The case for mandatory internet filtering

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Awrrr
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#1771159 27-Apr-2017 11:31

Here is a negative aspect: Although it seems very hard to find up to date cost figures for the NZ filter, according to the Techliberty web site, in 2010 $150,000 was budgeted for the software (I guess you are on to a good thing there) plus $2,000 a month for the connection. This does not include added costs of employee time, hardware and other items. And all of it in spite of the admission by DIA that it probably doesn't actually achieve much. I wonder how many abused children could be fed and clothed for that $150,000+ ? Or how many extra police officers rooting out the sources of this evil?

Just in case you got lost in the details, here again are the positive and negative aspects you say you are interested in:

Positive

- creates a few jobs

- gives people a false sense of security

- makes people think something is actually being done about the problem

- wins votes

Negative

- doesn't work

- waste of money

- opens door to widespread government surveillance

- destroys personal privacy

- takes responsibility away from parents so they can shrug and think the State will take care of it, like so many other things

- easy to circumvent (even a child can do it)

- facilitates more child porn by shifting the focus to a fake issue

- acts as a child porn site finder

- encourages people to think more and better government intervention is an answer to anything, instead of encouraging them to find real answers

- more things than there is room to list

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alliao

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#1771184 27-Apr-2017 11:54

An ideal stepping stone to end net neutrality.

Let me know when you have figured out a system that can defend against corporate lobbying.

Technical details aside, adding valves to a pipework increases points of potential leakage rather than reducing it.

And internet connection my friend, is just a tube. Have issues with the content? Deal with the source.

Don't manage the messenger, not it's role, nor it's effective as many have already pointed out.

I suppose you can say China's pretty effective, but remember they were born with it from day 1.

Hammerer

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#1771237 27-Apr-2017 13:37

Rikkitic:

Just in case you got lost in the details, here again are the positive and negative aspects you say you are interested in:

You've effectively presented no positive aspects. Readers are more likely to give credit to your position if you make it an even-handed comparison.

If your case is so strong then why are you resorting to such biased comparisons? At the moment, while you may intend some irony or sarcasm, such a comparison just look churlish.

Rikkitic

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#1771246 27-Apr-2017 13:50

So tell me what positive aspects I have missed.

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JimmyH

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#1771471 27-Apr-2017 18:13

There aren't any.... unless you are the person who stands to make a few bucks by peddling a snake-oil faux solution, or a politician who hopes to be elected by promising the same.

jarledb

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#1771491 27-Apr-2017 19:19

All it would accomplish is making it harder for the Police to catch people that are dealing with things like child porn, because they would start using more secure ways of communicating.

Never mind the obvious problems associated with any kind of censorship.

Its not that long ago that the movie "Life of Brian" (Monty Python) was illegal in Norway because it was considered blasphemous. I don't trust any government to not make such silly mistakes in the future, and thats the path you are going down as soon as you start censoring..

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UHD

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#1771492 27-Apr-2017 19:27

shanehobson:

UHD:

You make an interesting case for internet filtering. As with most discussions the devil is in the details and your posts are very light in that regard; arguably necessarily so since you're trying to market a solution that might like to keep its capabilities unannounced. I'll try to keep my response light too.

My comments are deliberately light in detail with regard to filter capability because I was interested in a broader discussion about the positive and negative aspects of mandatory filtering. As soon as we start discussing technical characteristics of specific filter systems then it we deviate from the wider discussion.

What are the positive aspects you refer to when you think of mandatory filtering?

vyfster

67 posts

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#1771810 28-Apr-2017 12:18

shanehobson:

...

I'm expecting to debate this topic in a public forum later this year and want to hear from people with opposing points of view (advocates of a unfiltered internet) to see how well my argument stands up to public scrutiny.

...

When and where is this debate?

alienwithin

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#1771868 28-Apr-2017 13:19

Here is the most effective filter, having the kids computer in the lounge where the adults can see what they are doing.

Its cheap (costs $0) and its probably the most effective tool out there.

