Infothought

My _Guardian_ column on "Access Denied" World Censorware Book

"If you block online porn, you'll surely block dissent in China"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/17/internet.censorship

"The issue of whether the internet can be censored, and how governments are trying to do it, continues to be fought around the world"

[Sigh ... remember, I don't get to write the titles ...]

This column is about the OpenNet Initiative's book "Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering", and what it might portend.

[For all columns, see the page Seth Finkelstein | guardian.co.uk.]

libertus.net: Censorware Report on ISP "Voluntary" / Mandatory Filtering

Echo: Irene Graham - ISP "Voluntary" / Mandatory Filtering
http://libertus.net/censor/ispfiltering-gl.html

[Description sent to a mailing list below]

Contains information about ISP-level filtering systems implemented, by various ISPs in various countries, to prevent *accidental* access to child sexual abuse material on web pages/sites. Page has sections about:

Europe (EU) Overview | Norway | Sweden | Denmark | Finland | Netherlands | Switzerland | Britain | Italy | Canada

The most notable thing about all of the Scandinavian and other European systems (except Britain and possibly Italy) is that they are using DNS blacklisting, which as some people on this list would already know, can only be used to block an *entire* domain/site, not a particular page, and is *trivially* easy to bypass. It's much less expensive to implement (than e.g. BT's hybrid URL-based system) which might well be why some of the ISPs in those countries were willing to voluntarily prevent *accidental* access to child sexual abuse material sites. However in, at least, the Netherlands and Switzerland there are a number of ISPs declining to voluntarily do so for a range of reasons.

Australian national censorware news report notes

First, a link to an Australian national censorware news article, without which this post would languish in even more obscurity than it will already.

Now, there's a basic issue of confusion: Is this for "illegal" material (under Australian law), in which case an opt-out makes no sense, or "adult"-only material, in which case there'd be a serious problem managing all the opt-out which would be needed.

I believe this is about "illegal" material, though the most recent reports and blustering make it sound like it's about "adult"-only material.

Paul Montgomery has the best local coverage. Which of course is relegated to obscure discussion status compared to the BigHeads.

One correction for this column: Why Australia isn't the new China

most recently in a column about the Australian approach by Seth Finkelstein pointing out that censorware never works.

I shouldn't be ungrateful for a press mention. Except I didn't say that :-(. The headline-writer did. The title "The internet can't be censored and it's wrong for governments to try" was not my words. I have a much more worried view of the effects of national censorware.

"Psiphon" anti-censorware program articles

Echo: The Psiphon network frustrates censors by using trusted friends (via Ronald Deibert)

MIT Technology Review has published a nice feature article about the Citizen Lab's software, psiphon. I thought some of you who know about the project might find it interesting.

I've mentioned Psiphon a few times myself, mostly because of the way it has, let us say, wide-ranging anti-censorship applications.

Note also Black marks appearing for commercial internet filters?

"We citizens don't have access to the block lists [of prohibited Web sites] that are put together by these companies because that is considered proprietary. Even researchers like myself can't explore the filtering technology that is being sold and used by governments around the world."

Sigh ... :-(

"When US-made 'censorware' ends up in iron fists"

Excellent article: When US-made 'censorware' ends up in iron fists, not the least because I'm quoted

"Some people say [censorware] is ineffective because dissidents can get around it," says Seth Finkelstein, a programmer and anticensorship activist. "I say political control doesn't have to be 100 percent to be effective. Controlling the ability of the vast majority of the population to see outside information is still very effective for the goals of the totalitarian regime."

And it's an accurate quote. In the course of conversation, I gave a version with parallelism "Some people say censorware is ineffective because dissidents can get around it, some people say censorware is effective because only dissidents will get around it". But the version used is just fine.

It's good to see that the connections between censorware companies and repressive governments is continuing to make news.

"Everyone's Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship"

Echo: Everyone's Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide

[Via Ronald Deibert]

Internet censorship, or content filtering, has become a major global problem.

Whereas once it was assumed that states could not control Internet communications, according to research by the OpenNet Initiative (http//opennet.net) more than 25 countries now engage in Internet censorship practices. Those with the most pervasive filtering policies have been found to routinely block access to human rights organizations, news, blogs, and web services that challenge the status quo or are deemed threatening or undesirable. Others block access to single categories of Internet content, or intermittently to specific websites or network services to coincide with strategic events, such as elections or public demonstrations.

Nart Villeneuve on Myanmar/Burma and Internet censorship

Echo: Nart Villeneuve, of Open Net Initiative about Myanmar/Burma and Internet censorship:

Media coverage of Internet censorship is usually framed through one of two lenses: The "1984" approach overstates censorship capabilities claiming that legions of internet police monitor everything in "real time" and are just one kick away if you make the wrong click. The "technoptimist" approach understates censorship capabilities and claims that circumvention technology is proliferating and the internet is a democracy-battering-ram chipping away at the crumbling walls of oppressive regimes. ...

Iran and the Google Blocking / Unblocking

Or, "It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder"

Iran blocked then unblocked Google, as I assume people have heard by now.

"Due to an error, the Google site was filtered on Sunday evening but the error was corrected and now Google and its different sites like Gmail can be used," said an official from the state-run communications company.

Well, what is there for me to say? I actually tend to believe them that it was an "error". If they were really going to shut-off search engines, they would have taken out Yahoo and MSN too. And I don't think they'd want to shut off Gmail short of a war or a coup d'etat. They apparently blacklisted a pattern like "*.google.com", which, just speculation, might have been a typo for some sort of typosquatting, or a misfire from some sort of link-spamming.

I could harp again on how this shows how fragile a free Internet is, how with censorware widely deployed, vast amounts of information can be censored quite arbitrarily. But I've been saying that for more than a decade, so I doubt saying it once more is going to help anything (or help me in any way).

My _Guardian_ Column on Government Of Australia National Censorware Plan

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/sep/13/guardianweeklytechnologysection.comment

"What is really under discussion is control of people. Calling it 'censorware' has the advantage of clarity"

I'm glad they used that as excerpt, though I don't like the title given ("The internet can't be censored and it's wrong for governments to try" - I don't assert categorically that the Internet can't be censored, in fact "Can you censor the Internet?" is the question I've explored for many years).

Franco Frattini EU Censorship Proposal - QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Franco Frattini, European Union Justice Commissioner, has set off a minor blogstorm from the following censorship proposal:

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Internet searches for bomb-making instructions should be blocked across the European Union, the bloc's top security official said on Monday.

Internet providers should also prevent access to any site giving instructions on how to make a bomb, EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini said in an interview.

"I do intend to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector ... on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism," Frattini told Reuters.

Putting aside the phrasing silliness (I know, it's like blogger catnip, ha-ha-he's-so-dumb), he has been making the same noises for a while:

Voice Of America News August 2006

"But I think it is very important, for example, to explore further possibilities of blocking websites that concretely incite to commit terrorist actions or for example providing of the diffusion of expertise or knowledge about bomb making," said Frattini.

However, it turns out that an organization http://SpyBlog.org.uk has compiled a VERY LONG Q-and-A about such censorship proposals

Below is the first part of our letter to Franco Frattini, and the preliminary, general answer, by Jonathan Faull the Director General for Justice, Freedom and Security of the European Commission.

See subsequent blog postings for Questions and Answers numbers 1 to 17

I doubt my audience needs me to say anything more about the battles of censoring the Internet, and he certainly doesn't care what I think reading ...

"Are web filters just a waste of everyone's time and money?"

Not my column, but mentioned here for the obvious reason:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/30/guardianweeklytechnologysection.internet1

Are web filters just a waste of everyone's time and money?

Charles Arthur
The Guardian Thursday August 30 2007

As our regular columnist Seth Finkelstein would tell you, the only people who truly benefit from web filters are the people who make them - such as those who laboured on those provided under the Australian government's NetAlert filter scheme (netalert.gov.au) at a total cost of A$84m

I should note that the 84 million dollars (Australian) represents a pure subsidy to censorware companies, for something like a country-wide site-license, not development cost done by the Australian government (people typically don't get it when I talk about the money, and the part it played my giving up).

