Rubénerd!

On Saturday, Renai LeMay poignantly makes the case against the Interpol filter in Australia with five points. It's the best summary I've read so far, but I have a further five to bring us around to an even ten. David Letterman might use them.

His points in a nutshell

1. Telcos aren’t informing users
2. There is no civilian oversight
3. The law in unclear
4. The potential for scope creep is strong
5. There is no open and transparent appeal process

My points

6. It will ultimately be ineffective

The telcos that have misguidedly implemented such a system want to appear they're doing something to stop the spread of child pornography, but Interpol's DNS based filtering scheme is even more simple to bypass than what Senator Conroy is suggesting.

As I've repeatedly stated here, every point about the ethical and financial burdens such a system introduces are entirely moot as long as this stands.

7. It can potentially implicate the innocent

Technically competent internet users regularly and legally use their own or alternative DNS servers for privacy and speed reasons. Requests from these users will be indistinguishable from those who have elected to use alternative DNS servers to access illegal and/or filtered content.

If we follow this Interpol filter to its logical conclusion, it's not inconceivable that ISPs could begin to demand usage of their own DNS servers in their terms of service, and those that don't could find themselves implicated alongside people distributing banned content. The social implications are obvious.

8. It encourages precedent

Assuming ISPs resolve Renai's first point and are honest with their customers, this filter is setting a worrying precedent that could be used to justify the more sweeping and comprehensive filter schemes Senator Conroy is proposing. I can see the talking points now: "The Interpol filter was benign and worked great, and our filter will be even better!"

Complacency, and acceptance of this as the status quo are what terrify me.

9. The Interpol filtering scheme itself is misguided, and won't save children.

Plenty has been written on this point already, but the fact that certain large ISPs are so willing to implement this raises serious ethical questions.

10. We've always been at war with Eastasia

"Here is an opportunity to to make your arguments. I trust to the common sense of the Australian public with respect to the classification system."
~ Stephen Conroy, as reported by Renai LeMay for Delimiter.

Mr Conroy has it backwards. He can ask for our opinion, but the fact is he has repeatedly failed to prove the financial and technical feasibility of his filter, to say nothing of the threat it poses to civil liberties. In the words of Christopher Hitchens: "What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof."

Therefore I submit the only common sense thing to do, is scrap it!

Following Dave's instructions as per his interesting new site:

If you agree with these principles, please say so in a place where your expression can be seen and counted. If you mostly agree, or would say it differently, just copy and modify the text, and point back to the original. That's why it has a CC license. Discuss on the tech-without-borders mail list.

The points, and Dave has them

1. We are people of tech.
2. We live and work everywhere.
3. We value our own freedom, the freedom of people who use our technology and freedom in general.
4. We think there is no meaningful distinction between WikiLeaks and the news organizations covering the stories in cooperation with WikiLeaks.
5. We urge all governments to respect freedom of the press, whether the news originates online or offline.
6. We apply these principles in our work and they are embodied in our technology.

My thoughts, and Ruben has them

On the whole I agree with all of his points, save for #4. I think there is a difference between Wikileaks and news organisations covering the stories with their cooperation, but that's not my primary concern. If we want to make this an all inclusive and time tested list people will be able to reference, we'd be doing ourselves a huge favour by not discussing the flavour site of the month and keeping things more general. Perhaps a more perititent point would be "We are journalists, because we're engaged in debate and discussion". Finally,

Point #2 really spoke to me, as I've essentially used it to attack the Australian governments plan for a compulsory internet filter on several occasions. Forgive the self-quoting:

Welcome to the 21st century Steven Conroy [the senator proposing the mandatory filter]. If you piss off well educated people who have the means to travel, they will simply wave, move away, apply themselves passionately to their jobs in a society that values their contributions [..] and pay their taxes to them instead. It’s your call.

Random footnotes

• I'm glad I can agree with Dave on something again after this confusing piece.

• Because this is TechWithoutBorders, I suppressed my weblog theme's automatic image border on the logo. Having a sense of humour and using common sense, there's another point he should include!

• Part of the reason why some things don't make sense, such as this point, is because they're entirely meaningless. This means people attempt to find meaning where there is none, like in this point. This point was entirely meaningless.

• In line with Dave's original piece, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, not Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution ShareAlike which the rest of my stuff here is.

  

It's time to start worrying.

