Cognitive Dissidents

While in Fuengirola the other day I bought a copy of the Daily Mail.

The advertisement article about BT Cleanfeed caught my eye for some reason.

The evil trade in child porn on the Internet is growing at a shocking rate.

Yet simple technology can block ALL these sites and put the pornographers out of business.

So why are some Internet companies refusing to use it?

I’ve registered my objections to blanket “blacklist” ISP censorship systems like BT Cleanfeed before – but this two-page PR puff article takes the biscuit – some of my objections are listed below.

My first objection is that the Daily Mail have actually made it *easier* for perverts to find illegal material – even though they have obscured the names of the guilty parties.

I’ll pick a quote at random.

… there is a the video ... of a ten year old girl “very cute sweety, in pain she’s even more beautiful” …

There are more quotes like this in the article – designed to overwhelm the reader with shock and horror so they buy into the major premise of the story – but each and every quote provides enough information for a Google user to locate the sites in question within minutes.

This is a big bonus for novice Internet perverts who haven’t managed to hook up with their more experienced brethren – but now the Daily Mail has managed to provide the information for anyone who can read.

I guess the author of the article did exactly what I did - looked at the links in Google - - an act which is not illegal – rather than viewing the websites – which is illegal.

There was a high degree of match between the quotes in the initial opening paragraphs of the article and the material I found on Google – too high a match in my opinion – haven’t the Daily Mail heard of synonyms, rewriting or selective editing?

I considered rewriting the quote above – but as (i) I am quoting the Daily Mail in this context I wanted to leave as much intact as possible, (ii) the illegal website in question has been removed from the (possibly) hacked site that was doing the hosting, and (iii) the damage has well and truly been done – how many people read the Daily Mail as opposed to my blog?

The Daily Mail provided enough information to any pervert with a knowledge of the Internet to find exactly the kind of goods that were being described in the article – you can’t buy advertising like that – especially with the circulation of the Daily Mail.

Shame on you Daily Mail! Next time you do an expose like that - rewrite the quotes so that they don’t lead perverts directly to illegal material – you changed the names – why not change the quotes as well?

Next on my list – the often cited figures about “100,000” attempted “accesses” to illegal material daily – figures that cannot be verified by any critical external observer because BT Cleanfeed is a closed system.

No-one can verify that the blocked URLs are illegal – that would be illegal – and BT Cleanfeed release few details about what sites are blocked as illegal because that would be like providing a directory of illegal sites.

In just two years the number of ... websites identified by British police has increased by an astonishing 78 percent to 6,128, virtually all of them abroad.

Every day in Britain alone, more than 100,000 attempts are made to access pornographic images of children- three times the number recorded in 2004.

Yet nobody can independently confirm these figures because:

The "BlackList" is secret - and any attempt to reverse engineer the contents of the BlackList might be illegal under the DMCA - and no checking can be made of the BlackListed sites anyhow.

If you really do stumble upon a dubious site - and confirm that the BlackList is working - then you are open to prosecution for viewing the wrong kind of site.

Otherwise we have no idea who is "BlackListed" - as I said the whole .ru domain seems suspect

The blunt instrument of blacklist usage - blocking servers, domains and subdomains because they are suspected of hosting illegal material - inflates the illegal “access” figures by including innocent Internet users along with the guilty – and also damages free speech.

If I access some domain in Russia that is blocked because certain hosts inside that domain are guilty of hosting illegal material – does my attempt to access that domain count as an attempt to “access” the wrong type of material?

If a domain, subdomain or even a single server were blacklisted - then BT Cleanfeed has no way of knowing whether I wanted to access legal or illegal material from that server, domain or subdomain.

The BT Cleanfeed system only knows that a site is blacklisted – and then counts any attempted access as an “attempt to access” illegal material – this must inflate the figures for “attempted illegal accesses”.

So we can’t take the claim that “100,000” attempts per day are made to “access” illegal material seriously until we know more about how BT Cleanfeed works - but we can’t find out how BT Cleanfeed works because it is secret – and if we try and figure out how it works we might be prosecuted anyway.

This is called “Catch-22” – and I still fail to see how it helps to protect children from abuse.

While we have no way of knowing the true validity of the statistics claimed for the BT Cleanfeed system – we do know that people in Russia, China and many other countries rely on the web and P2P file sharing to promote freedom of speech and free communication of ideas away from the hand of repressive government restrictions.

If whole networks are blacklisted how will they get their information?

Any server could be blacklisted for a number of reasons – including being compromised by criminal hackers seeking to set up illegal sites - but should that server be blocked because criminal elements have used it?

How long should the block last?

How would you even know that you had been blocked – after all the contents of the BT Cleanfeed blacklist are a secret – when all that appears on the screen is an error message?

In my mind there is no room in any democracy for any “secret blacklists” – they must be open to inspection – not only to ensure that data integrity, data security and data access are not compromised in any way – but also to ensure that the commercial claims based on any statistics are grounded in some kind of reality.

That is especially true when the system is from a UK company, the product costs 2K and which is being heavily promoted by the UK government who are looking for “100% takeup”.

