Loss of Privacy

Last week, we learned that net filters were going into place in Australia.  Now, we learn that the filters don’t work as advertised, the government doesn’t seem to care, and no one, apparently, is going to do anything to fix them.

The Federal Government is attempting to silence critics of its controversial plan to censor the internet, which experts say will break the internet while doing little to stop people from accessing illegal material such as child pornography.

Since filtering child porn was the reason behind these filters to begin with, it should come as no surprise that it isn’t very effective at doing that job at all.  Instead, ISPs are having problems of severe latency, speed drops up to 86%, and up to 10% of legitimate sites being blocked.

The first tier, which internet users would not be able to opt out of, would block all “illegal material”. Senator Conroy has previously said Australians would be able to opt out of any filters to obtain “uncensored access to the internet”.

The second tier, which is optional, would filter out content deemed inappropriate for children, such as pornography.

But neither filter tier will be capable of censoring content obtained over peer-to-peer file sharing networks, which account for an estimated 60 per cent of internet traffic.

Brilliant planning from the Australian government has resulted in ignoring the main source of sharing online.  They completely ignored P2P traffic when creating these filters.  Either the Australian government is extremely stupid or they wanted it to appear as if they were actually trying to do something to stop child porn.

The third, scarier, option is that they just want to track everyone in their country and this is a pretty good way of doing it.  Proof of this can be seen in the filtering of banking systems.

There’s also the issue of filtering HTTPS web traffic – the protocol used for online banking transactions. Five of the filters tested for ACMA could intercept HTTPS traffic, a worrying prospect if the Government intends to use one for blocking secure websites that are inappropriate or illegal. A filter inspecting secure banking data and online purchases for unsavory content effectively opens the door to fraudsters and undermines the entire e-commerce process.

They claim it is to search for anything illegal, but shouldn’t they have a suspicion first before being allowed to intercept your bank details?

To provide a safer environment for children online we need to focus on areas posing a real threat to young Australians like cyber-bullying, identity theft and online predators. Filtering does nothing to reduce these risks. Just like we educate children about staying safe outside, we need to educate them about staying safe online. Walk them through it just like we’d walk them to the park. If that means educating parents unfamiliar with the Internet as well, then let’s do it.

And this is what we should be doing.  This isn’t to say that we should ignore child pornography, but cyber-bullying, identity theft, and online predators are a much greater, and possibly immediate, threat in the world.  We should be doing more to educate children and adults rather than just throwing catch-all filters in place and hoping the problems will go away.

Under the guise of anti-terrorism efforts, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith hints that the government should have access to sites such as reddit, digg, facebook, YouTube, eBay, and any other site that offers free accounts.

The plans to create a large database of emails and phone calls were controversial enough, but the new plan is to make any website offering free accounts fair game for the relevant authorities.

Smith says in a speech that websites that offers a free account “are a potential hotbed for terrorist activity”, as the activity on them is not tracked.

She wants the relevant authorities to be able to track potential terrorists’ actions, although only names and locations would be logged, not the content of the message.

So while there isn’t going to be a huge database where all your digital communications live, you might want to think twice about putting up an image of Osama Bin Laden as your profile picture for comedy effect.

So, these sites are hotbeds for terrorists?  I’m sure the terrorists on facebook make sure to post what they’re doing before going out and blowing up a building.

It’s equally stupid to keep a log of people’s names and locations, but not the content of the message.  That is, unless the government just wants you in a database with no record of what you did so that you cannot mount a defense against the government.

You also might want to put up as many photos of Osama bin Laden as you can, along with photos of the prophet Mohammed.  Flood the databases as much as you can.

If you want to prevent the creation of such a database, you need to lodge your protest now.

When Australians first heard of the new filters in 2007, they thought it would only be to protect the children.  Then, they found out that they would be subjected to the net filters, and there’s no opt out.  Despite public outcry, testing began in Tasmania and, soon, all ISPs will be forced to use the official government blacklist.

Australians may not be able to opt out of the government’s Internet filtering initiative like they were originally led to believe. Details have begun to come out about Australia’s Cyber-Safety Plan, which aims to block “illegal” content from being accessed within the country, as well as pornographic material inappropriate for children. Right now, the system is in the testing stages, but network engineers are now saying that there’s no way to opt out entirely from content filtering.