Value add: another journalist writes: How to crack the Aussie $84m porn filter in five clicks

Australia's government censorware initiative - slippery slope in action

In the news about Australia's censorware initiative, which encompasses various subsidies and hotlines, one aspect has gone unremarked (h/t Ian Burrows):

Other changes include an extension of the ACMA Blacklist, which includes pornography denied classification by the regulator, to cover malware and terror sites.

Note the slippery slope is no conjecture. Here it began with porn. Once the blacklist system was in place, then it encompassed "terror" sites. But who could be in favor of "terror"?

It's just too easy to have mission creep like this. With secrecy and lack of accountability and outside review, there's an incentive to ban more rather than less.

"Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007" ("V-chip 2.0")

The "Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007" was recently passed:

The bill requires the FCC to review, within one year of enactment, technology that can help parents manage the vast volume of video and other content on television or the Internet.

For whatever good it does, and that's somewhere between not much at all, and none, I'll point out that we have been here before, with the FCC / CIPA (library censorware) order, where the FCC had to determine basic acceptable censorware regulations for libraries. It wasn't a big deal. They basically went through the motions and ducked the difficult questions.

I expect a similar result this time around. The real negatives are that the censorware companies will be able use the proceeding as a marketing-fest (not that the FCC will suddenly censor the Internet). Since of course no real evaluation will be done, the PR flacks can claim anything.

Commerce Committee Net Censorware Hearing - looks like posturing

I suppose I'll write a few words on the censorware story: "US Senators call for universal filtering"

The measures they are calling for include directing the Federal Communications Commission to identify industry practices "that can limit the transmission of child pornography" and requiring the Federal Trade Commission to form a working group to identify blocking and filtering technologies in use and "identify, what, if anything could be done to improve the process and better enable parents to proactively protect their children online."

I looked at the hearing's testimony, and various statements but actually didn't see much beyond a lot of speechifying. If they're calling for a report here, and working group there, all about "industry practices", I'd say it looks like more generic posturing than a serious attempt to get a new law on the table.

Nigerian One-Laptop-Per-Child Porn-Browsing and Censorware

Thanks to everyone who mailed me about the "Nigerian pupils browse porn" story:

Nigerian schoolchildren who received laptops from a U.S. aid organisation have used them to explore pornographic sites on the Internet, ... [snip]

A representative of the One Laptop Per Child aid group was quoted as saying that the computers, part of a pilot scheme, would now be fitted with filters.

I wasn't sure if there was any point in my saying anything about this story, since it looked like it was going to be extensively echoed, so what would be the point in my adding my marginal voice to the chorus?

I think the "One Laptop Per Child News" (an independent site) had the best commentary about the utterly mundane situation that sex draws interest: "To focus on it this much means that the reporter really wanted a headline grabbing story or is against the project on a personal level."

I could note that adding censorware to the machines seems problematic. If these are open-source, then removing the censorware will be trivial. And who is going to control what goes on the blacklist? Etc. But it's not like anyone is going to press those issues (oh, I could try playing "citizen journalist", but there's nothing I could do if my phone calls weren't returned, or I was routed to a flack who just kept repeating a PR line).

Frankly, the One Laptop Per Child idea has always struck me as very ill-considered, a bad combination of techno-utopianism and paternalistic colonialism. But I'll get in trouble if I say what I really feel.

Google Video Cache Bypasses YouTube Age Verification

Echo: http://lists.grok.org.uk/pipermail/full-disclosure/2007-July/064625.html

Youtube.com requires account creation and login before allowing visitors to view videos flagged by users as inappropriate.

Sample flagged video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[video_id]
"This video or group may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube's user community.
To view this video or group, please verify you are 18 or older by logging in or signing up."

.....alternatively, download the video directly from Google video

http://cache.googlevideo.com/get_video?video_id=[video_id]

[h/t Google Blogoscoped forum]

I've said it before, cache is the bigggest threat to censorware.

Amnesty: "The Struggle for Freedom of Expression in Cyberspace"

Amnesty event: The Struggle for Freedom of Expression in Cyberspace

Event: Some People Think the Internet is a Bad Thing

6 June 2007 1:30 PM EST

Amnesty and the Observer Newspaper will use the internet to link activists from around the world to discuss the struggle against internet repression and to celebrate the irrepressible desire of people towards freedom of expression. The meeting will include participation from internet gurus, cyber dissidents as well as net activists, writers and journalists. Everyone will be able to participate to the debate online through a webcast on the day.

Event venue: Online at www.amnesty.org.uk/webcast - broadcasted from the Human Rights Action Center in London

Related: Doctorow - See no evil?

There's an inverse correlation between the regulation of speech and the freedom of a society. In the new global world of censorware, we all live on Syria's internet, China's internet, filtered by companies whose first priority is to ensure that Beijing is happy with its work.

I was originally going to title this post "Internet Censorship Conferences Are The New Black", but I decided that was churlish as well as reeking of sour grapes. I have to remind myself not to have my assessments clouded by bitterness. Anything that gets the message of censorware use by repressive governments into the public mind, is good for all censorware critics.

Censorship, Politics vs Porn

Echo: Porn-Surfing By Proxy

Summary: If works for politics, it works for porn. And there's a whole lot more people interested in porn than in politics

Mr. X first visited CNN.com and a few other media pages, but when Hunter checked his psiphonode [proxy] log again hours later, he discovered Mr. X had moved on to a search for nude pictures of Gwen Stefani and photos of a panty-less Britney Spears.

Then he spent five hours on hard-core sex sites.

This is the flip side of the values vs. implications argument. That censorware for {parent, child, sexual material } and {government, citizen, human rights} are the same technical issue. It does no use to repeat endlessly that one's one values are in favor of the former and not the latter. The implications are independent of the personal values.

Not that this reflects badly on the goals of Psiphon and other such projects. But it's a fact of life.

Columnist asks readers if they've evaded censorware

Circumventing censorware seems to be going mainstream. "Network World" has a column: Getting around Web filtering:

So, what kind of filtering and for that matter logging does your company have in place and do you and or your co-workers use any of these free public proxies to circumvent them? If you are on the IT management side, do you attempt to block these proxies?

The tone of this column is interesting. It's not the standard kids/porn piece. Rather, it's about (high-status) employees escaping company controls, and is sympathetic to the workers.

There's also discussion that translation systems can act as proxies, and hence are blacklisted.

OpenNet Initiative - Censorware All Over The World

ObPost: BBC: Global net censorship 'growing', covering the Open Net Initiative censorware report

money-quote:

"It's an alarming increase," said Ron Deibert, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, one of four universities participating in the yearlong study along with Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge. "Once the tools are in place, authorities realize that the Internet can be controlled. There used to be a myth that the Internet was immune to regulation. Now governments are realizing it's actually the opposite."

What more is there for me to say, that I haven't said already, too many times? :-(

Free Press: "WiFi filters raise worries of city censorship"

Free Press: "WiFi filters raise worries of city censorship"

Banned site result of glitch, Boston official says

By: David Brand

As the city advances its plans to expand wireless Internet service to all of Boston, some website operators and civil liberties advocates say the city-sponsored network is censoring some sites -- but city officials have attributed this to glitches on the network's filter.

Lots of quotes in this piece, including me (accurately):

Anti-censorship activist and server programmer Seth Finkelstein, who maintains a website that provides information about censorship cases, said the site was blocked as the result of an arbitrary "dumb computer program," adding it is likely many less popular sites also get caught in Boston's network filter.

"We only heard about this since BoingBoing is very popular," he said. "What else was banned [but] didn't have the ability to publicize it?"

That point is key - Boing Boing is one of the absolute top blogs, and they have the power to make a media fuss when they're affected. But it's like cockroaches, if you see one of these, it's virtually certain there's many more which are hidden.

There's also been some discussion about the legality of Boston Wireless censorware. I'm not sure anything will come of it all, but it does seem that there's ways to make a good argument against it.

David Sheets Tests Of "BostonWireless" censorware

David Sheets tested "BostonWireless" censorware. Rather than echo his laundry-list of censorware silliness (everything from breast implant procedures to many encyclopedia entries on lotteries), let me cut to the chase:

Conclusion

From a technical standpoint, the stupidly simplistic the artificial "intelligence" algorithms used to censor content are beyond sad. After over a decade of work on spam detection, the fact that a system like this has been implemented is beyond reproach. The engineers or systems administrators who chose and implemented this system should be fired and Mayor Menino should think long and hard about his stance on free speech.

