Australian Govt's Plan to Censor the Internet is 'Stricter than Iran'

Now reportedly silencing those critical of its plan to filter the Internet of "offensive" and illegal material.

I've mentioned before how the Australian govt is moving ahead with plans to have ISPs filter porn and other internet content deemed inappropriate for children despite findings that they aren't effective and reportedly degrade connection speeds by an alarming 86%.

Now comes word that the office of the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, is trying to silence critics of the plan after one of his advisors wrote an “intimidating” email to Mark Newton, an engineer at the ISP Internode, who criticized the plan on the Whirlpool broadband community forum by saying it would not work and could even enable child abuse.

“In your capacity as a board member of the IIA (Internet Industry Association) I would like to express my serious concern that a IIA member would be sending out this sort of message,” the email from Mr Conroy’s advisor Belinda Dennett read.

“I have also advised (IIA chief executive) Peter Coroneos of my disappointment in this sort of irresponsible behaviour.”

Newton also criticizes the plan in an interview with Tech Wired Australia:

Censorship systems by their very nature are centralised, there’s only 1 blacklist and the traffic has to be funneled through whatever system it is that’s processing that blacklist and that will inevitably cause central points of failure on a network traffic will need to be funneled into directions that network design principles would usually indicate you wouldn’t funnel traffic in that way. You would have to send it into the filtering system, if the filtering system breaks or runs out of capacity or something like that, there are going to be outages so it is going to make the Internet less reliable even if everything is working perfectly and of course we know from the Enex report that it can’t work perfectly anyway.

Under the scheme there will be two filter tiers: one which blocks illegal material like child pornography; and another, referred to in a department press release, which blocks a list of material deemed unsuitable for children.

Users can opt out of the latter, but there is no opt-out for “illegal content."

“I’m not exaggerating when I say that this model involves more technical interference in the internet infrastructure than what is attempted in Iran, one of the most repressive and regressive censorship regimes in the world," said Colin Jacobs of Electronic Frontiers Australia.

Luckily enough, neither tier will be capable of filtering content obtained over P2P and file-sharing networks, which account for an estimated 60% of Internet traffic.

Newton continues:

...there are other aspects to the trial where you don’t even have to dig deep, like look at the headline results for applicability to non-web protocols. I know as a network engineer at a large ISP that over 60% of Australia’s Internet traffic is Peer to Peer. Over 60%. Now none of the products that were testing by Enex can have even the slightest affect on Peer to Peer, and Peer to Peer is the single most common means of transmitting content around the Internet. So let’s say that your a nefarious sort who’s interested in transmitting around the information which the government claims is illegal. OK you can either put up a webpage, but you won’t do that if these products are deployed because webpages will conceivably be blocked if the products actually work, but on the other hand distribute exactly the same content with say BitTorrent, and there is no single filtering product on the market that can do anything about that. The best the filter can do is detect that there is some BitTorrent traffic on the network.

Australians will pay for ISP filtering with decreased performance and higher charges, but to limit the free flow of information that makes the Internet the most valuable communication and education tool of our time, means that they'll pay a much larger price in the long run, and to try and silence those who point that out is the real crime here.