Thread: Internet filtering

I have been following the debate about Internet filtering with some interest.

In brief; as we know, the Internet contains offensive material, such as child porn. The Government wishes to create a "clean feed" by filtering offensive material, thereby relieving everyone of the burden of doing it themselves, or accidentally stumbling across the same. The argument goes that nobody should be accessing such material, thus, why object to its blocking? We have censors for magazines and movies, why not the Internet? What's wrong with a nice clean feed devoid of the nastier porn and suchlike?

There is a counter argument based on two principles. Firstly, what's offensive and not offensive? And secondly it's a moot point because filtering doesn't work anyway. Unfortunately for those making the second point, that relies upon understanding of some technical details of the Internet. Without quite detailed explanation this comes off as something of a lassiez-faire libertine answer.

So to tackle the first point. What, exactly, is offensive material? Let's just look at porn (no, not literally, close that browser window). On one hand we have child porn. On the other, a model clad in a swimsuit. Somewhere between the two is where most people will draw the line. Nobody is going to agree where, so why should the Government decide it knows best? If you want filtering, you can set it up on your own system. Remember the Henson saga? Whether you thought his photo was porn or not, do you want that choice made for you? It wouldn't be so bad if the blacklist was open, or at least there were some descriptions around banned and non-banned content. But there aren't, and if something will be censored I'd like to know what rules are used to censor or non-censor.

Then what about non-porn? Let's take politics. On one extreme we have the Ku Klux Klan who are actively plotting murder of non-whites. On the other we have the Green party. Does the Government plan to censor political content? We don't know, the blacklist is secret. Even if it did nothing in the history of humankind suggests it would be successful, or stop communications.

What other content other than some porn, some political views might be censored? Bomb-making instructions. Which may, or may not have legitimate uses.

The second point -- that filters just don't work -- makes it all moot. Child porn doesn't exist on the web. It exists in peer-to-peer networks which filters cannot touch. The filters also won't touch email, NNTP, torrents or any of the other myriad protocols the Internet is made up of. Remember, the Internet is far, far more than websites.

Secondly, it is incredibly easy to circumvent filters for the web (or anything else), and if the Govt decided to implement one I give it ten minutes before it's common knowledge about how to step around it. This happens all the time in China, for example. A little example; does your workplace block access to websites? Simply use an anonymous proxy (Google it) and you're in. That's just one way to do it, and use of proxies is an easy way around some filters. Banning things, especially on something as nebulous as the Internet, just doesn't work.

Then you have filter design. Hands up if you've got a spam filter and never lost an important email to it, or had a false positive. Right, now tell me a web filter won't suffer the same problem, but magnified.

Volume is also a concern. Humans view movies and rate them. They also view magazines before sale, and both can be tied back to other humans who produce them for money.

Not so the web. Trying to trace who is behind a website can be very difficult, and the authorities don't have the resources to keep up. You wouldn't want to pay the taxes to have them do it. And all filters will be automated -- believe me the technology does not exist which can replicate a human's ability to comprehend a web page and rate it. As a little example, you've seen those Captchas -- little images that ask you to type in words -- those are to fool automated machines, and they do a pretty good job. A machine simply cannot reliably distinguish between a "good" or "bad" image whatever the criteria may be, so it has to rely on the website's address. And that's trivially easy to change every few minutes, quicker than blacklists can be updated.

So whilst I'd love to cleanse the Internet of child porn, that won't happen till the world is so cleansed. If you are concerned about the nasty stuff on the Net, educate yourself, your children, monitor them openly, install your own filter if you want, and to be honest if you don't go looking for it, you're unlikely to find it; nobody is forcing you into an X-rated shop, and if other people have different tastes to you, live and let live. There's an Internet question, but goverment-controlled filters aren't the answer.

Benjamin Franklin summed the internet filtering situation up when he said;
Quote:
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

More about Benjamin Franklin here