Thread: Internet Censorship - again

Originally Posted by Dmmos

I came across this thread again recently - does Wikileaks work in Australia again? That was a sorry saga (when they claimed to possess the ACMA blacklist, and were then blacklisted themselves)...

Without the filter in place, the blacklist is ineffective unless you have a PC filter approved by the IIA and hence supplied with the blacklist. It does prevent them from being mirrored or linked to locally. Not sure where they are at present, they were in Sweden, but I seem to remember hearing they were planning to move to Iceland.

Wikileaks suffers from working on a shoestring, and whenever there is something on there that gets a lot of publicity their server falls over under the load. With this recent information (wardiary) this is likely to be the case. Just keep trying.

John

Originally Posted by JDNSW

Without the filter in place, the blacklist is ineffective unless you have a PC filter approved by the IIA and hence supplied with the blacklist. It does prevent them from being mirrored or linked to locally. Not sure where they are at present, they were in Sweden, but I seem to remember hearing they were planning to move to Iceland.

Wikileaks suffers from working on a shoestring, and whenever there is something on there that gets a lot of publicity their server falls over under the load. With this recent information (wardiary) this is likely to be the case. Just keep trying.

John

John - I was referring to early last year (when this was all throught the press);

Australia Censors Wikileaks Page | Threat Level | Wired.com

When people read about the blacklist they wanted to see it - myself included. Certainly not for the reasons we were alleged to want it (which do not need to be discussed). Wikileaks was blocked for weeks, and when it returned was around the time it voluntarily (globally I believed) took itself offline as part of a fundraising drive.

I'm in the US at the moment and the list is freely available here on Wikileaks - I was wondering if it was in Australia also.

The biggest issue for me so far has been the discussion regarding the inclusion of anti-abortion sites, which I would find very troubling.

Wikileaks has never been offline except as the result of insufficient funds or insufficient capacity for the number of queries, which amounts to the same thing. And if it is online, it can be reached by Australians just as easily as Americans, unless the user's PC has a filter on it that uses the blacklist.

However, it is worth noting that if a link to Wikileaks were to be placed on this forum, it would make Incisor's hosting company (if in Australia) liable to a fine of $11,000/day if someone lodged a complaint and it was upheld (which would be pretty much certain if it was a valid link).

This is one of the concerns with the proposed filter - it could quite easily , at least in theory, make large slabs of the web inaccessible by this linking making other pages blacklisted. Of course, in practice it would not be that bad, as with the process of blacklisting taking as long as eight months, and new URLs appearing at over a billion a day, it is impossible for a complaints based system to ever affect anything other than a vanishingly small proportion of the web.

The problem is, that since the list will be secret (it needs to be only because it will not work!) it is obvious that the only real use for the system is political censorship, or as the inception of a far reaching scheme to change the internet from its present status as a communications channel to a media service controlled by governments and corporations. Consider for example, that one of the problems with the filter legislation is that it appears to require changes to the Telecommunications Interception Act - and it is probably going to be difficult to word these in a way that will not raise widespread alarm, as was shown when recent changes were made to it to allow network engineers to intercept communications in the course of their work.

John

Originally Posted by JDNSW

...The problem is, that since the list will be secret (it needs to be only because it will not work!) it is obvious that the only real use for the system is political censorship, or as the inception of a far reaching scheme to change the internet from its present status as a communications channel to a media service controlled by governments and corporations...

John

I knew DiCaprio was on to something! Aaagh! By the way for those of you who haven't seen it yet, go and see Inception - it's definitely one of the best Hollywood 'blockbuster' films you'll ever see.

I was certain (from personal experience) that Wikileaks had public access barred, as is suggested in the linked article above, however I may have been mistaken.

Another major issue of the proposed filter (I'm unsure if it's been described here, especially as it is not popular with many people) is that according to the SMH (17 March 2009) of the 1370 sites on the list 506 of them are (R18+) & (X18+). This means that a large number of the sites are actually perfectly legal pornographic websites. I am certainly not making any assertion that I visit these sites, or those like them, however if true this would represent a significant over-reach of the government. It's obvious why nobody would defend this point too much, but I feel it's important.

Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11,000 a day - Technology - smh.com.au

I also have a quick question, primarily for you John - if the filter works as well as it's proponents claim it will, isn't a secret list then made redundant? Can it be argued that if the information (i.e. the website) is unable to be viewed by the public, the list should be viewed by the public? Although a URL is by no means even a reasonable indication of the content of a website, over half of the websites on the proposed blacklist are a little obviously-named. Furthermore, couldn't these sites then be viewed by a larger group of individuals than the ACMA in order to verify their content?

Also (please excuse my lack of IT understanding), what is the state of tracking software at the moment? I assume it's possible for an ISP or the government to merely track an individual's web presence, and determine easily enough whether they have engaged in (exceptionally) nefarious activity? Don't they just see who goes to these sites and investigate from there?

Dave

Dave

The Government under the UK & US Security Agreement (UK & USA Security Agreement - Wikipedia) have had the ability to intercept and "packet interrogate" transmissions for decades. Furthermore while in most of the five signatory countries to the agreement it would be illegal to intercept and monitor it's own citizen's transmissions without a court order. In practice he governments don't intercept it's own citizens communications, it has a partner country intercept the transmission and then pass the information back. In fact one of the monitoring sites straddles the US-Canadian border and the Canadian site routinely monitors US traffic while the US side monitors Canadian traffic.

You only have to look at the number of individuals who are being arrested and sucessfully prosecuted for child pornography and paedophilia offences to know that it's happening. And don't be misled into believing that it just happened because some police officer happened upon the information by random luck in a chat room, it happens firstly by signals intelligence identifying an individual computer and then targetted investigation. Usually by a foreign Police investigator so that no local "wire tapping" laws are broken.