I should note here that spam detection, though it may look similar, is actually a structurally different problem. A system which catches 95% of spam is very useful. But catching 95% of porn sites just means someone has to click a few more times. It's the difference between something you don't want to read, and something you do want to read.

But anyway, this shows that ridiculous bans are still very much a reality in practice.

Note also "Oh, and when I tested the network, BoingBoing was no longer restricted." - since evidently the post with the "banned combination phrase" has scrolled off the page now.

WHY Boing Boing Is Censorware'd "Banned-In-Boston" from Dan's Guardian

[Original research here!]

I ran a copy of the relevant censorware and found why Boing Boing got censorware'd by Boston Municipal Wi-Fi.

Remember: "The phrase "Banned combination phrase found" is a characteristic message of the censorware Dan's Guardian. http://www.dansguardian.org/ It seems some combination of words has triggered the "isItNaughty" flag (that's what they call it).

This is the message that appeared in the server log:

http://www.boingboing.net *DENIED* Banned combination phrase found: google, &safe=off

It looks like the "Banned combination phrase" was the following link, because of the search with SafeSearch set to "off":

Much more of Biskup on Boing Boing <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&domains=boingboing.net&q=%22Tim+Biskup%22&btnG=Search&sitesearch=boingboing.net">Link</a>

"Arbitrary and capricious" seems the relevant characterization.

[Update: BoingBoing should be viewable again on that network when the offending post scrolls off the main page, which should happen in a day or so. But that post itself will remain censorware'd until someone changes the phrase blacklist entries]

[Welcome Slashdot/BBoing readers - feel free to read more of my past extensive censorware research]

Boing Boing "Censorware'd" Banned-In-Boston - Dan's Guardian

[Not a pure echo, original research here!]

Boing Boing got censorware'd by Boston Municipal Wi-Fi.

I sent them the following information:

"The phrase "Banned combination phrase found" is a characteristic message of the censorware Dan's Guardian. http://www.dansguardian.org/ It seems some combination of words has triggered the "isItNaughty" flag (that's what they call it).

It would be an interesting legal case to see if you had the right to file a Freedom Of Information Act for the settings and block logs to find out the exact reason you got censorware'd."

Note, to be clear, this looks like a words-on-the-page blacklisting, rather than a prohibited-site blacklisting.

Sigh. Why bother? I see Slashdot is spreading a rumor over it, and it's a huge joke to think I'm going to make any difference blogging about it :-(.

.XXX domain rejected

Via Susan Crawford, the .XXX domain proposal has been voted down.

The [.XXX domain registry] Application raises significant law enforcement compliance issues because of countries' varying laws relating to content and practices that define the nature of the application, therefore obligating ICANN to acquire a responsibility related to content and conduct.

And there was much rejoicing, among everyone except the registry investors who wanted monopoly rents.

My _Guardian_ column on COPA and the censorware effectiveness argument

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,2044595,00.html

"Would you be surprised to hear US civil liberties groups arguing that Internet censorship is cheap, easy, relatively effective and difficult to circumvent? While in reaction, the US government claimed that such efforts had an unacceptable amount of collateral damage?"

Free Expression Policy Project on COPA and censorware

Worth echoing: Free Expression Policy Project on COPA (and censorware)

Ironically, in view of the ACLU's educational materials pointing out the massive censorship potential of filters, the ACLU and its fellow plaintiffs now presented experts touting filters' virtues, while the government, which had praised filters a few years earlier when it successfully defended a federal law that mandated their use in schools and libraries now pointed out their flaws. The ACLU explained its apparent inconsistency by saying that filters are fine as long as nobody is compelled to use them.

XXX Domain Decision Delayed, Expected Soon

I don't see the latest "XXX domain" saga news mentioned anywhere much, so I might as well pretend I'm doing some good in blog posting about it. At the March 13 meeting of ICANN (the organization in charge of approving such new domains), they eventually decided not to decide at that meeting, but:

The Chairman asked if the Board would be prepared to vote on this matter at the Lisbon meeting [March 28] and suggested that it would be useful for the Board Members to engage in additional deliberation on the materials already received and that they spend time setting out their positions in writing and reaching a clear rationale regarding to any proposed board action.

Reading between the lines, I suppose that means prepare for an upcoming flamestorm, whatever the outcome. To wit:

John noted in relation to community input that since the initial application on the proposed application and revised contract, there had been over 200,000 emails sent to ICANN and additionally over 1300 separate comments had been received in the public comment forums established by ICANN. Paul Twomey added that he had personally received many personal emails, mainly from the American Family Association, opposed to the creation of the domain. John confirmed that those emails were included in the overall count and that Staff had attempted to post all of them. John stressed that it was important that the ICANN Board take into account the unprecedented public comments regarding this matter relating to any decision that might be made on this topic.

In terms of strange bedfellows (pun unintended), the two groups which have been lobbying intensively are the Religious Right and the "Adult Industry" - both against the domain. My superficial take is that many at ICANN now realize that the XXX domain is a horrible idea, but they don't want to be seen as caving into political pressure.

.XXX domain public comments to ICANN - Round 2 IN PROGRESS

The .XXX domain proposal has been revised and is going through a second round of comments:

Consistent with the direction given by the ICANN Board as described in the Preliminary Report of the 12 February 2007 Special Meeting of the Board, ICANN today posted for public comment a revised Appendix S [PDF, 108K] of the proposed registry agreement with ICM (sponsoring organisation for the proposed .XXX registry).

xxx-icm-agreement@icann.org

Deadline seems to be March 9 2007 (the website says Feb 9 2007, I think that's a typo).

Money quote:

Roberto Gaetano said that he believed that there was significant opposition from the adult entertainment industry as they come to understand the repercussions and operation of this domain. He thought a substantial number in that community had changed their mind over the last six months. He said when the Board has evidence of substantial opposition that must be taken into account. He noted for .TRAVEL the Board had only one statement of opposition. In this case there had been hundreds.

Rita Rodin echoed what she saw as both Vint and Roberto's views. She believed that the reason ICANN had public comment periods was to take into account the views expressed during them. If the Board does not pay attention to those views, she said, this would support the oft-mentioned argument that the Board does pay attention to the community.

There you have it - the more they hear against it, especially from the intended monopoly rent-payers, I mean sponsored community, the harder it is to put the monopoly rent machine in place.

.XXX ICANN comments - enormous opposition

I skimmed through the dot-XXX domain ICANN forum to see how the public comment on the .XXX domain was proceeding, and my impression is that it's overwhelmingly negative towards .XXX.

For example, in terms of opposition based on trademark concerns: MarkMonitor's concerns regarding the intellectual property impacts associated with the .XXX Application and Agreement

In order to address the second issue, we would like ICANN and the ICM registry to recognize that brand holders as well as many other individuals and organizations view the launch of .xxx as an unfair means of extracting fees for defensive registrations and STOP proceedings. ... [snip]

As we represent a large number of brand holders, we urge ICANN and ICM to consult with intellectual property community before finalizing the .xxx agreement to ensure that appropriate brand related protections are adopted to minimize the potential damage to major brands throughout the world.

Internet Commerce Association Opposes Approval of the Revised Proposed Agreement on .XXX and Urges Rejection with Finality

Interesting nuanced objection from: Government of Canada comments on the proposed ICM Registry Agreement

ICANN was not conceived to be the global Internet content regulator. It has had some difficulty establishing legitimacy and full acceptance in carrying out its primary function related to managing the domain name system. ICANN's becoming engaged in content regulation through its contracts with TLDs risks undermining its legitimacy and purpose at a time when these need to be reinforced and strengthened.

There's a few professional pro-.XXX submissions in the pile, but I'm not going to comment specifically on them here since I don't want to be unfair to their arguments (I think the arguments put forth are generally ludicrous and monetarily self-interested, but a detailed rebuttal would take substantial time to write).

Global Internet Freedom, aka Company Censorship Collaboration Squirmfest

AP: Tech Firms Seek Action on Net Censorship: "WASHINGTON (AP) - American technology giants urged the U.S. government Tuesday to do more to confront China and other countries about Internet censorship."

