Censorship in New Zealand: Wide-spread public brain-wash

A lot has been written about the coming age of Internet censorship in New Zealand. What I find disturbing in this debate is that many in the public are agreeing that 'something should be done' against child-porn and focus on the budget or the technical details of the implementation, and thus completely miss the bigger picture.

I responded to an article in The Standard. I have replicated, slightly edited and extended that comment here.

We have to remember that any possibility to filter web-pages and the Internet in general - no matter what the initial good intention may have been - opens the door to abuse and further spreading of censorship.

Remember, this debate should not at all be about whether child-porn is good or bad. A similar debate, similarly distracted, currently takes place in other countries as well and it all boils down to the same:

• You can't just stumble across child-porn on the Internet. As has been mentioned many times already, these sites are traded by word of mouth and are mostly closed and password protected. Therefore, blocking access to these sites does not do anything to prevent normal people or even children from seeing child-porn, since they wouldn't see it anyway. In 15 years of heavy Internet use, which has led me to many dark corners of this network, I have not once stumbled across child-porn. Not once!
• It is still quite easy to overcome even this kind of filtering attempt. Thus, those who really want child-porn can still get it with very little effort. That's what transparent proxies are for. Therefore, this kind of filtering does not work in really preventing access to these sites for those intent on really seeing it.
• If the DIA or whoever is in power really would want to stop the child-porn that's out on the Internet they would only have to do one very simple thing: Call the hoster on which these images are stored and ask them to shut down the account. Believe it or not, but that works remarkably well: Child-porn is illegal in almost all countries. The hosting companies (no matter in which country) often have no idea what someone has stored in an account on one of their servers. Therefore, if they find out about it, they don't want to have anything to do with it and will very quickly respond by shutting it down. This was tested with some of those leaked child-porn lists in other countries that use child-porn as a reason to start filtering. But instead of very effectively removing this account from the Internet with a simple phone call or email, the government instead prefers to put a filtering infrastructure in place. They know where the sites are, but chose to do nothing...

Now consider all of this: It doesn't really stop child-porn, and a much more simple low-tech approach to getting rid of it is available, but not used. Why is this?

Because child-porn is used (here and in other countries) just as a flimsy alibi to install a ubiquitous government controlled censorship infrastructure. Think about the children! That is the killer-argument with which these attempts are justified and the public is pacified. As a commenter on Slashdot very succinctly said when they discussed the development in New Zealand: "Where would your government be without childporn? If it didn't exist, the government would surely invent it."

As long as we are keeping ourselves pre-occupied by talking about the technical merits of the system, or waste our time by discussing minutiae in the definition of the word 'filter', or talk about how in principle we should agree to this since nobody likes child-porn, or talk about the budget for this. we are just distracting ourselves from the real issue and are playing into the hands of those who want to make censorship widely accepted.

Once the technical possibility is there, the calls to use it for other purposes will start. There will be lobbying by all sorts of groups (some openly, some secretly) to block more and more content. Remember the list is secret, so you never know what is going to be blocked. Already happens in other countries, so why should it be different here? How about 'killer games'? Let's block that as well. How about 'sites critical to the filtering effort'? Let's block that, too. How about (insert controversial subject you care about here)? Let's block that as well.

Fight the beginnings, is all I can say. By focusing on what the majority finds to be repulsive a government can get the majority to go along with any scheme, no matter how many of our freedoms are taken away in the process. That's how it always starts. Let's learn from history. People don't really change and history always repeats itself. Let's not walk into this asleep and with eyes wide shut.

But isn't this type of material alrady censored in other media already? Sure it is! Any kind of censorship is to be examined very, very critically. The problem with the Internet is that censorship here affects one of the most revolutionary communication media in the world, where for the first time ever, an ordinary person can publish their opinion to the world with little effort. This was never there before. This is widely out of control of any government, as it should be. And when the masses are not under the government's control in the way they can communicate and share ideas and opinions then governments feel very uncomfortable. They can't have that.

As a little additional crimp in the story, consider that the suggested technology doesn't always have to block your access. It can be used to switch on transparent monitoring of any accesses to specific addresses or web-sites (by letting the DIA server work as a transparent proxy), and even for the modification of the content that is returned to the user, without the user ever knowing what happend! I should know, since I have worked on transparent and content-modifying proxies in the past.

Remember:

• This is not about the budget.
• This not about the technical issues behind the implementation.
• This is not about whether child-porn is good or bad

Instead, it is about control over what we can see and say on the Internet, it is about the establishment of a wide-spread and arbitrarily usable censorship infrastructure, which once in place, can be used for anything that those who control it see fit.

Do you want that?


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