I am here continuing to assume that mandatory blocking is restricted to RC material.

Alas, no. The current version of Conroy’s plan [checks desk calendar] is that the filtering will be “the ACMA blacklist”. As Ireme Graham explains, the blacklist isn’t just RC material, but also material which is rated PG or above which doesn’t have an age verification mechanism, or material which an unnamed ACMA officer thinks “would be” prohibited.

Offline material is classified by the Classification Board, an independent statutory body comprising publicly named members. Titles of banned and classified material are publicly available in the Board’s online database. Classification Board decisions can be appealed to the Classification Review Board which from time to time overturns decisions to ban material.

In contrast, decisions to add content hosted outside Australia to ACMA’s blacklist are made by unnamed government agency (ACMA) staff, such decisions cannot be appealed or otherwise reviewed, and all information about material on ACMA’s blacklist is secret. Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation was changed in 2003 to exempt all such information from disclosure under FOI. (The same FOI amendments also exempted from disclosure any information about Australian-hosted online content classified ‘prohibited’ by the Classification Board).

This secrecy is, in my opinion, a serious cause for concern. As is the lack of appeals process.

No. It does not. Using BGP is only the first step. The ISP has a relationship with a filter provider. The filter provider identifies for the ISP the IP addresses associated with the URLs that exist on the blacklist. The ISP then sets the routing tables in its border routers to route traffic to these IP addresses to the filter provider.

The filter provider then undertakes the further analysis of wether the specific URL requested is a blacklisted URL. The filtering solution itself stays index-based and is not a dynamic filter. The point of using the BGP is that traffic that is not to one of the IP addresses listed is not slowed at all. The benefit for the ISP is that they never have to see the blacklist. In addition the nett cost can be low as each ISP does not need to own the filtering solution, indeed it can be even lower if it is implemented by the transit provider rather than the domestic provider.

None of this alone makes blacklist management any easier. But knowing the blacklist can be effectively blocked means that it can be more actively managed – including doing things like advising domains for which the specific content would fall outside of their hosting rules of the content.

I am here continuing to assume that mandatory blocking is restricted to RC material.

I will defend the policy of asking ISPs to undertake technical trialls though. I will defend the idea of mandatory index-based filtering of web sites based on a “blacklist” of RC sites only subject to said tests and subject to the implementation of an effective and transparent review process for claims of incorrect listing. I would defend the policy of the Government encouraging ISPs to provide network based filtering solutions as a commercial service.

But I will continue to oppose people who scare monger about the technical implications or missrepresent the existing classification process as a freedom of speech debate.

Kiss Kiss

Last I saw Conroy didn’t label the whole industry child molesters, he only labelled those opposing him such.

So that’s OK then? Defend a policy by slandering your opponents rather than tackle their clearly-stated concerns?

As for the Humpty Dumpty reference, well, as it happens words like “harmful” and “inappropriate” currently have no clear legal meaning. Since this is government policy, the justification for spending $44.5 million of taxpayer’s money, a little clarity wouldn’t go astray. But every time someone asks for the words to be defined, Conroy (and you) resort to debating tricks to avoid the question. Who, exactly, is playing the Humpty Dumpty game?

I give up. If you can’t get that material being accessed over the Internet is “dissemination” then I give up. After all your customers pay you to carry all those little encoded binary signals that make the pisture or the words onto the end user’s computer.

Do you think surfing the web is somekind of teleporting machine? The content is distributed to the end user. The classification scheme applies. Get used to it.

PS Last I saw Conroy didn’t label the whole industry child molesters, he only labelled those opposing him such.

PPS This discussion didn’t start on this site. I blogged about Stil’s Crikey post behing the paywall, and he replied here.

But in rough order:

You stated that the ALP “Plan for Cyber Safety” said “… Labor will provide a mandatory `clean feed’ internet service for all homes, schools and public computers. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will filter out content that is defined as prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority,” and you’ve suggested that that makes it clear that what’s being proposed right now is the same as the election policy.