And how to confront? To wit:

Andrew McLaughlin, senior counsel for Google, told a State Department-sponsored conference on Internet freedom that his company is trying to use its presence in countries that are restrictive to provide communication options, such as e-mail and blogs, for people who may not have other ways to talk to each other freely.

Ah, blog-evangelism. But the obvious counter-argument is that Google's services of "e-mail and blogs" form an incredibly centralized honey-pot of monitoring and censorship for those restrictive governments to monitor and censor. And those governments won't be playing around with puny subpoenas for research over which Google can make a huge PR fuss. They'll just order Google to provide them with "dissident alerts".

McLaughlin urged the U.S. government to fight for technology and information companies' rights in the international trade arena.

"What we need is for censorship to be treated as a trade barrier and be put right up at the top of our agenda when it comes to bilateral" free trade agreements, he said.

Ha ha ha. The man is funny. Part of being a lawyer is training to make outrageous arguments with a straight face. Free trade agreements do not exactly have a distinguished record as tools for human rights enforcement. Though I appreciate the rhetorical purpose of the argument, the deflection of the issue into what would certainly be an economic-growth-solves-everything response (but it would be someone else's response, and so get Google off the hook).

Now, I'll grant this is not a simple problem, because of the obvious dilemma that any company which doesn't go along with repression loses market share to a company which will (which is in fact an argument for a legislative approach). On the other hand, I don't have too much sympathy for the companies involved trying to weasel it away.

"The Geopolitics of Asian Cyberspace" - Ronald Deibert

[Underechoed (h/t: XarxAsia)]

The Geopolitics of Asian Cyberspace
Far Eastern Economic Review, December 2006, by Ronald Deibert

"Conventional wisdom had it that the Internet was an unstoppable force for liberalization, with nondemocratic states powerless to control this sprawling, seamless network of networks. But this vast international "underbelly" of the Internet -- almost completely invisible to most Internet users -- has become an object of geopolitical contestation among states, and a site where political power is being asserted." ...

"The increased sophistication of Internet content filtering practices can be attributed, in part, to the services provided by Western (mostly U.S.-based) software and Internet service firms. Whereas once the best and brightest of Silicon Valley were associated with wiring the world, and opening up access to vast stores of information, today they are just as likely to be known for doing the opposite. Although Microsoft, Cisco, Yahoo!, Skype, and Google have all come under scrutiny for colluding with China's Internet censorship practices, perhaps the most significant, serious, and yet overlooked contribution to Internet censorship by Western corporations comes from the manufacturers of the filtering software used to block content."

"Censorware Chronicles" advice - recapping recent censorware news

Walt Crawford asks for censorware advice regarding the relevant section of his library-oriented (though not exclusively) publication Cites & Insights:

2. Censorware Chronicles ( appeared once this year, in September, although censorware was mentioned in two other issues ).

I think this one's a fait accompli - there just isn't very much happening. The one lawsuit I'm currently aware of is against a library that's failing to follow the post-Supreme Court CIPA (that is, not unblocking sites at an adult patron's request), and thus really has no effect on CIPA. There's the ongoing DoJ attempt to revive COPA, and that's interesting, but others are covering that a lot better than I could.

Where to start ...

To the contrary, that lawsuit is quite significant with regard to CIPA (the Federal library censorware law). Whether an adult patron could have censorware disabled on request was a major factor in the Supreme Court opinions on the law. Showing such ability is not true in practice would be very significant as part of further legal challenges to censorware in libraries (this has to do with a complicated concept of two type of legal challenges "facial" vs "as-applied", which is about roughly theory vs. practice).

And while there's certainly been much coverage of the "Child Online Protection Act" (COPA), it's my view that the censorware implications could be explored much better than they often have been. I've been writing about that, but frankly, very few people read me, certainly compared to the overall media reports. I think it's useful for more people punditing on the topic to point out the censorware least-restrictive-means argument is NOT new, going back more than a decade (to some vicious politics of touting censorware). And it leads to deep problems of talk-up/talk-down censorware. The superficial punditry is going to snark that those problems are a contradiction, then there's going to be somewhat knee-jerk contrarian articles claiming it's not really a contradiction because there's different contexts: parents/children/government/law/etc. But there's not a lot of good writing with a deep perspective, pointing out that even taking into account different contexts, there's still a problem since that overall situation just doesn't stay so neatly partitioned or ideally formalized. The legal argument over the sufficiency of censorware for parents tends to turn into a public-relations argument about how well it works.

Then there's the recent DMCA censorware exemption loss (due to, well, I've said it too many times :-( ...). But maybe that's worth an item.

The Psiphon censorware circumvention project is getting a lot of publicity. And I seem to be the only one so far pointing out that if it really worked, that would undermine one of the ACLU's arguments in COPA in favor of censorware (that in practice censorware is difficult to circumvent).

Note: If "psiphon is a human rights software project developed by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies that allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the Net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor." - that works just as well for libraries that censor. In fact, even better, since nobody involved is going to be killed as an enemy of the state. It might even make for some interesting guerrilla activism against censorware in libraries.

And in general censorware news, there's the Great Firewall Of Canada, where Canada wants to have national ISP censorware to ban illegal-in-Canada sites.

There's also been mentions that the The Open Net Initiative is going to have a big report in the near future on country censorware, which feeds back into all the above.

So there's much going on.

Personal note: NONE of this is helpful to me. It does not change my political baggage or the unfavorable economics of employment. In fact, I have to remind myself that though it may break my heart, getting involved is likely to be as hugely destructive to me (in both stress and money) as happened to me before (in fact, probably all the censorware blog posts I've been writing recently are not as good for me as if I had been doing Google-related blog posts).

Psiphon vs. COPA - "When Titans Clash"

NYT: Web Tool Said to Offer Way Past the Government Censor (about Psiphon)

TORONTO, Nov. 21 -- Deep in a basement lab at the University of Toronto a team of political scientists, software engineers and computer-hacking activists, or "hactivists," have created the latest, and some say most advanced tool yet in allowing Internet users to circumvent government censorship of the Web.

... "Governments have militarized their censorship efforts to an incredible extent so we're trying to reverse some of that and restore that promise that the Internet once had for unfettered access and communication," Dr. [Ron] Deibert said.

Now let's compare Ed Felten's testimony in the "COPA" trial:

Q. ... I want to discuss with you the ease which filters can be circumvented. Do you have an opinion regarding the ease with which minors can circumvent Internet filtering technology?

A. Yes, I do.

Q. What is your opinion?

A. My opinion is that it's quite difficult for minors to circumvent filters.

[Later ...]

There are some other methods in which the user could try to set up their own intermediary site on some other computer, and that turns out to be fraught with all kinds of technical difficulties. You really have to have a lot of facility with installing and configuring networking software in order to have any hope of getting that to work in practice.

Now, of course, both might agree that's the current state of affairs.

But either changing that state of affairs will succeed, in which case one of the pro-censorware arguments against the "Child Online Protection Act" will then be invalidated. Or it will fail, in which case, you can censor the Internet.

Pick one (and don't shoot the messenger).

DMCA 2006 Circumvention Rulemaking - no more censorware exemption

Per AP, the US Copyright Office has now issued the 2006 anticircumvention exemptions for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Sigh ... the attackers won.

http://www.copyright.gov/1201/docs/fedreg_notice.pdf

"Although the notice of proposed rulemaking made clear that proponents of renewal of an existing exemption must make their case de novo, proponents in the current rulemaking proceeding made no attempt to make any factual showing whatsoever, choosing instead to rest on the record from three years ago and argue that the existing exemption has done no harm, that nothing has changed to suggest the exemption is no longer needed, and that if anything, the use of filtering software is on the rise. In a rulemaking proceeding that places the burden of coming forward with facts to justify an exemption for the ensuing three-year period on proponents, one cannot assume that the elements of the case that was made three years ago remain true now. Nor is there any evidence in the record that there has been any use of the exemption in the past three years, or that there would be likely to be any use of an exemption during the next three years. While this is not necessarily fatal, nevertheless a record that reveals no use of an existing exemption tends to indicate that the exemption is unnecessary. Together, the absence of any quantification of the current scope of the problem along with the absence of any demonstration that the existing exemption has offered any assistance to noninfringing users leaves a record that provides no basis to justify a recommendation for renewal of the exemption."