Right now the BT Cleanfeed system provides none of the transparency and openness that we have come to expect from the current government – who claim to be in favour of “open government” – but that comes as no surprise.

I guess the correct democratic solution is to form a panel of IT experts, academics, hackers, media people, and law-enforcement types - with a sprinkling of the great and good and a couple of Tony’s cronies - to monitor the performance of the near-monopoly that BT Cleanfeed will enjoy.

At least it would help to ensure that BT Cleanfeed (i) works as specified, (ii) that any available public data was consistent and complete, (iii) that standard concerns about data integrity, security and access were addressed and (iv) that the BT Cleanfeed system cannot be reverse-engineered or hacked in order to provide a “directory of illegal sites”.

Next up – the canard about blacklists fixing the problem of child abuse on the net.

Campaigners against child abuse quite reasonably argue that if people cannot reach the websites, the criminals cannot profit from their crimes.

Whereas campaigners against secret and undemocratic blacklists reasonably argue that blacklists do not prevent children being abused, and also that black lists do not prevent perverts accessing illegal material.

Paul Goggins - the government Home Office Minister in charge of illegal websites – wants 100% of UK ISPs to take up the scheme – costing 2K plus implementation costs and is “determined that we will hit 100%”

That 100% figure looks good on paper – but it sweeps the problem of child abuse websites under the carpet where NuLabour can claim that they have tackled yet another problem successfully.

The bonus “spin-factor” of keeping abusive material “out of sight and out of mind” is good – but better still - NuLabour have made money for “Cool Britannia Plc” in the process – which should guarantee at least some of them nice directorships when they retire from politics.

The government should concentrate on action against the criminals who abuse children for profit in marginal and 3rd world countries, rather than applying media-friendly quick-fix band-aid solutions. The use of secret blacklists does not stop children being abused, nor does it stop perverts viewing illegal material – but it does make for positive spin – no surprise that NuLabour has chosen it then.

Finally, it would seem that the Daily Mail has a very shaky grasp of the “common carrier” principle.

Worryingly the ISPA is insisting its members are “mere conduits” for these depraved images, pleading that ISPs are “carriers’ of information like the postal service.

Except, or course, the postal service delivers to a specific person and the content of the postbag is not open to anyone.

I hate to mention this to the Daily Mail – but the contents of TCP/IP traffic are delivered to a specific person – the one operating the computer.

In addition to that – anything delivered via an SSL connection is also “not open to anyone” – although unencrypted traffic can still be sniffed of course.

My preferred analogy would be if the criminals who ran these operations sent out their “brochures” via snail-mail, the perverts then sent back payment via snail-mail using postal orders, and then the illegal material was sent back via snail-mail to the perverts.

Would the Daily Mail then advocate that because the Post Office is carrying illegal material they should be prosecuted?

No they would not – because the Post Office – like ISPs - are common carriers.

ISPs are not responsible for the material they transact across their networks anymore than the Post Office is responsible for illegal material delivered by post, or Fedex is responsible when criminals use their system to distribute illegal drugs.

… the ISPA asserts that it must rely on the general public and official agencies to police the net. It cannot do it, it says, because it is not “possible or practical” to monitor content.

Even if it was “possible or practical” to monitor content - would the Daily Mail advocate the opening of every parcel, letter or package in the country if it was conclusively proved that criminals were using postal and parcel delivery services to make an illegal profit?

Once again they would not – and if they did then the Post Office would point out that they were not responsible for the mail they handled – and invoke the “common carrier” principle.

So why does the Daily Mail apply one rule to the ISPs and another to more traditional forms of communication?

The appalling fact is that the government and big media are using the illegal content stick to force UK ISPs into using monopolistic CensorWare which restricts access to certain websites – the details of which are held on a secret blacklist which has no integrity checks and no accountability – and which can never work anyway.

What price free speech?

Are we to allow blacklist censorship via the back door in the name of protecting children – even though blacklist censorship does not protect children – or are we going to try and find ways of protecting free speech while still tackling the problem of child abuse?

Right now the choices are open.

We can accept passive CensorWare that glosses over the problem and waves a media friendly magic wand to convince the public that the government is doing something, or we can find a more proactive solution to child abuse – one that doesn’t involve secret blacklists and covert censorship.

The government could start by looking at the international links between the criminal gangs that are involved in human trafficking for sexual activity, child pornography, and pornography spam, rather than promoting this flawed approach

Until the government tackles the problem properly a secret blacklist will be determining everything you see or hear on the web, children will still be abused and perverts will still find illegal material on the web.

Is that the solution we want?

Can't we do more for these children?

This is not a solution – this is a problem that is not going to go away unless tackled properly – and blacklist censorship is not tackling the problem properly.

Its time to change the system – tackle the causes and not the symptoms - but NuLabour were always about shallow quick fixes backed up with propaganda - so I won’t hold my breath.

Tags: censorship control internet filtering BT IWF child pornography kiddie porn cleanfeed blacklist censorship covert censorship blacklists censorware