COPA and Filtering

The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) received a blow from the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that it is likely that COPA is unconstitutional. COPA is a law that purports to protect minors from viewing sexually explicit materials on the Internet by requiring those who post sexually explicit content for "commercial purposes" to restrict access to the content by requiring a credit card or some technological measure so that minors cannot gain access. Failure to do so could result in a $50,000 fine and six months in prison.

The Court decision argues that "blocking and filtering software is a less restrictive alternative" and that COPA can be circumvented by minors that have access to credit cards and that COPA does not apply to foreign pornographic content. Therefore even if COPA were to take effect U.S.-based porn outfits could just move their operations overseas. It also concludes that COPA would only apply to Web content, therefore filtering technology, which can block email, chat, and other forms of Internet communication is more effective. Finally, it suggests that filtering technology is less restrictive because it can "impose selective restrictions on speech at the receiving end, not universal restrictions at the source" and its use can be encouraged "by giving strong incentives to schools and libraries". But is the use of filtering technologies a good substitute for bad legislation?

Filtering reports

Recently two report have been published looking at state-directed Internet filtering and surveillance. The first is entitled " The Internet In the Arab World: A New Space of Repression?" by the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information. The second report is "Internet Under Surveillance 2004: Obstacles to the free flow of information online" by Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

Both the OpenNet Initiative and the Citizen Lab are mentioned in the RSF report.

Google and China

Google has reportedly invested $10 million in Chinese search engine Baidu. It appears that Google is trying stake out some territory in China in order to compete with Yahoo!, a company that already has a presence there through the 3721 search engine. In fact some are describing the move as a clash between the Google/Baidu and Yahoo!/3721 camps.

Recalling that Google itself was temporarily blocked in China the move seems surprising. But some are suggesting that the move allows Google to become acquainted with China’s self-censorship policies. Google apparently worked with Chinese officials to have Google unblocked but little is known about why Google was blocked and how it came to be unblocked. If Google is intending to move into the Chinese market, what will Google's stance be on self-censorship and Internet filtering?

Transparency/accountability and Internet filtering

The fact that the Internet in China is subject to significant filtering is old news, but now users's themselves can help out. The new website Illegal and Inappropriate Information Report Center, is run by Internet Society of China (ISC), the same people who brought you the Public Pledge of Self-Regulation and Professional Ethics for China Internet Industry ( signed by Yahoo!) If you want to have a website blocked just fill out a form, but make sure that the site falls into one of the categories such as "Attack party and government", "Publicizes the cults" (e.g. Falun Gong), "Violates the common courtesy", or "Other illegal and not good information". (* The wording is odd because it was translated with Babelfish.) This raises serious questions concerning the transparency and accountability of Internet filtering.

Combatting child porn or just another censorware outfit?

The Guardian reports that British Telecom, "Britain's largest high-speed internet provider" will begin censoring web sites to combat child pornography. The project is known as Cleanfeed and the article states that "who attempt to access illegal sites will receive an error message as if the page was unavailable." The article implies that that list of illegal sites was compiled by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) but all of this remains unclear to me. While IWF does monitor sites that host child abuse images and report them to police it does not appear to be involved in the production of URL black lists, public lists anyway.

[NOTE: I have since been informed that this Cleanfeed is NOT the same Cleanfeed as mentioned in the article. So take the following merely as my thoughts on the Cleanfeed service and has been slightly edited as a result :]

Cleanfeed, however, is a "pre-filtered broadband Internet" service that maintains a database of more that 6 million (6280873 total domains to date) categorized domain names that are further classified as "banned" or "allowed". The following is a quick, and less than thorough, assessment of Cleanfeed using its own site testing tool. In short, Cleanfeed only seems to categorize domain names, not full URL's and is plagued with all sorts of (mis) classification issues.

6/4 & Censorware

Today, June 4 2004, is the 15 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the world is remembering. The authorities are trying to snuff out any protest and maintaining a strict censorship policy, including Internet censorship. The cyberpolice keep a close watch over the Internet and restrict access to many web sites. In the past, researchers have attempted to document censored content and various methods of Internet filtering in China. But one aspect of Internet filtering that has not been fully explored is censorware products targeted at the client/small network level and implemented in schools, libraries, and web cafe's.

Air Traffic Control and Cyberterrorism

On June 3 2004 the air traffic control system in the UK shut down for one hour (7am -8am) causing flights to be delayed, cancelled and grounded. The Flight Data Processing System was being tested (testing on a live, critical infrastructure system?) in preparation for an upgrade when errors were detected. It was decided that a reboot (always the best option?) was the appropriate solution. Service was eventually restored. A similar incident recently occurred in Texas, USA.

These events will no doubt make their way into "security" literature with the addition of "what if" scenarios in which the disruption was cause by hackers or cyberterrorists rather than the unappealing reality of bugs, glitches and upgrades.

Iraq, Memory Holes, SmartFilter and a whole lot more

The Memory Hole blog reports that it is blocked on U.S. military computers. An email from a user stationed in Iraq to the Memory Hole shows that this block page information is shown to the user when they try to access the site:

Access Denied (content_filter_denied)
Your request was denied because of its content categorization: "Extreme;Politics/Religion"
For assistance, contact your network support team.

The categorization indicates that it is probably blocked as a result of the sites categorization as "Extreme" by a commercial filtering application rather than a specific blockage by the U.S. military. But you never know. A quick google search reveals...