COPA - Closing Argument - ACLU: Censorware Works, Govt: Censorware Doesn't Work

In the closing arguments of the "Child Online Protection Act" (COPA) Internet Censorship trial, the censorware "talk-up" vs. "talk-down" divide was prominent.

ACLU press release, censorware "talk-up":

... But as the ACLU showed during the trial, Internet filters would be far more effective at blocking sexually explicit Web sites.

... "It is also clear that other alternatives, including education and filtering, are far more effective for those parents who want to limit access by their children to certain websites using their own values."

[later] ... In addition, according to the government's own expert, America Online's filter blocks more than 98 percent of all sexually explicit sites.

Now let's compare the government statements (AP article), the censorware "talk-down"

PHILADELPHIA - Justice Department attorneys, defending a law aimed at keeping online pornography from minors, argued that software filters often block valid sites -- on gay rights or sexual health, for example -- that teens might seek out.

"Filters are hindering minors from learning about the world around them. That's a huge problem," government lawyer Joel McElvain said Monday. "There may be reasons the teenagers have problems speaking to their parents about these (issues)."

Here's where the side-switching happens, that people sometimes mistakenly refer to as a "contradiction". It's formally consistent for the ACLU to argue that parents can use censorware on minors, and the government shouldn't apply censorware to adults in public libraries. But the issue tends to drift from those bare control-rights based statements. Here, the ACLU is "talking-up" censorware in their own press release ("more than 98 percent"!). While the government is "talking-down" censorware in their public comments ("hindering minors"). These are not legal statements, but short bits for popular consumption. Both would agree that censorware catches some porn sites and makes mistakes. But the switch comes that here the ACLU is emphasizing the accurate part and the government is emphasizing the inaccurate part, while in a library censorware case, the emphasis would be reversed. And more deeply, that the accurate aspect is claimed to be what matters, while the inaccurate aspect is dismissed as an acceptable cost (and elsewhere, vice-versa)

On a personal note, I'm hoping this all helps me get across to people what I went through in trying to get support in opposing censorware. And why those issues are still a factor. But I'm probably being over-optimistic.

ACLU(WA) Sues Library Over Refusing To Disable Censorware For Adults

http://www.aclu-wa.org/detail.cfm?id=557:

Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, three library users and a nonprofit organization today brought suit to ensure that patrons of a library system in Eastern Washington have access to useful and lawful information on the Internet. The lawsuit challenges the library system's policy of using a restrictive Internet filter to bar access to information on its computers and of refusing to honor requests by adult patrons to temporarily disable the filter for sessions of uncensored reading and research. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Spokane. ...

The North Central Regional Library District (NCRL) operates 28 community libraries in Chelan, Douglas, Ferry, Grant, and Okanogan Counties. The NCRL has used a blocking software product called SmartFilter, Bess edition, manufactured by the California-based company Secure Computing Corporation, to filter Internet content on all public computers at its branch libraries. Bess blocks a very broad array of lawful information, and the NCRL has refused to unblock sites for patrons. ...

Libraries that receive funds for Internet access under two specific federal programs are required to have the ability to block minors from seeing "visual depictions" of sexual activity. But the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the law to mean that libraries should disable those filters upon the request of an adult. The ACLU believes that the NCRL filtering policy goes far beyond what is allowed under federal law.

[full text of complaint]

It's not irony, given that this is about adults being about to turn off censorware in a public library. But still, given the tendency of COPA to have the ACLU "talk-up" censorware, and that this lawsuit (by a different ACLU division) will "talk-down" censorware, there could be some press confusion. So it's still a bit of a surprise that this lawsuit was announced while the trial for the "Child Online Protection Act" (COPA) is still taking place.

COPA - Censorware Report Media Coverage And "1 Percent" Result

More news articles are being written about the Child Online Protection Act censorware report. I've dug up a reference to illustrate what I keep saying about there being no surprise in the conclusion:

Here, Accessibility and Distribution of Information on the Web, 1999:

Information distribution

83% of sites contain commercial content and 6% contain scientific or educational content. Only 1.5% of sites contain pornographic content

COPA censorware expert-witness report 2006:

About 1 percent of the websites in the Google and MSN indexes are sexually explicit.

Yes, another go-around in 2006 is a nice confirmation and additional data-point. But essentially nothing has changed. Which means that whatever one's position beforehand about censorware and COPA, there's nothing changed from this study.

The only thing which has changed is to temporarily quiet the objection that those other studies were old and hence no longer valid. Oh, and maybe debunking media hype about how The Internet Is For Porn.

[Update - Consider this item in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Net not so dirty?

Conventional wisdom has it that the Internet is loaded with porn. But, according to the San Jose Mercury News, only 1 percent of all Web pages contain sexually explicit material (based on random samples taken from the Yahoo, MSN, Google and AOL search requests). This may well be meaningless, though, because the analysis cannot reveal whether this is a declining or increasing amount or whether the weight of the estimated 55 million blogs is drowning out the porn. Seth Finkelstein, a civil-liberties activist quoted in the piece, has another theory. "What we are learning about the Internet is that it reflects life and that the Internet is not -- contrary to what some people might think -- more sexual than people are in general."

Note, exactly what I've said - the value in this study is getting the word out to "conventional wisdom". The writer is apparently unaware that the results are consistent with other studies going back several years, because that's not the "conventional wisdom". ]

Z-list blues note: The MSNBC / FT.com article has this statement:

The findings, first reported in the San Jose Mercury News, were disclosed in Federal court in Philadelphia last week during the latest hearing into the ACLU's injunction.

Cough. Ahem, ahem, ahem ... Not that I'm especially annoyed - as I said, the findings were released in an authorized email to many reporters and other interested case-watchers. But I do think I had the first material on the web about it. Again, it doesn't matter, as I didn't really do anything except be awake at the time (which is a dubious achievement) and have a blog. So I'm noting this more for amusement than anything else. But it's yet another little point about the silliness of blog triumphalism.

Quoted in Mercury News about COPA Censorware Report

Study: About 1 percent of Web pages have sexually explicit material

Seth Finkelstein, a programmer and civil-liberties activist, said Google's stance was "horribly self-serving."

"There were no privacy implications in the sense that the data was restricted to a very small set of researcher who were under various sets of protective orders," Finkelstein said.

Finkelstein said Stark's findings about the prevalence of pornography on the Internet are similar to other academic studies.

"What we are learning about the Internet is that it reflects life and that the Internet is not -- contrary to what some people might think -- more sexual than people are in general."

The quotes are accurate, though of course it was a small part of a much longer conversation.

I'm climbing the pundit-ladder! :-)

[h/t: Catherine Crump]

"Google Subpoena"-related Expert Report On Censorware Now Released

[Small scoop, though several reporters will probably have items shortly - updated with full report ]

The expert witness censorware report which set off the media frenzy Google Subpoena has now been released, almost completely. There are only some small redactions having to do with specific numbers related to various sizes of search engine indexes, which the companies regard as proprietary information.

I was on a list of recipients who inquired and received the full text in a mailing when it was approved for release by the Department Of Justice. As the report will probably show up on the big search blogs, I'll save my disk space and let them post it. It's not all that, err, sexy, anyway.

Money shot:

V. SUMMARY

This study reports on the Google and MSN indexes, on AOL, MSN and Yahoo! queries, and on the most popular Wordtracker queries. About 1 percent of the websites in the Google and MSN indexes are sexually explicit. About 6 percent of queries retrieve a sexually explicit website. Nearly 40 percent of the most popular queries retrieve a sexually explicit website. Close to 90 percent of the sexually explicit websites retrieved by queries are domestic. Filters that block more of the sexually explicit websites also block more of the clean websites. The most restrictive filter blocks about 94 percent of the sexually explicit search results, but also blocks about 13 percent of the clean results. Of the sexually explicit websites that get through the filters, 30 percent to 90 percent are domestic.

The number of sexually explicit websites is huge. Search results often include sexually explicit material. A lot of sexually explicit material is not blocked by filters. Of that, a substantial percentage is domestic.