Labor has lost its substantial two-party preferred lead against the coalition in just two weeks, the latest Newspoll has found. [...] The poll, taken between Friday and Sunday, found Labor and the coalition are split 50-50.

Don't get me wrong I'm not a Labor fan (at least not any more), but the prospect of this guy being our PM is absolutely terrifying. We don't need another anti-intellectial theocracy.

From a tech perspective I'm guessing we're screwed either way, unless enough people vote below the line and oust Stephen Conroy, or enough Labor ministers grow spines to stand up against the filter, or enough Greens are elected to put pressure on Labor to straighten up and fly right, or a decent combination of all three.

We all suspected as much, but now it's official: the readers of (uh, Zoo Weekly) have dubbed Stephen Conroy the dumbest politician in Australia.

It's all them portal things

For those not in Australia, the illustrious Stephen Conroy is the senator who wants to implement a nationwide, mandatory internet filter based on a super secret blacklist, regardless of the technological infeasibility, negative social implications and other such quibbling factors of which I've discussed at great length. If he wasn't taught at the Ted Stevens school of understanding the intertubes, he at least received some free coaching one afternoon from the man over some cheap alcoholic beverages.

"There's a staggering number of Australians being in having their computers infected at the moment, up to 20,000, uh, can regularly be getting infected by these spams, or scams, that come through, the portal (sic)."

Unlike other esteemed survey organisations such as Newspoll, Zoo Weekly is uniquely positioned to gauge the sentiment of the Australian public on the societal impact of technology. Their exposes on how much photoshopping one poor model in a bikini can endure are featured on the front covers of their magazines each week.

Runners up

As a runner up, I thought Richard Dawkins' description of the Orwellian-ly titled Family First party leader Steven Fielding was particularly apt:

Runner up in the Zoo survey was Family First Senator Steve Fielding, who has been described as having the intellect of an earthworm by eminent scientist Richard Dawkins, after saying he thought the earth was less than 10,000 years old.

I dunno, earthworms can navigate with their eyes closed. Still, I do follow him on Twitter.

For a brief period of time this evening, Australia watched Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott debate over who would best serve the country as PM by dodging questions, not proposing constructive steps towards any environmental action and expelling much hot air about boat people in a way Pauline Hanson would be proud. Third party candidates like Bob Brown or Fiona Patten who would have made the debate interesting (or even just useful) were not invited.

I watched by proxy through Twitter. Don’t think I missed much.

At least it wasn't Australian Idol or a Big Brother celebrity special, I suppose.

sbsnews: Abbott and Gillard's debate will be moved to avoid clashing with #MasterChef on Sunday http://bit.ly/9CCxcW

In other news, this is the first post to showcase my brand new graphic to be displayed with pride on each of my Aussie election posts. It's amazing what 5 minutes in The Gimp and a complete disregard for good design can do :).

Some civil liberty groups are championing the news that Senator Conroy's plan to filter Australian internet has been put "on hold", but personally I'm still just as jaded and pessimistic as I was before. Conroy and his cronies haven't said they're scrapping it which is the only sensible thing to do, they've simply pushed it to a time after the federal elections to spare themselves some embarrassment.

While we're also talking about this, David Ramli of ARNNET is reporting that it seems Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce has also put his support behind the mandatory filter which leads us to one very important question: can we all stop calling Barnaby Joyce a maverick, rouge, super elite senator please? Yes he's taken issue with a few things the coalition have proposed in the past, but reading these descriptions at the start of every single story about him starting to get a little long in the tooth.

A case of another leader who started with a lot of promise but failed to deliver like so many other politicians, so they were replaced. Which of course is the politically correct way to say said person didn't fulfill the desires of some faction. So who do we have now?

Late last night a cabinet reshuffle ousting thingy (they're valid political terms, look them up) former Aussie Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been replaced with Julia Gillard. No, that's me in front of Parliament House, not Julia Gillard, sheesh get your glasses checked.

Position on internet filtering?

Because this is a tech blog (or at least it's supposed to be) I'm more interested to hear what happens to Mr If You Are Against The Mandatory Filter You're A Pedophile Senator Conroy's position. My very good friend and all around awesome guy talkingduck informs me that he could be replaced by Kate Lundly, patron senator of IT and open source. Sounds great, almost too great, so I'm hedging my bets that it won't happen. I hope I'm wrong.