There are a number of ways that those aims could be fulfilled — The GOVERNMENT could provide a clean feed available for subscription by interested parties, for instance, and there’s no requirement for ALL ISPs to censor to meet the strict language of the section you’ve quoted.

Senator Conroy appears to have been open to that possibility in December 2007, over a month after the election, when he proposed that “anyone wanting uncensored access to the internet will have to opt out of the service.” http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/12/31/2129471.htm So it’s clear that a month after the election it was still going to be optional, and that filtering would be a “service”, and it wasn’t until July after the failed ACMA/Enex trials in Tasmania that the whole thing became compulsory.

So it’s a bit rich to argue that there’s some kind of election mandate at play here. When I compare the Government’s 2007 rhetoric to their 2008 rhetoric (there isn’t anything from 2009 yet, it appears they’re too embarrassed!) I reckon they’re breaking an election promise to make it optional.

You say I want “to restate the objectives so that the project fails.” Well gee, excuse me for being realistic. And need I remind you that YOU are the person who came up with this “standard browser” nonsense, and the Government has said no such thing. Who, exactly, is restating the objectives here?

Conroy working with the industry: I’m trying to work out whether you’re trying to rebut me or agree with me. Is the bar for our public discourse so low that merely “trying a lot more than other Ministers” is sufficient? And is labeling an entire industry segment as supporters of child molesters really what you’d call “trying” anyway?

On the existing classification scheme: Here you’re going right off the deep end. You downplay the distinction between “reading/viewing” and “selling”, and claim that a ban on the latter is an effective ban on the former. Sadly for your case, we have about 20 years worth of regulatory history which draws completely the opposite conclusion. The ALP-initiated “Film and Literature Censorship Procedure” published by the Australian Law Reform Commission 1991 even drew attention to the dichotomy and considered whether it should be an offense against the Commonwealth to possess material that is illegal to trade, and they specifically rejected the idea on the basis that Australians are grown-up enough to be able to read and view whatever they please.
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/alrc/publications/reports/55/ch5.html#Heading2 under the section “Should RC films and publications be prohibited?”, we see the important statement that, “Classification is done for the purpose of controlling dissemination. It is not done for the purpose of controlling what a person is able to have in his or her own home.”

So you can downplay the separation between distribution and possession/reading/viewing as much as you like, but the fact remains that we have an existing, mature regulatory structure here which applies every bit as much to the internet as it applies to anything else which, after much detailed consideration and public submission, specifically recognizes that adults can have access to that material.

So what, exactly, are you arguing for? Overturning of that time-honoured concept, the idea that Australians are mature enough to make their own reading decisions? Because that’d be a profound alteration of the relationship between the individual and the State, and I’d expect that it’d be accompanied by a bit more level-headed discussion than the ALP is prepared to entertain about this policy.

Firstly we could play an endless version of the Humpty Dumpty trick of debating what words mean (and resort a la said HD to claim they mean what I want them to mean … or to not mean what I want them not to mean.)

I have no intention of answering whether my name is a pseudonym or not. I didn’t see anyone on the Digital Economy blog asking whether other people’s names are theirs or someone else’s. I just found the presumption that a name was a pseudonym as equally offensive as you did when Rod Bruem had a go at you. And that was even with a Tom Riddle – and we all know who he was!

I only revealed the detail that I worked for an ISP to dispell the myth that I was a staffer, and to demonstrate that not everyone who disagrees with you is removed from reality and/or the industry.

Another nice ad hominem trick: “I guess that happens if you take policy discussion seriously” is a back-handed way of claiming others are not taking it seriously. I’d suggest there’s plenty of people taking it seriously — they just don’t agree with you.