[But we all knew that last paragraph already ...]

[Update: Looks like nobody else bothered:-), and it turns out I can host it, so here it is:]

Main Report:

http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/copa-censorware-stark-report.pdf

Supplement:

http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/copa-censorware-stark-supp.pdf

Supplement 2:

http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/copa-censorware-stark-supp2.pdf

COPA - Censorware Statistics Studies Reported

The "Child Online Protection Act" (COPA) Internet Censorship trial discussed censorware statistics on 11/8, where we finally got to hear the results from the report which sparked the net firestorm of the Google Subpoena.

Executive Summary: blah, underblocking, blah blah, overblocking, blah blah blah, number number ...

It was without a doubt the most statistical sophisticated expression of the idea that a censorware blacklist catches some stuff but not everything, and usually more than intended. All else is elaboration. And frankly, I've yet to find anyone for whom the precise numbers make much of a difference. Maybe the judge cares here.

Most amusing moment:

A. No. As I answered previously, I think that one needs to consider the overblocking as well as the underblocking. If all you were concerned about was underblocking, you could just disconnect the computer from the Internet.

Q. What would the effect be of disconnecting the computer from the Internet?

A. There would be no underblocking at all, however, the overblocking would be rather severe.

COPA - Civil-Liberties Witnesses Say Internet Censorship Effective And Easy

[Very interesting testimony on this topic in the "Child Online Protection Act" (COPA) Internet Censorship trial. As I say about censorware, if it works on minors in America, it'll work on citizens in China. And if it doesn't work on citizens in China, it won't work on minors in America. It's irrelevant here that someone may hold the social values that it's OK regarding minors in America, and not OK regarding citizens in China. The technical issue is the same. Pick one, but you can't have it both ways.]

[Lorrie Faith Cranor, 10/24]

Q. What steps did filtering companies take to make sure that their products can't be circumvented? Can you give us a few examples?

A. Well, so they monitor the various websites where children talk about how to circumvent the products and they -- when they hear about techniques they make sure that their software is not susceptible to those techniques and they use -- they password protect all aspects of the software, such as changing the settings and removing it.

[Note that while the answer uses the term "children", it works equally well with "political dissents" - indeed, those are not mutually exclusive categories, given student protest!]

[Ed Felten testimony, 10/25]

Q. ... I want to discuss with you the ease which filters can be circumvented. Do you have an opinion regarding the ease with which minors can circumvent Internet filtering technology?

A. Yes, I do.

Q. What is your opinion?

A. My opinion is that it's quite difficult for minors to circumvent filters.

[Later]

Q. You mentioned a second approach to circumvention. What was that approach?

A. Second approach is to try to somehow route the Internet traffic through some kind of intermediary on the net in the hope of obscuring what is going on so the filter would not block it.

Q. What are the difficulties of that approach?

A. Well, there are a number of -- there are a number of different ways this approach can be tried.

One method is to try to find -- is to use one of a well-known set of sites on the net that will act as an intermediary for your web traffic. And the difficulty with using that method is that the filtering companies know about these sites as well. And so if they see traffic that tries to go to one of these well-known proxy or intermediary sites, the filter can just block that traffic. The filter will notice that this looks like an attempt to circumvent the filter and it can just block that traffic.

There are some other methods in which the user could try to set up their own intermediary site on some other computer, and that turns out to be fraught with all kinds of technical difficulties. You really have to have a lot of facility with installing and configuring networking software in order to have any hope of getting that to work in practice.

[I should note I actually agree with him, but don't want the arguments it usually gets me, or accusations of defeatism or "sour grapes", with those who believe censorware circumvention is substantially workable - take it up with him, not me!]

Department of Justice Says Censorware Doesn't Work

[For "amusement", I present here an excerpt of the "Child Online Protection Act" (COPA) Internet Censorship trial (10/23), where in an opening statement, as part of their strategy, government lawyer Eric Beane argues vigorously that censorware does not work. My snark in brackets]

The evidence will show that a shocking amount of pornography slips through these filters and into the hands of children. The evidence will show that the patchwork of status quo solutions is not working well enough.

[Shocking. Censorware doesn't work. Later he really gets into this:]

We provided pictures to you that got through filters tested by plaintiffs' own expert. Each of those pages had gotten through a filter. And you are also going to hear testimony from our experts, Paul Mewett and Philip Stark, describing their comprehensive study of the effectiveness of the filters.

[They can prove it. It's science.]

The results of the study confirm what the public already knows. Filters don't solve the problems.

One filter failed to block over 60 percent of the sexually explicit web pages it was tested against, over 60 percent. We refer to this problem as underblocking.

Many other filters missed more than 25 percent of those sexually explicit websites.

Even the filter that underblocked the least sexually explicit pages still allowed 8.6 percent of the sexually explicit pages through. Don't let a small percentage fool you. This percentage translates to hundreds of millions of sexually explicit pages.

[Porn pornn pornnn, it's everywhere ...]

If a water source was mixed with a sewer system, and you had a filter that screened out but 6.6 percent of it, would that be a solution to the problem? Would that cure the problem of the drinking water? I think that analogy works here with kids. It's the fact that there are still all of these images there, there were speeches that can be done directed at the source that can address that problem where filters will never be able to.

[Trying to bail the ocean with a spoon doesn't work. But, I must say, neither does commanding the waves.]

A low underblocking rate also comes at a cost. The filters that are most successful at blocking out sexually explicit pages also block out many other pages that contain no sexual content at all. 23.6 percent of the pages that were blocked had no sexual explicit content.

[You heard him! Censorware doesn't work!]

For example, one filter even blocked a website promoting a marathon to raise funds for breast cancer research. Part of the CIA's World fact Book was blocked. And a page with an ACLU calendar. In fact each of the plaintiffs websites in this case was blocked by at least one filter, and the united states has consistently taken the position that none of the plaintiffs' websites are covered by COPA.

[The "breast" issue isn't obsolete, it's still a problem!]

So in the absence of the solution offered by COPA, parents are left with a very difficult choice of allowing their children to be exposed to sexually explicit material or of cutting off their children's access to a significant portion of other materials on the worldwide web, materials that in many cases are necessary for a child to complete his homework.

[Wow - Censorware interferes with children's ability to do homework. The government wouldn't say it if it weren't true, right?]

As you might imagine the task of keeping an up-to-date black list is mammoth. It is simply impossible to catalog the entire worldwide web. So the overall effectiveness of a filter will always depend on the performance of automated classification software or dynamic filtering.

On this point you will hear from Dr. Stephen Neale who is a nationally renowned expert in linguistics. He will explain that image filtering does not work and that robot filters that operate by sorting language and text will never be able to stop pornographic images from reaching children.

[It's an impossible task - you have word of the US Department Of Justice on it]
[Of course this is posturing - but the quotes might be useful for anyone dealing with a censorware-maker]

"Child Online Protection Act" (COPA) Internet Censorship trial begins

ACLU COPA press release:

PHILADELPHIA -- The American Civil Liberties Union today presented opening arguments in federal district court in its longstanding challenge to an Internet censorship law, ACLU v. Gonzales.

Best coverage I've seen so far is at law.com. See also nerve.com COPA blog

Frankly, is there anyone reading who 1) doesn't already know what I have to say on the topic, and 2) cares?

Welcome, SurfControl.com reader! Please introduce yourself.

I see I have acquired an interested reader from the censorware company SurfControl.com. Welcome! Please introduce yourself. As I asked the "Smith & Metalitz LLP" reader - who are you? Where do I rank in terms of "threat level"? Do I rate a Vice President reader? Marketing researcher? Intern?. Frankly, I don't think I'm much of threat at all these days, so maybe you're just a random company person who has stumbled upon my obscure thread of the web. Inquiring minds want to know.

I've always wondered what people assigned to do long-term surveillance of their ideological opposites think about it all. As in, if you get stuck wiretapping a mob conspiracy, it's going to be a pretty dull job. You're never going to wonder if the mob guys have a point after all, or admire something they've done except in grotesque way. But if its, e.g. the FBI and John Lennon, did any of the agents ever have a positive thought about the music, or even, maybe the war wasn't such a good idea after all?

So far, no assigned "opposition researcher" of me has ever been both willing to discuss it with me, and also thoughtful about the topic. So the mystery remains.

Censorware Blacklisting Roundup

A bunch of censorware-related items have crossed my screen recently, so I decided to collect them for a spit into the wind, err, democratic aggregatory gesture. Interestingly, none of these have to do with porn, but more like the difference between broad category labels versus the practical effects.

"Emergent Chaos" (a group blog on security, privacy, liberty, and economics) recently ran afoul of SmartFilter.

The vdare.com (see self-description) site has post on its experiencing various blacklisting issues.

Doc Searls: "Oddly, I can listen to Howard Stern at my hotel, but I can't visit his website. I can't do (AIM-based) instant messaging or send email either. " Later: "... it turns out that what looked like censorship the other day was an installation glitch. The service company had installed a severe (corporate? school? I dunno) firewall in the hotel, when a much more open one had been called for."

[N.b.: I have a few thoughts on this as it relates to earlier discussion of What Can't Be Fixed, but this example is really extremely minor. I mean, I could have asked for some attention patronage, and he probably would have granted it, but the point is that I am a peasant begging alms, and it's not worth it. I only wish I wouldn't get personally attacked when the topic makes the rounds. ]

DailyKos Now UnBlacklisted by SmartFilter from "Profanity", "Mature"

Following-up, the DailyKos censorware blacklisting is now minimal:

There's various ways this incident can be viewed - e.g. whether you consider it a big problem that a site can be prevented from being read in many places (including certain public libraries) via being added to a secret blacklist, or whether you want to say that the censorware maker didn't want to push this cause-celebre so that proves censorware is responsive, or maybe even that nobody in the real world cares about a ranty political forum site so it doesn't matter.

Last week was the American Library Association's "Banned Book Week". Sadly, my idea of "Banned Websites Week" is now just futile blog-posts of what could have been.

DailyKos Gets Censorware Blacklisted by SmartFilter as "Profanity", "Mature"

Yup, as being discussed, it's censorware blacklisted:

Update: In a comment Kos himself says:

I'm working behind the scenes to see if I can resolve this quietly. Computer Associates apparently uses this filter, which is why I was seeking someone from that company earlier. But if Secure Computing is the source, then even better.

I have reached out to their PR department to see if they can facilitate a reversal of action. If they don't respond favorably within the next 48 hours, then I bring out the big guns.

lol, this is definitely an example of how I've changed in the last four years. Even a year ago, I would've burst out with guns blazing. But it's amazing how much you can accomplish with a little sugar.

I think I'm mellowing with age...

"Race to the Bottom" - Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship

Human Rights Watch has released a new report "Race to the Bottom" - Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship

It's a thorough examination of the topic. I won't attempt to extensively summarize, since that'll be done by many others.

I'm mentioned (with regard to Google censorship) at the bottom of page 61, in very good company:

For more on this issue see Bill Thompson, "The billblog: Google censoring web content," BBC News, October 25, 2002 [online], http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2360351.stm; Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, "Localized Google search result exclusions," October 26, 2002 [online], http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/google/; Seth Finkelstein, "Google Censorship - How It Works," Sethf.com, March 10, 2003, http://sethf.com/anticensorware/general/google-censorship.php; and Philipp Lenssen, "Sites Google Censors," Google Blogscoped, January 25, 2005, http://blog.outercourt.com/archive/2005-01-15-n50.html (all retrieved July 12, 2006).

[Hat tip: Philipp Lenssen

"DOPA" and What Is A "Social Networking Website"?

In some "DOPA" discussions, the issue of "what is a Social Networking Website?" gets examined. The legal language is:

(J) COMMERCIAL SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITES; CHAT ROOMS- Within 120 days after the date of enactment of the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006, the Commission shall by rule define the terms `social networking website' and `chat room' for purposes of this subsection. In determining the definition of a social networking website, the Commission shall take into consideration the extent to which a website--

(i) is offered by a commercial entity;
(ii) permits registered users to create an on-line profile that includes detailed personal information;
(iii) permits registered users to create an on-line journal and share such a journal with other users;
(iv) elicits highly-personalized information from users; and
(v) enables communication among users.'.

My contribution: While people can have fun coming up with the most twisted interpretation possible, as a kind of party-game ("it bans all ISP's, because ISP's collect personal info, generally have free webpages, and enable communication among users"), I'm virtually certain that the eventual answer is going to be pretty simple:

A "Commercial Social Networking Website" will be whatever the censorware company puts on the blacklist for "commercial social networking websites". End of story.

Why is this true? Simple. Because that's what happened the last time regarding FCC censorware compliance regulations. They basically amounted to saying that the censorware companies could do whatever they wanted. There's no reason to think it'll be any different this time.

"DOPA" - HR 5319, Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006

The "Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006" (DOPA) act was recently passed. To quote Library Journal for a summary:

"This unnecessary and overly broad legislation will hinder students' ability to engage in distance learning and block library computer users from accessing a wide array of essential Internet applications including instant messaging, email, wikis and blogs," said ALA president Leslie Burger. "Under DOPA, people who use library and school computers as their primary conduits to the Internet will be unfairly blocked from accessing some of the web's most powerful emerging technologies and learning applications. As libraries are already required to block content that is "harmful to minors" under the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), DOPA is redundant and unnecessary legislation." DOPA would extend CIPA by tying receipt of E-rate funds to blocking social networking and other sites. The legislation now will go to the Senate, which ALA said may or may not have time to vote before their session ends for the year.

I was going to sit this one out because of preaching-to-the-choir, but Kent Newsome asked my thoughts (disclosure: he's said nice things about me), so here's a rundown, and an attempt to say a few thing not everyone else has said.

1) We've been here, this is called "moral panic"

Set the WayBack machine for ten years ago, and you'd see similar articles about AOL. Here's a good one, from *1995*

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1995/09/21/DD22231.DTL

AOL wants to have its cake and eat it, too. It wants a family system that appeals to kids. It also wants to keep making money off the hotchat crowd. And it's terrified that the Microsoft Network is going to eat its lunch, so it's selling harder than ever.

Unfortunately, in the process it's built a system that makes it easy for predators to operate, and has then turned around and aggressively marketed it to prey. AOL had better figure something out. As it stands, this is not going to end well for it.

2) Observe the slippery slope in action

I don't know how many times the point has been made that once censorware was woven into the fabric of school and library Internet access, racheting up the blacklists would be very easy. The next moral panic, the next political campaign to pander to social conservatives, the next time a demagogue needs a hot button to push, it's just the flip of a switch. Here's another proof.

3) However, this particular law matters less than one might think

Broad application of censorware blacklists is already in place

* Federal law requires Internet blocking only of sites with certain visual depictions -- such as "obscenity" -- yet, some libraries have gone beyond this obligation, choosing to censor other types of material as well, including such ill-defined categories as "gambling" and "illegal" sites.

* The minimum blocking level that the software system for the state's public libraries has adopted for all computers exceeds what federal law requires, so that even libraries opposed to unnecessary filtering are forced to deny patrons access to protected material.

* Many libraries in the state [of Rhode Island] have done little to make patrons aware of their legal right to gain access to information blocked by the deeply flawed "filtering" software now in use.

People just don't hear much about it, since the civil-libertarians generally have no money to publicize the issue. Which brings us to:

4) Politically, Republicans fighting _Fox News_ is a sign of desperation

I suspect this bill is part of the Republican election strategy, of pandering to the right-wing base. Flag burning, gay marriage, the recent "Teen Endangerment and Grandmother Incarceration Act", it's all red meat for the campaign. However, MySpace (social networking site) is owned by the same enormous corporation which owns Fox News, and they can fight back. If anyone is able to exploit this potential wedge between the theocrat and plutocrat wings of the Republican party, the result could be interesting indeed.

5) Singing "What's The Matter With Kids Today?" never goes out of style

Just on general principles, there tend to be few arguments more futile than lecturing about what youth *should* do. And the youth are usually not around to defend themselves. But "DOPA" is dramatically beyond legislating morality - it's legislating against interactivity.