It's 1984 26 years late!

"Don't tell anyone that I said that or I'd have to kill you!" (as the saying goes)

Originally Posted by Dmmos

.........
I was certain (from personal experience) that Wikileaks had public access barred, as is suggested in the linked article above, however I may have been mistaken.

No, as I explained, while it was added to the blacklist, this had no direct effect for most users, but does stop any Australian site from linking to it. But they have suffered from too many trying to access them a lot of the time!

......... This means that a large number of the sites are actually perfectly legal pornographic websites. I am certainly not making any assertion that I visit these sites, or those like them, however if true this would represent a significant over-reach of the government. It's obvious why nobody would defend this point too much, but I feel it's important.

According to informants who claim to have systematically gone through the leaked list, none of the URLs listed would probably have been illegal. A number of them are dead URLs, heaven knows what was originally on them. It is worth noting two points - IWF say that the average life of CP pages is less than 50 days, and a German group, using a leaked copy of the IWF list found that the majority of the pages were removed (not blocked!) within 24 hours by simply emailing the hosting company.
...........
Can it be argued that if the information (i.e. the website) is unable to be viewed by the public, the list should be viewed by the public?

This is precisely what I, and many others, said in submissions to the government on transparency measures for the filter. There is, in fact no reason at all why the list should not be made public if, in fact, the filter worked. The fact that this is not even considered by the government is a clear indication that they know it will not work (and possibly that they know that at least some of the decisions will raise controversy, such as when they blacklisted a dentist and photographs that were already classified PG.)

Although a URL is by no means even a reasonable indication of the content of a website, over half of the websites on the proposed blacklist are a little obviously-named.

Most of these names are probably deliberately misleading links to legal pornography.

Furthermore, couldn't these sites then be viewed by a larger group of individuals than the ACMA in order to verify their content?

Something like this is what the government is proposing, although what they want is a retired judge or similar.

Also (please excuse my lack of IT understanding), what is the state of tracking software at the moment? I assume it's possible for an ISP or the government to merely track an individual's web presence, and determine easily enough whether they have engaged in (exceptionally) nefarious activity? Don't they just see who goes to these sites and investigate from there?

This is barely possible subject to some limitations - for example, most users do not have a static IP address (there aren't enough) and records of who is using what address at any time are not routinely kept for very long. And certainly this cannot be done legally without a court order.

Dave

There are a couple of points to bear in mind. Firstly, there is almost no material on the open web at any one time which are actually illegal in most countries. The range of illegal material in Australia is significantly larger because of the wider definition of child pornography here.

Even with this in mind the current Australian blacklist is claimed by ACMA to contain 355 URLs of CP. In the perspective of a web containing close to two trillion URLs, increasing at over a billion a day, this means that what would be blocked by the filter is vanishingly small - the filter is claimed to be to reduce the chances of accidentally encountering them, but with the chance of doing so being around once in ten thousand years without the filter, it does seem to be a bit of overkill.

John

Originally Posted by Lotz-A-Landies

Dave

The Government under the UK & US Security Agreement (UKUSA Agreement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) have had the ability to intercept and "packet interrogate" transmissions for decades. Furthermore while in most of the 5 signatory companies to the agreement it would be illegal to intercept and monitor it's citizens without a court order, in practice the governments don't intercept it's own citizens communications it has a partner country intercept the transmission and then pass the information back. In fact one of the monitoring sites straddles the US-Canadian border and the Canadian site routinely monitors US traffic while the US side monitors Canadian traffic.

You only have to look at the number of individuals who are being arrested and sucessfully prosecuted for child pornography and paedophilia offences to know that it's happening. And don't be misled into believing that it just happened because some police officer happened upon the information by random luck in a chat room, it happens firstly by signals intelligence identifying an individual computer and then targetted investigation. Usually by a foreign Police investigator so that no local "wire tapping" laws are broken.

It's 1984 26 years late!

"Don't tell anyone that I said that or I'd have to kill you!" (as the saying goes)

I would be very surprised if many such prosecutions for "paedophilia" were the result of signals intelligence. The military intelligence services are not about to risk revealing their operations by letting them be used for mere criminal cases, certainly not ones as insignificant as "moral panics".

Apparently quite a few recently come not from signals intelligence but from providing p2p seed boxes with known CP images - and tracking what IPs download them, but most result from long term and deliberate infiltration operations by police, mostly in international operations. These generally do use court orders to help in the tracking. In addition, probably most commonly, someone in an image sharing group shows something to somone who informs police - who then seize the computer, which often leads them to a number of other suspects, as these images are most commonly exchanged by email or some form of P2P, and the computer often has a list of contacts. And you get one of these and it may lead to dozens more before the trail peters out.

But the bottom line is that anyone who assumes that anything they do on line is untraceable is just as much in error as anyone who assumes that their phones are not tapped and their private conversations unrecorded. Might be illegal, but it can and does happen, and even if it cannot be used in evidence against you, it can be used to target further investigations!

John

Joe Hockey officially announced that the coalition is against Labor's planned filter.
See
Coalition to dump flawed internet filter

This means that with the Greens and Xenephon opposed, and a likely increased green representation in the Senate from the middle of next year, the legislation cannot pass.

It also gives a conundrum for the ALP. If they continue to support the plan, the opposition will use it to campaign against them - and Labor's action in deferring it till after the election shows that they know it is bad news if it gets publicity. But changing policy in response to what the opposition announces is never a good idea - and besides, nobody would believe them.

John