Internode network engineer Mark Newton told Computerworld that users are able to opt out of the “additional material” blacklist—which targets content inappropriate for children—but not the main blacklist that filters what the Australian government determines is illegal content.

This appears to be very similar to the great firewall of China.  If things like this keep happening, the Internet will, effectively, be much like it was in the past.  The Internet will become a series of computers connected to a few “legal” sites only within your own country.

Ben Hoskings has a brilliant open letter to Senator the Hon Stephen Conroy, Australian Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.  You should read it, use it, and send Mr. Conroy a letter yourself.

Just in case you missed some of these stories in the past couple of weeks, here’s a few gems that I stumbled across.

The Rev Peter Mullen, chaplain to the London Stock Exchange, called for homosexuals to be tattooed with warnings about the perils of gay sex in a cigarette-packet-style health warning.

Where does one even begin attempting to comment on such idiotic statements?

There is a video clip of cats flushing toilets over on YouTube.  It was slightly amusing.

There is a lot of wondering about why Blackwater and US troops might be deployed on US soil.  Conspiracies abound about the possibility of martial law before the election.  It could be true, but it could also just be fear mongering.  I really wish I could dismiss the idea out of hand.

Seattle high schoolers are now going to get failing grades that will affect their GPAs.  It’s the first time in seven years that this has happened.  It’s only being changed because it violated school board policy.  Too bad they didn’t do it because it’s the right thing to do.

The federal government is proposing a consolidation of personal information into databases.

There are more than 3,000 programs or databases in the federal government that hold personal information–Social Security numbers, addresses, fingerprints, and so on–yet the government is only beginning to develop a plan for collecting, protecting, and using such information.

The feds want to put it into fewer databases to better track individuals, despite the fact that they have admitted that data mining sucks.  This will probably also be used in conjunction with their new surveillance program that will turn military satellites back onto the US.

In Peru, an ancient pyramid has been found using satellite technology.  This is what we should be doing with satellites instead of spying on our own people.

In other, really cool, news, the library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum is revealing it’s long lost secrets, albeit very slowly.

You can also buy the US Constitution as a graphic novel.  Maybe now, with pictures, George Bush will understand this fine document.

Jerilea Zempel was detained at the U.S. border this summer because she had a drawing of a sport-utility vehicle in her sketchbook.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers told Zempel they suspected her of copyright infringement.

She was released after more than an hour in custody at the Houlton, Maine, port of entry from New Brunswick, Canada.

Her release came only after she persuaded border guards she was an artist doing a project that involved a crocheted SUV as a statement against America’s dependence on oil and love for big vehicles.

Zempel’s passport showed she’d been to Africa, Australia, Central and South America, Mexico, Turkey and Europe in the last nine years.

“U.S. citizens who’ve traveled to the places I’ve been need to be looked at.

Why?  Please explain to me why someone who enjoys traveling the world and seeing different cultures and historical landmarks need to be looked at.  I have traveled to many of the same places as Ms. Zempel, yet I would be pissed beyond belief if I was stopped solely because of the stamps in my passport.  Screw you America.  I’m free to travel wherever I want.  You can kiss it if you think I would ever cooperate with a border security guard who stopped me solely because of the places I like to visit.

One top of all this, this woman just had a few sketches and a bunch of yarn.  What’s she going to do with that?  Get real.  This is harassment, yet Ms. Zempel thinks that it is perfectly fine to be stopped for such flimsy reasons.

A half hour at the computer gave the agent cause to put me into another suspicious category, meriting a full car search. She (the agent) took my keys and went through my car.

“After going through my (laptop) computer, digital camera, cell phone, business cards, suitcase, reading materials, boxes of yarn and crochet tools, she returned with my sketchbook.

“I was taken to a room and told to sit on a bench with handcuffs at both ends. But they did not handcuff me.”

“My sketchbook puzzled her,” Zempel said. “It was a cartoon sketch. They couldn’t understand what I was doing. She said, “Just what were you doing in Canada? We think you’re engaged in some kind of copyright infringement.”

Why are border guards stopping people for suspected copyright infringement?  After spending an hour searching her stuff, that’s the best they could come up with?  You can’t sketch an SUV and cover it with a crocheted cozy?  Then, you let the woman leave just because she showed her ID that she’s an art professor?  What kind of shoddy work is this anyway?