What I'd love to see is a person put in charge who not only recognises the need for open standards, but a transparent bidding process for government IT contracts and who understands that a mandatory internet filter is a futile exercise that will hurt Australia's standing in the world. Oh and it'd be great if she took the NBN seriously, and if she pledged to make all government documents open and available in standard formats, or if not her then someone she puts in charge. We'll have to wait and see.

Positions on other whatnot?

As for other issues, Kevin Rudd talked the talk when it came to asylum seekers, emissions trading and the environment, but failed to follow up on any of them. Preliminary chatter on Twitter by my Aussie friends suggests she won't be changing much of the party's policies, bummer. Ah democracy, its such a productive exercise.

One bit of good news is she's an atheist, like me. I have no problem with people of any faith being the leaders of countries provided they don't let their influence their policy decisions, and Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd unabashedly proved they couldn't in that recent embarrassing debate. If anything only addressing Christian voters was an insult to people of all other faiths and not just heathens like me.

Not sure when the Governor General will be swearing her in on behalf of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and all that. I suppose in these circumstances I can see where having a separate head of state and head of government is a good thing, sort of, kinda, maybe.

It's past the stage where we can laugh and call Senator Stephen Conroy a hapless, bumbling boob who espouses Ted Stevens School of Internets ideals, it's time to start acknowledging him as a grave and real threat to the privacy and security of Australians.

After indigently pushing through with plans for his brainchild mandatory internet filter, Senator Conroy now wants internet providers to log their customers internet usage including sites visited and emails sent, in a similar vein to the WiFi hotspot record keeping proposed in Europe. Once again kudos to ZDNet Australia for their excellent coverage of this.

So unabashedly abhorrent

When arguing against the proposed internet filter, I figured even if the ethical and legal questions were legitimate they were superfluous given such a system would simply fail technologically. I joked on Twitter that it was like arguing the ethical and legal qualms with having lead balloons. In this case, allow me to briefly indulge.

I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV or Twitter, but I have to think there are some serious laws being broken here, and at least a few United Nations charter thingys. Whatever happened to those quaint ideas that you're innocent until proven guilty and that you need probable cause and authorisation from a judge before you can start intercepting a private citizen's communiqués?

It seems far fetched, but this is no different from the government deciding they'll start opening and scanning all snail mail, recording phone calls and photographing smoke signals. Some tin foil hat wearers say such things are already happening, but for those of us without the self esteem to be seen in public wearing such things it certainly seems like yet another thing to be genuinely worried about.

Technological

Okay now that stuff is out of the way, time to move into the area that pays my bills and I like to pretend I know something about.

1. The plan would almost certainly backfire, as people performing illegal activities would simply use proxy servers and encrypt their traffic. As a consequence, law abiding people would have their privacy violated while the Bad Guys keep doing what they want without fear of having their traffic monitored. It would make covert and authorised gathering of intelligence virtually impossible.

2. ISPs wouldn't want to record every address people visit because it would be prohibitively expensive and complicated to maintain such a database, and customers wouldn't want it because the expenses would be passed onto them. I'm assuming the government wouldn't foot the bill.

3. In a fact that perhaps escaped Conroy and his cronies, webpages are often composed of media loaded from multiple sites. This means a single site visit could result in multiple URLs being recorded, some of which could be unintentional -- or worse -- unknown. I can only imagine all the goatse-like sites people will create for Australians to accidently stumble upon that contain frames performing Google searches for child porn or whatever it is Conroy claims is the reason for these North Korean measures.

4. Conroy's personal crusade against Google looks ridiculously hypocritical given he wants the same alleged powers for himself and the Federal Police.

5. If this became law, I'd create a website with an address like ScrewYouConroy.com and have all our computers ping it around the clock while performing random Google searches on random combinations of dictionary words from The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Even if such draconian measures were enacted, we could lower their information entropy enough for them to be rendered far less useful.

6. You think Australia is the laughing stock of the Western world now and the butt of thousands of jokes in China highlighting our government's hypocrisy and arrogance? You ain't seen nothing yet.

We're really screwed

I usually vote for The Greens but their preferences go to Labor. The conservative Liberal and National parties have issued nothing other than off the cuff remarks and certainly no thorough repudiations of these draconian policies. It's become cliche to say we'll vote for the lesser of two evils, but what do you do when both parties are evil?

I think on election day this year I'll just quietly sob in the corner of my room with a big tub of ice cream and watch some moeblob anime. That is, if the latter is still available and wouldn't flag me as a suspect.