I have a friend who is now retired from the FBI who has always said the greatest day for pedophiles was the day parents started letting their kids have a live camera in their bedrooms. You are right, the best thing any parent can do is having their computer in the lounge, not letting the kids have one in their room.

web filtering will never work, there are always ways around the filtering if you think in anyway that web filtering works just look to the countries like China, Iran.

If you support web filtering because of child porn, how is that working out for you, seems there are still a lot of people in NZ caught downloading child porn.

All web filtering has done around the world is lead people to having to use more secure ways to find what they want to find, making it harder for the law enforcement to bust them. And even when they do find ways to exploit that as the FBI etc have done with Tor, it just leads to other avenues.

Rikkitic

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#1773873 1-May-2017 21:47

Family First wants to make you have a porn filter. Not for kiddieporn, or sex with animals porn, or rape porn, or anything like that, but for all porn. They held a survey and claim there is overwhelming support for this. Naturally our lapdog media are slavishly reporting it without criticism or question.

The survey questions seem reasonable enough on the surface, asking what people think about the effect of pornography on society and its accessibility by young people. However, the questions never define what pornography is, leaving that up to the respondents, and they make no distinction between erotica and violent porn. This alone makes the survey a joke. No respectable researcher would waste even a glance at such unprofessional formulations.

The ‘survey’ ends just as skewed, asking whether respondents think the government should require all ISPs to have filters, and whether they should be automatically activated unless the customer chooses an opt out option. No other possible answers are offered, thus steering respondents to the desired outcome, i.e., there should be filters, and they should be on by default.

This is a tactic that has been successfully used by other agenda-driven pressure groups. First, get general agreement that something should be done. Then offer a solution that seems fair. People who still want to see porn can, they just have to change a setting (in other words, they have to ask for it). In the meantime, all those happy innocent children never have to worry about accidental exposure again.

Except, of course, it doesn’t end there. Once the first battle has been won, the forces of repression will continue to chip away. This is how the anti-smoking lobby made its gains. They didn’t start out demanding that cigarettes be banned and taxed to extinction. That would have seen them driven into the ocean. Instead, at first they just asked for smoke-free areas in restaurants. That didn’t seem unreasonable. But then they wanted smoke-free restaurants, and then bans on smoking in pubs and offices, and now prohibitions on outdoor smoking. It starts small and spreads from there.

Of course smoking is bad for you. But according to Family First, so is porn, and as the anti-smoking crusade has made clear, the end justifies the means. Once they have their obligatory filter, they will start turning the screws on the slippery slope. Reasons will be found why this or that is harmful. That is how it works. Like the anti-smoking lobby, the anti-porn wowsers will never be satisfied until everything they disapprove of is prohibited. This is yet another reason why such a filter is such a bad idea. They are like bedbugs, or borers. Once they get into your life you can never get them out again.

Filters, or any other form of censoring, should be a family affair, done on an individual basis if it is done at all. Family First and others like them are constantly scratching at the door. Don’t let them in.

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Lias

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#1774067 2-May-2017 10:20

Rikkitic:

Family First and others like them are constantly scratching at the door. Don’t let them in.

Someone should really take them out the back of the farm and shoot them, like happens to any other rabid dog.

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Aredwood

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#1775244 3-May-2017 23:06

Rikkitic:

Family First wants to make you have a porn filter. Not for kiddieporn, or sex with animals porn, or rape porn, or anything like that, but for all porn. They held a survey and claim there is overwhelming support for this. Naturally our lapdog media are slavishly reporting it without criticism or question.

So much stupid in that herald article. How do they purpose to filter websites that use TLS (encryption that is the same as what your internet banking uses). How would it deal with innocent everyday words that are also slang works for X rated things. And what if a website gets hacked or a DNS cache poisoning attack means that a common domain now points to an X rated site.

I remember back in high school all of their computers ran Win98. Initially the school porn filter was a proxy server. And since the computers all had Internet Explorer on them, all you had to do was go Tools - Internet options - untick the "use proxy server" box. Bingo, instant access to any website available on the public internet. And a common trick was to load a porn site, then right click on a juicy image and select the "set as desktop background image" option. Then just shutdown the computer. The next person to start it would then get a big surprise.