Google Germany Censored Sites vs. Germany's Voluntary Self-Monitoring Blacklist

Philipp Lenssen asks Why Is Stormfront.org Missing in Google Germany?, discussing Google censorship:

How does Google know which sites they need to censor? One thing Google and others in Germany do is to access blacklist data on a server by the Association for the Voluntary Self-Monitoring of Multimedia Service Providers, FSM("Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle Multimedia-Diensteanbieter eV") ... Stormfront.org, however, is not on this BPjM blacklist module, according to the BPjM.

My comment on this was that he hasn't found a bug in Google's censorship, he's found a bug in the "BPjM blacklist" :-).

The response he got from Google was unhelpful as usual.

One of the reasons I've opposed censorware is that secret blacklists preclude judicial review. This may be a commonplace now, but it's acquiring new resonance with, let's say very prominent cases involving claims of secrecy and national security:

pp.39-40, "If the government's public disclosures have been truthful, revealing whether AT&T has received a certification to assist in monitoring communication content should not reveal any new information that would assist a terrorist and adversely affect national security. And if the government has not been truthful, the state secrets privilege should not serve as a shield for its false public statements. In short, the government has opened the door for judicial inquiry by publicly confirming and denying material information about its monitoring of communication content."

But then, we're back to the same problem - I'm preaching to choir here, and marginalized to anyone else :-(.

India ISP Blog Censorship Update

Kingsley Joseph wrote an update in the comments of the previous post:

Seth, you're bang on. The government wanted about 20 sites blocked, not for terrorist activities, but for hate-speech reasons. The stupid ISPs, too lazy to put in sub-domain blocks, blocked IP addresses instead.

It's been resolved, and we should be back to almost normal in a day or two.

There's another article in the Indian Express. It's very strange, some of the sites don't make sense as targets for censorship.

I spent some time (probably too much time ...) trying to find a pattern, with a lead or two, but nothing obvious. Even if I did find anything, I'd then have to devote time to writing it up, and then further running around trying to get some credit, probably unsuccessfully. Not worth it. That's unpleasant to write, but it's the reality of unpaid freelancing, err, "citizen journalism".

India ISP Blogspot Blocking - Conjecture

I've read a bit on the story of ISP's in India blocking certain blog services. Many people have confirmed that it's happening, so it's apparently true. But it doesn't make sense. India is a democracy, so one wouldn't expect the sort of extreme censorship found in e.g. China.

I briefly considered it might be a case of bans of a few particular blogs accidentally leading to widespread overblocking by cutting off entire servers, since many blogs are hosted on a single server (i.e. banning meant to be by-name was instead implemented by-IP address). But that can't be right, since while one ISP might make that mistake, several ISP's wouldn't *all* make that mistake, especially after complaints started coming in.

It sure can't be a terrible fear of the Voice Of The People, since only some services are being censored. If the government was afraid of self-agonizing emergent intarwebizens, all such services would be blocked. So that explanation is nonsense.

I wonder if we'll find out that somebody said that terrorists were using *blogs* to communicate, so in a panic, prompted by the recent terrorist bombings in Mumbai, some government official issued a hasty "national security" directive to block certain blog services. That would fit the observed pattern, because those sort of panic directives are both overbroad, and people won't want to talk about them. It also implies that this should clear up in few days, as sanity prevails. We'll see.

Jerry Pournelle Censorware'd From Otis Air Base By SmartFilter

Jerry Pournelle is well-known science fiction writer and computing/space-tech pundit. He has some material now on his site being blocked, starting from a reader report:

Dr. Pournelle,

You might be interested to know that at Osan [Air Base], your website domain is explicitly blocked under the category "entertainment, online sales".

First reaction:

I have no knowledge of this. I sell nothing. Well, I suppose I "sell" copies of Strategy of Technology through Paypal and I push my wife's reading program, but that's hardly online sales. I do hope to be entertaining. I really don't know why any Air Base would think me a danger to the troops.

It seems the censorware program involved is SmartFilter. He further describes his experience with its website procedures:

I went to that URl and perhaps it is because my head aches, but I could make no sense of it or of what to do. I suppose it has been explained to how "services" like this "Secure Computing" work, and why anyone would allow them to dictate who is allowed access to whom, but the explanation didn't take. Are these outfits owned by private individuals? Corporate stock holders? "Western Enterprises" (a one-time front name for a CIA overseas corporation)? A religious group? Are they fronts, money makers, or just what? Because they do seem to have considerable power to determine what will be seen by at least some of our citizens.

Does that need discussion?

All journalists want to be entertaining, because no one will read their works if they are not, but I certainly would not call this site primarily an entertainment, and while once in a while I offer things for sale that is hardly my primary purpose. Do they ban all sites that accept Google ads? How does this work? And who decides whether or not to follow the advice of this group?

It's very interesting what happens when writers get "filtered" by censorware.

"Ignoring the Great Firewall of China"

[Echoed for a good cause]

Ignoring the Great Firewall of China

Richard Clayton, Steven J. Murdoch, and Robert N. M. Watson

Abstract. The so-called "Great Firewall of China" operates, in part, by inspecting TCP packets for keywords that are to be blocked. If the keyword is present, TCP reset packets (viz: with the RST flag set) are sent to both endpoints of the connection, which then close. However, because the original packets are passed through the firewall unscathed, if the endpoints completely ignore the firewall's resets, then the connection will proceed unhindered. Once one connection has been blocked, the firewall makes further easy-to-evade attempts to block further connections from the same machine. This latter behaviour can be leveraged into a denial-of-service attack on third-party machines.

But see the comments in the blog post thread:

http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2006/06/27/ignoring-the-great-firewall-of-china/

Particularly the claim it doesn't work in practice:

http://spacehunt.info/2006/06/09/man-in-the-middle-is-an-understatement/

Censorware Blacklisting Amusing Message

I found this funny: I was putting a few sites into a censorware site's blacklist look-up form, and got the following supplemental info when testing for the Boing Boing blog (my emphasis below):

Check or Request Site Rating

Use this page to find out the rating of a website. Enter a valid site, and see what categories K9 calls it. You can send us comments or suggest a different category here, too.

Review Page: http://www.boingboing.net/ (Check another site)

This page is currently categorized as Proxy Avoidance, and Newsgroups

This web page has already been submitted many times, and has been verified as rated correctly.

They don't say "stop bugging us about it already" - but it seems that way :-).

"Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report" - Free Expression Policy Project

"Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report":

The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), requires [censorware] in most schools and libraries for adults and minors alike. A new report from the Free Expression Policy Project at the Brennan Center for Justice explains the effects of CIPA and then analyzes nearly 100 tests and studies that demonstrate how filters operate as censorship tools. "Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report" concludes: Although some may say that the debate is over and that filters are now a fact of life, it is never too late to rethink bad policy choices. The report is available at http://www.fepproject.org/policyreports/filters2.pdf

This is a great resource for collecting much of the references for censorware research.

Skimming through it was a bittersweet trip down memory lane for me. I was the secret decryption source for many of the early studies mentioned, though that's not mentioned anywhere (and I'm not criticizing them at all, no particular reason they should note it, just describing why it's so bittersweet). Some later reports done under my own name are there, which is good. So all in all, I suppose I did make a difference.

EFF: "Unintended Consequences: Seven Years under the DMCA"

EFF has released a new DMCA report :

Unintended Consequences: Seven Years under the DMCA

I'm mentioned:

Censorware Research Obstructed

Seth Finkelstein conducts research on "censorware" software (i.e., programs that block websites that contain objectionable material), documenting flaws in such software. Finkelstein's research, for example, revealed that censorware vendor N2H2 blocked a variety of legitimate websites, evidence that assisted the ACLU in challenging a law requiring the use web filtering software by federally-funded public libraries.

N2H2 claimed that the DMCA should block researchers like Finkelstein from examining it. Finkelstein was ultimately forced to seek a DMCA exemption from the Librarian of Congress, who granted the exemption in both the 2000 and 2003 triennial rulemakings. The exemption, however, has not been a complete remedy, since it is limited to the act of circumvention, and does not permit researchers to create or distribute tools to facilitate research.

Censorware in Australia, "YesterDMCA", DMCA and censorware work

Collected noteworthy items, on censorware/DMCA and my past work.

Electronic Frontiers Australia (no relationship to US