Thank you for quoting the pre-election ALP policy in your blog post:

That is why Labor will provide a mandatory ‘clean feed’ internet service for all homes, schools and public computers that are used by Australian children. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will filter out content that is identified as prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). The ACMA ‘blacklist’ will be made more comprehensive to ensure that children are protected from harmful and inappropriate online material.

It gives me the change to repeat, again, that “harmful” and “inappropriate” have no defined meaning. This is one of the key reasons that many people oppose the policy — including ultra-conservative Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi.

Which ISP did you say you worked for again?

I think it’s time for you to properly declare your interest in this debate. After all, almost everyone else commenting on this post has identified themselves, either directly or through online handles clearly linked to their identities.

Responses here.

But on the personal stuff. “Pravda” means truth in Russian. Yes it was the name of a Communist newspaper, but “Truth” was the name of an Australian newspaper (of some infamy) run by John and Ezra Norton. I hope you aren’t offending some people because there are a few Pravda’s in Australian telephone books. And “Verity” as a first name does mean “truthful”. If that was your name wouldn’t you wonder “what is truth”?

As to being noticed on the DBCDE website on the DE blog, I guess that happens if you take policy discussion seriously. But it doesn’t mean the Minister noticed – I doubt the Minister has looked at that blog – that’s what he has a Department for.

She cuts through the spin and rhetoric, digs through the documentation and explains what’s really going on, both what’s already in place and what’s being proposed — and how that proposal has been morphed, changed and indeed warped since the discussion started.

Of particular interest:

1. Australia’s Internet Censorship System, explaining what is in place now.
2. AU Gov’t Mandatory ISP Filtering / Censorship Plan, explaining the plan itself and its evolution.
3. ISP ‘Voluntary’ / Mandatory Filtering, comparing both of these with what’s in place in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Switzerland, UK, Italy Canada and New Zealand — i.e. all th countries Senator Conroy keeps claiming are already doing this. They’re not.

It’s all must-read stuff.

What you mischaracterize as “an extreme libertarian view of the internet” is what I prefer to view as “the status quo.” I don’t need to invest too much time in considering the long run implications of what I advocate, because we’ve already been doing it for decades and I merely need to examine the empirical results.

Due to the internet in its current form our society is immeasurably better off as measured by virtually any metric you can dream up. We are now more connected to each other, we are more informed, we have new ways of doing business, we are wealthier, we have new ways of conducting ourselves politically, we have more social outlets. The AFP even says the internet even makes us better at catching criminals, imagine that! On every issue governments are supposed to care about, the internet in its present form has made us better than we were before its arrival.

So society hasn’t fallen apart due to the status quo, and virtually everything is better than it was before, so I reckon the status quo has done a pretty good job. You could argue to tweak it to fix some of the infinitesimal areas where it has failed, but I posit that the tweaks will introduce their own unintended consequences too and, on balance, we’ll be no better off than we were before. Furthermore I’d want to resist tweaks authored by people who completely misunderstand anything and everything about the internet, and observe that pretty much every time control-freak politicians get involved in the internet we end up with a colossal clusterfuck because they just don’t get it.

Your damning of “the industry of which I am a part” (are you trying to personalize this?) completely misunderstands the role that the internet industry plays in the internet. ISPs don’t, as a rule, create or publish content. End-users do that. ISPs don’t build botnets or phishing sites, end users do that (and nobody does more than ISPs when it comes to locating and destroying them — do you actually know anything about the subject?) ISPs don’t distribute refused classification material, nor do they carry out copyright “theft” (another loaded term if ever I saw one — are you familiar with Section 116AH of the Copyright Act, by the way, or Order 15A discovery?). They do, however, routinely work diligently with the AFP to investigate them when they happen. how else do you think the AFP finds all those bloody pedophiles they keep catching?

As for your disagreements with my arguments:

1. You claim that there’s a problem on the internet that needs solving because the ACMA has a list of “prohibited content” (not, as you would mischaracterize it, “refused classification” content — hardly any of the list has even been vetted by the classification board, so we’re really just trusting a public servant about the whole damn thing). I suggest that it’s equally likely that the ACMA has a list because the definition of “prohibited content” is broken. Why don’t you have a read of Schedule 7 of the Broadcasting Services Act and see if you can figure it out?

