Wednesday 29 June 2011

Voluntarily filtering the Australian Internet - another reason to despise Stephen Conroy



Browsers which have attempted to access blocked sites will be directed to an Interpol page explaining why the site has been blocked [IIA 27 June 2011]

The Australian Internet Industry Association (IIA) on 25 June 2011:

The voluntary industry code of practice for ISPs in Australia would entail blocking child pornography sites which would otherwise be available to Australians. It would rely on a blacklist compiled and supplied by Interpol, in cooperation with the Australian Federal Police ('AFP').

Consistent with industry commitments made almost 12 months ago to develop a voluntary industry program to block child abuse materials, the IIA announced the final elements of the scheme were moving into place in preparation for a launch of the code in July.

IIA member ISPs in Australia have confirmed their intentions to support a code based approach.

"We anticipate that we will have ISPs representing between 80-90% of the Australian user base complying with the scheme this year," said IIA's chief executive Peter Coroneos.


Apparently this national filter will be based on the Interpol child abuse site blacklist, which as part of its inclusion criteria states that; The whole domain is deemed illegal if any part of it is found to contain sexual abuse material with children. One image of a child that fits the above criteria will be enough to classify the whole domain as illegal until the illegal material is removed.

As Interpol insists that there are no accidental domain name/web page errors in its black list and only it and the Australian Federal Police are envisaged as official arbitrators (ACMA seemingly having been reduced to a mere receiver of Australian complaints), one can almost see the problem rolling down the line for web hosts such as Blogger.com or Facebook and countless public forums.

Especially when the naturally malicious discover how easy it will be to bring a halt to online political debate, by taking a quick tutorial on YouTube, hacking a website and hiding a simple illegal image (or an image containing illegal content in an internal winrar file) on one of its pages and then making an anonymous complaint to the Australian Federal Police.

Many bloggers already find themselves spammed or linked to adult porn sites whenever they offend certain flying monkeys. At the very least I predict a large number of 'please explains' being swapped between bloggers and their ISPs as this so-called voluntary Internet filtering rolls out.

No comments: