial content services to have in place access restrictions if providing R18+ and commercial MA15+ content;
  5. ‘take down’, ‘service cessation’ and ‘link deletion’ notices to remove content or access to content that is the subject of a complaint; and
  6. A co-regulatory approach that provides for the development of industry codes to address issues including the classification of content, procedures for handling complaints about content and increasing awareness of potential safety issues associated with the use of content services.

I would like to draw attention to point 4, which suffers a severe departure from reality and shows that the legislators behind this Act is out of touch with the modern world.

Firstly, in order for Internet Service Providers (ISP) to determine of R18+ or MA15+ content is being accessed via their network, they would need to monitor in real time the activities of its customers, which is a severe violation of customer privacy.

Secondly, ISPs would need a system which can classify terabytes of information, in a hundred different formats and languages in real time. There are two major problems:

  1. To create such a system would require breakthroughs in image processing, computer linguistics, voice recognition, expert systems, communication and many other fields. It is not to say it can’t be done - it certainly can be done, but at great expense and almost certainly not in the immediate future.
  2. Such a system would be rendered impotent by encryption.

Encryption is Achilles’ heel of this and similar legislations. Encryption allows two parties to securely exchange information i.e. between a website and a web browser. Against encryption even the most sophisticated monitoring systems will fail because they can not access the information being exchanged. There is no way for an ISP to know if the encrypted information they are carrying is R18+ or G rated.

Sure one can block communication based on its point of origin, but there is at the last count more than 108 million websites. The cost of setting up a new website in terms of cost and time is minimal - web hosting and domain name registration costs less than 10usd per month, in others words peanuts. I sincerely hope the futility of doing this is evident. Further the origin of information is no guarantee as to its content. Such a blacklist will inevitably render many innocent websites inaccessible.

Before any one points to the Great Firewall of China as a triumphant example of Internet censorship done right, please consider for a moment the kind of country China is. There is a reason China is one of the two lowest ranking countries in Privacy International’s 2006 International Privacy Ranking, and amongst the Top 20 offenders in The Observer’s Human Right Index 2000.

The Australian Government needs realise that the Internet is a vastly differently beast compared to traditional media. It is the preverbal square hole to the round peg of censorship. Traditional media can be censored relatively easily because its distribution is bounded by location - that is to say the points of distribution, i.e. cinemas, stores, and radio towers, are all on Australian soil and operated by Australian companies. This makes it easy to enforce Australian law and to censor material. New media on the other hand is delivered over the Internet, and has no such limitations. Anyone, either an individual or an organisation, can distribute any material they wish to anyone in the world over the Internet encrypted if needed. In short, Australian law can not be applied to distributors of new media outside Australia, and there is no way determine the nature of encrypted content in order to censor it.

There are of course more problems with this new legislation. One is the requirement to restrict access to contents based on a person’s age. The Government seem not to have learnt from its failure to enforce such restrictions on traditional media. How exactly they hope to achieve it with new media has not been made public - they have only made it known they want it to be so. Perhaps they will require you to present 100 points of ID to a Government representative to purchase a Government approved computer with which to access the Internet, then get council approval of your new “Internet Room” which is shielded from electromagnetic and audio eavesdropping, locked to your fingerprint and retina. It is to protect the children you see.

All in all, the new legislation and the Australian Communication and Media Authority’s new rules are a nothing more than unrealistic wish lists. Wishing for something however doesn’t make it true.

Am I worried about the Government’s attempt at censoring the Internet? No at all. I am quietly confident that it will fail. I am worried what this will cost the Australian people, and whether its inevitable failure will be used as justification to pass more draconian laws all in the name of “protecting the children”.


Cheers,
Steve

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posted by steve @ 10:27 PM  

20070515

What is privacy for?

the purpose of privacy is to protect ourselves from the erratic rationality of our fellow humans' moral judgment (as well as the wholesale absence of rationality behind some of our laws). We've still got evolutionary wiring left over that causes us to feel physical pain when others disapprove, and so privacy is a rational demand.

Slashdot is on fire today!


Cheers,
Steve

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posted by steve @ 1:47 AM