2. The government did not get elected with this as an election commitment. On December 29, over a month after the election, Conroy was still being quoted by the ABC as saying that Australians who didn’t want a filtered feed wouldn’t have to have one. Then in July, after the ACMA/Enex trial, he completely changed his mind. The voting public did not ask the Government to do what they’re pushing now — even if they had time to consider it in the five days between the publication of the policy and the election, they’d have been asking the Government to do something else.

3. If “stopping people navigating to URLs containing bad stuff using a standard browser” is the objective, I promise you it will not work as soon as someone posts an open proxy’s IP address to their facebook page, or when someone uses an online translation service to translate a prohibited page “From English to English”, or when I or anyone else like me gets circumvention features committed to the firefox “standard browser” source tree, or when you socialize end users into seeing the benefits of moving their mouse pointers up to the top right of their screen, pulling down their network menu and selecting “Connect VPN (L2TP)”. That’s a reprehensibly stupid argument, Verity, and it speaks very poorly of your understanding of this issue. Do you really think that everything and everyone on the internet is static, and won’t evolve to grow countermeasures?

4. Perhaps you know more than me about what’s being proposed. If so, spill the beans. At the moment I can only go on what Conroy has said, and what the government has said in their form letters, which is that he wants ISPs to mandatorily implement an ACMA Prohibited Content blacklist of up to 10,000 URLs, and he wants ISPs to implement additional opt-out adaptive content filtering. As for whether or not there are “relatively easy BGP implimentations (sic)” that will make any difference at all, I’m not even going to attempt to address that until you prove to me that you know enough about BGP to be able to spell it, and until you read about the government’s view of a false positive as specified in the Technical Testing Framework document accompanying the hilariously delayed “(almost, but not quite) live trials”.

5. The Minister is working so closely with industry that he tried to shove the negative IIA report down the memory hole, he’s completely ignored SAGE-AU, and he’s accused ISPs who speak out of wanting to assist child molesters. Yup, pull the other one, it plays fart jokes. As for whether or not the data gathered to date is associated with what’s proposed, perhaps I’ll believe you when the Minister stops referring to it as useful information when he’s talking about it under oath in the Senate, ok?

6. The blacklist distributed to PC level filters has leaked. Cyberpatrol’s list has been cracked and decrypted on multiple occasions since 2000, and the ACMA list has been embedded within. The Minister can’t magick his way out of this one, and nor can you: Do you seriously believe that when this list is distributed to hundreds of ISPs who hate this idea, and is placed into the hands of thousands of staff who hate this idea to control millions of end-users who hate this idea, that it won’t leak? As for solutions that don’t require ISPs to see the list, that’s completely false: the Minister is on the record saying that his department won’t be imposing any particular technology on ISPs, and each one will be free to work out the best way of implementing the ACMA blackiist. Unless he was lying, that requires a copy of the list to be sent to each ISP so that it can be incorporated in each ISPs custom-developed blacklisting solution.

7. Merely a statement of fact, which you ignored in your answer to 6 when you seemed to suggest that a lack of leakage from PC level filters implied that the list could never leak, ever.

As for your final question: The existing content classification system already applies to the internet. All of it. Including the bits that say you get a judge and jury for offenses, including the bits that say RC material is legal for adults to view, including the bits that say that principle 1 underlying the national classification system is that adults should be free to read and view whatever they please.

Verity, it’s like you’re living in some kind of parallel universe where the internet is an expression of extremist libertarianism, where no rules apply, and where it creates all kinds of problems. I don’t see that in my universe; I see an internet that’s part of an existing legal system with checks, balances, due process, and three decades of well-documented inarguable success.

