Three News Items of Interest

UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre

The UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) has released its latest annual report (2008/2009). While they cover a much wider range of activity, one of the findings is highly relevant to the debate about Internet filtering in New Zealand.

Similarly we can report a step change in the way that offenders access images, with the vast majority of trading taking place on various peer to peer (P2P) platforms. Our focus must now be on tackling this as a priority.

What’s relevant about this? The Department of Internal Affairs’ proposed Internet filtering scheme only works with unencrypted websites, and is useless against P2P file trading.

How Voluntary Ends

The UK has a non-government voluntary web-filtering system that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can sign up for. Well, as reported by the Independent, it won’t be voluntary very soon:

The leaked Home Office letter says a clause in the Police, Crime and Private Security Bill in the Queen’s Speech would “compel domestic ISPs to implement the blocking of illegal images of child sexual abuse”.

The New Zealand system is also voluntary for ISPs. I’m worried that the voluntary nature of the scheme will only last as long as it takes to get established.

Filtering Systems are an Opportunity for People Who Wish to Suppress Free Speech

Finally there’s an article about an attempt by Scientologists in Australia to not only have anti-Scientology sites added to the Australian Internet filter, but also sites that provide anonymisation services to those sites.

We have identified that such websites play a major role in the ongoing hate campaign against our Church and their removal or a restriction of access and of content would play a major role in preventing further religious vilification against us.

It is therefore recommended that the Australian Government take action to prevent to the creators of websites, whose primary purpose is the incitement of religious vilification, to be prevented from using programs such as WhoisGuard to conceal their identity, so that normal recourse to the law may be accessed as needed to defend basic rights covered by Australian law.

One of the problems with Internet filtering is that, once it’s established, there are no more technical and legal difficulties in banning material on the Internet. This means that the filter is now fair game to every group that has a bee in their bonnet about controlling access to certain sorts of information.