After they installed a better porn filter, one of my classmates stuck a whole lot of X rated images on a free Geocities website he signed up for. He was careful to not put any keywords anywhere on the site that might trigger any filters. Result - filter bypassed. Then there was another classmate in English class who decided to bring his own "ahem" "reading material" inside a big book to class. Except there wasn't much to actually read as it was a Playboy magazine.

Now bypassing a filter is as simple as downloading a free VPN app.

Either way if material is available on the internet, people can and will bypass any filtering system to find it. So the first option should always be to stop production of banned material. And to remove banned material that already exists. Surely kid porn is illegal in almost all countries. So the existing rules should be better enforced. Rather than dreaming up new rules.

UHD

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#1776073 5-May-2017 09:47

I've always been intrigued by the child porn argument for internet filters myself. As has been established even common end to end encryption would likely break any filter trying to block specific content from NZ citizens unless you want to go full DPI for the entire country à la China and commit a large IT team to play whack a mole with the VPN providers that will bypass it.

URL block lists have always intrigued me more than content specific filters though, there isn't a dodgy web host on Earth that knowingly hosts child porn on the open web. Even the dodgiest host in Iran/Russia/Sweden/Japan/Pakistan/Romania does not allow content of that kind for fear of their entire upstream being null routed. The last time I heard of a web based child porn ring being busted was some years back involving both a dodgy host and the services running exclusively on the darknet/TOR (which a national URL filter would not block).

Far more frequent are groups busted using services like Skype, Facebook, IRC, FTP, etc... for transmission of this type of content. Any URL filter would have net zero effect on services like this for protecting our citizens from child pornography.

Additionally, I would argue that a single IT admin or even government official with some training would be able to destroy a URL block list with a telephone and e-mail account in a couple of days. Simply contact the hosting provider that is hosting child pornography on their servers and their upstream provider with evidence of the offending and it would disappear within hours in almost all cases. When it does not a simple release to the media of the upstream provider enabling child porn distribution via their network will have it killed right quickly. Shareholders hate losing money more than child porn in most cases.

I struggle to understand what else a URL block list contains that is:

1) currently available over the open web

2) cannot be removed from the web via the method described above

3) is not still easily accessible despite a URL filter

4) is also illegal in New Zealand such that the content needs to be blocked

I could imagine perhaps extremist Islamic websites/blogs could be candidates (though a lot of that is still available via services like Facebook etc...) and I think a block for things like that is quite tenuous when it comes to freedom of speech/religious freedom.

I could imagine detailed instructions for bomb/firearm/drug manufacture could be added to a URL block list but I have been able to Google and locate detailed instructions of that nature for a couple of decades now both with and without the URL filter so I argue the filter is woefully inadequate in that regard and given the nature of the content (simple text and diagrams in most cases) effectively impossible to filter.

Beyond child porn, extremist Islamic content, illegal bomb/firearm/drug manufacture what does a URL block list actually contain? If it is primarily child pornography then why have we not worked to have it taken down? If it is primarily extremist or illegal manufacturing content then why is it so inadequate at doing its job?

Rikkitic

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#1776126 5-May-2017 10:44

I don't know why the proponents of filters cling to them so grimly in the face of all evidence. I think it must be an emotional thing. It makes them feel like they are doing something, even if not much. It is also exploited for political purposes, which doesn't help. I suppose people driven by ignorance do ignorant things. What a pity the resources cannot be used for something that matters.

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MikeB4

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#1776130 5-May-2017 10:51

Rikkitic:

I don't know why the proponents of filters cling to them so grimly in the face of all evidence. I think it must be an emotional thing. It makes them feel like they are doing something, even if not much. It is also exploited for political purposes, which doesn't help. I suppose people driven by ignorance do ignorant things. What a pity the resources cannot be used for something that matters.

Why do assume that folks that may have a differing view to you are being ignorant?

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