Maybe you can bring mandatory government-controlled ISP censorship into your universe and it’ll work for you. Good luck with that. I think I’ll stay in my universe though, and advocate for the continuation of the status quo that’s been so monumentally successful that it’s given you this vast, complex communications platform you can use to argue with me.

It’s just that hearing someone say we can filter porn using BGP is like hearing someone suggest cracking a macadamia nut with a jackhammer. It’s such a wrong idea that I can’t help but be intrigued about how anyone could come up with such a profoundly wrong idea (unless, maybe, they have no idea what a jackhammer is, but just heard someone on TV say that jackhammers are good at cracking things…)

Moreover, as James Polley correctly points out, there are plenty of other things on the list other than RC material. To focus constantly on the RC material is to parrot Senator Conroy’s misleading talking point.

@James Polley: I wouldn’t bother going down the red-herring path of asking how you block websites using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

(For readers who happen not to be network engineers, BGP is how routers tell each other about changes to the Internet’s structure. A BGP “announcement” is a bit like letterboxing everyone to tell them Smith Street is closed for roadworks, please take Jones Street instead. The main “backbone” link of the Internet carry a constant chatter of BGP as the routing is changed to even out traffic flows and bypass faults.)

Early versions of China’s Great Firewall, as well as simplistic filtering systems, would block sites by IP address. One way of doing that is to add an entry to the routing table for that IP address, leading to nowhere. Presumably you could then communicate the block list between routers using BGP. A bit BFI (brute force and ignorance), but given the size of China’s Internet and the central control it’d work.

Verity Pravda is actually right when he/she says it’d work for the “limited objective” of blocking a small, pre-defined list of URLs, but it wouldn’t scale very well. And I don’t know how effective it would be in Australia’s decentralised, multi-player ISP industry. Maybe it’d be OK at the borders, because there’s relatively few links in and out of the country, but it’d be a hell of a mess to get it to work internally.

This fits another of Senator Conroy’s repeated talking points, though: that the plans “at this stage” are only about the ACMA blacklist and increasing it to this magic number of 10,000 sites. That brings two points to mind:

1. If the plans “at this stage” are only about the ACMA blacklist, what is all the rest of this testing about? Particularly the last-minute-before-Christmas announcement that P2P traffic would be added to the mix?
2. In the Cisco routers which are typically used at the junction points between major ISPs, what is the maximum size of the routing table they can hold before performance degrades? Would it be… 10,000 entries, by any chance?

@Bob Bain: Thank you for that extremely useful background information. I also like your point that UTC (“unable to classify”) might be a better term than RC (“refused classification”).

@Verity Pravda: My my my… you are the special one, aren’t you! Senator Conroy singled you out for mention by name. And you just happen to be repeating the Senator’s talking points. What a happy coincidence. I guess that’s why he likes you so much!

@websinthe: Increasingly I’m thinking the argument that “your attempts are futile because the Internet resists regulation” works to the advantage of the filter-mongers. It’s easy to frame “unregulated” with “outlaw” with “shonky”, in a Today Tonight dodgy builders ripping off poor old grandmothers sense. It’s much better to emphasise that to achieve the real stated aim — which admittedly has not been clearly stated, and that’s part of the problem — that this is not the most effective approach.

Increasingly, talking in detail about how effective a filter might be — false positive rates, performance degradation percentages, whether you block by BGP-transmitted changes to the routing table or the triple-tap RST packets of the newer pass-by Great Firewall technologies — is the wrong path for three reasons:

1. It clutters the debate with technical detail which few people understand. “Ordinary folk” tune out and are left with the emotive “we must protect the children”.
2. It frames the debate as a discussion of how effective a filter will be. To a lay audience, something that’s “99.8% accurate” sounds good, even though that still means a huge number of filtering mistakes every day.
3. It diverts effort from more effective debating issues — such as continually pointing out that the most effective way to stop child abuse is to fund law enforcement and education.

Whew! Another coffee after that, eh?