[Chapter-delegates] Internet Filtering

[Marcin Cieslak]

Sivasubramanian Muthusamy wrote:
> I am far from a person who advocate control of the internet

I will refer to the points below because I think they are important to 
improve our understanding of the "malicious activity" on the Internet.
Please do not treat this as a personal response to Sivasubramanian -
I am actually taking opportunity to quote some sentences to engage in
a bit more deeper discussion.

> There is a lot of malice around, that arises out of the power placed
> on the malicious underground (here again I would like to say that the
> "underground" per se is not malicious, but a section of the
> underground)  that brings down computers and whole networks down with
> destructive malware. 

It is important in the discussion we have with the stakeholders that 
various kinds of malice should be treated appropriately. Once cannot put 
  DDoS, hacking, unwanted content into one category. I believe that we 
should stress each and every time that the particular issue should be 
identified and appropriate measures taken and no "catch-all" solutions 
exist.

 > On extreme issues such as child pornography I believe that the 
Internet community
 > needs to find a way to keep these untraceable content completely out 
of the net.

I have trouble understanding why "child pornography" made such a career 
in recent times. Mentioning this over and over as the example of the 
"universally accepted wrongdoing" brings more harm than good; I wonder 
how many people started looking for such content just out of curiosity.

The Internet reflects more and more accurately human activities in the 
real world. It is not the issue to remove the content out of the net.
It is the issue to root-out the particular criminal activity. There has 
been lots of expertise in tracking particular kinds of criminals in the 
real world.

One very often forgotten fact is that Internet brings also new 
possibilities of combating crime; for example it is much easier and 
safer for police agent provocateur to act on the Internet. They do not 
need to risk they lives to engage with the wrongdoers.

> It requires some form of regulatory mechanism. I am not suggesting
> that such powers be vested with the Government. 

There will not be and cannot be a single regulatory mechanism, since we 
are dealing with very different policy issues:

1) Network and protocol-level vandalism
- is handled today to a some successful extent by the network operators 
by managing excess traffic for example.

2) Preventive (ex-ante) censorship - blocking the content before it can 
be seen
- is handled in the best way by the end-user.

Filtering out pornography is no different than popular spam- or 
ad-filtering. I would advocate the use of Privoxy 
(http://www.privoxy.org/) or similar solutions to many end-users. 
Actually, removing pop-under and pop-up advertisements makes it much 
more difficult to reach unwanted web sites.

In my practice since many years I have not been able to reach any 
explicit pornographic content by accident, mainly because I use 
appropriate host security, spam and ad filtering software. Maybe I am 
lucky, but I could access specific content only by explicit request and 
even with some effort.

In general I advocate the use of personal filters because of the very 
fact that every user should be able to define his/her own filtering 
rules. Every user should also be able to temporarily turn off the 
filtering should there be a need to access specific normally unwanted 
content. This way those users' policies (what's unwanted and what's 
wanted) can be personalized and can change over time, in order to become 
more effective.

Whoever takes the responsibility to take care of others (being that ISP, 
the government etc.) by providing a shared policies (global, nation-wide 
or per-site filters) is taking the possibility of free choice off the 
end-users. This, among from free-speech disadvantages mentioned already 
by Oliver, generates also the false sense of security - "we are safe 
because somebody ELSE takes care of us".

We - in Poland  - have analyzed the rules of one the software "blessed" 
to be used at the Polish public schools (unfortunately in Polish: 
http://prawo.vagla.pl/node/6430). The result? It blocked access to many 
popular blogging sites and everything about homosexuality.
The Internet community here has managed to cause that issue to be 
petitioned officially on the parliamentary forum 
(http://prawo.vagla.pl/node/6984).

3) After-fact (post-ante) take down mechanism.

This works only for the best for the most obvious and universally 
regarded as malicious content (for example worms, viruses). 
Traditionally in the early days of the Internet this was handled with 
the so-called LART-mechanism - the informal process of exchanging 
information between network operators. Today this process has been 
largely replaced be some sort of cease-and-desist letters, being 
generated manually or automatically, with limited success.

The issue with #3 is similar to that one of the global filtering - no 
one is able (and I presume will never be able) to provide a global set 
of policy rules stating what's right or wrong.

 > But would there be any harm if such powers are vested with the 
Internet Community
 > - you and me and those from the Internet Community renowned for their 
values of
> freedom and privacy and other rights and values that are
> characteristic of today's internet?

Yes, but finding a universal solution to the wrongdoing on the Internet 
is a special case of solving the general philosophical question "What's 
right and what's wrong?". While it is easy to name few unquestionable 
cases, things are getting really nasty when the edge cases come to play, 
for example as regards to political, religious or sexual content.

Therefore I believe that the general strategy of ISOC should be to 
empower and educate users about making their own explicit choices and 
the possibilities to apply appropriate technology.

-- 
               << Marcin Cieslak // saper at saper.info >>

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