Placing the New Zealand Internet Filter Story in Perspective
March 15th, 2010
I rarely need to do this, but please stop submitting this story. Dozens of you guys think I have somehow missed this. I didn’t.
Why didn’t I post it?
First of all, given everything that’s out in the open about what governments are doing on the Internet, is this story even relevant for Cryptogon readers?
Second, in the case of NZ, there is no requirement for ISPs to use the filter.
Third, it is only being used by two tiny ISPs at the moment. Don’t like it? Use an ISP that doesn’t use it. So far, there are two (Slingshot and Natcom) that explicitly state that they won’t use it.
Fourth, this news was all over the media in New Zealand, so, for the relative handful of Kiwis who read Cryptogon, it would have been a waste of time to mention this.
Fifth, most ten-year-olds could get around the filter.
Sixth, the New Zealand Government does virtually nothing of any significance without consulting its masters in Australia/U.S./China/Japan. Anything crappy that’s happening in New Zealand is an echo of absurd policies elsewhere. I don’t know whether the beehive needs an enema or an exorcism, but whatever has taken over in Wellington isn’t serving the interests of the people of New Zealand.
So… An ISP optional list of childporn and bestiality sites that only two minor ISPs are using… It didn’t spike above noise level for me.
Some might say, “But the government will start flagging traffic to political sites as well!”
I would respond that anyone who thinks that the government isn’t already flagging traffic to political sites hasn’t been paying attention over the last fifteen years or so.
Why does virtually all Internet traffic in New Zealand flow through one address in Auckland? (I don’t get dozens of emails about that.) There’s a nothing-to-see-here explanation, which is related to long haul data transport to and from a small island country… But that situation has created a degree of centralization that I would call too tantalizing for any government to ignore. I definitely don’t want to discuss the facility in any more detail, but traceroute is all you need to know that the situation here is far weirder than some list of kiddie fiddler sites. Note: Don’t bother posting the address to the facility I’m referring to here (or a Google Street view link, that shows, among lots of other terrifying things, that people throw trash on the diesel backup generator cage outside near the sidewalk).
Via: Ars Technica:
New Zealand’s government-run Internet filtering system is now running, and two ISPs are already using the system. Seven thousand websites are on the list, most dealing with child sexual abuse, bestiality, and other illegal content, as classified by the country’s official censors (you too can be a censor for a day). Such material has been illegal offline in New Zealand for years, so the expansion of the program to the Internet isn’t a big surprise. But will it work?
The government runs the filter, but ISP participation remains voluntary. Currently, Maxnet and Watchdog are confirmed to be using the filter, though other ISPs are said to be interested. Maxnet CEO John Hanna explained his company’s position to Computerworld New Zealand: “Filtering out child pornography is also very much in line with our company values—our customers would be disappointed to hear if we weren’t participating. So participation for us has always been a no-brainer.”
The filter uses a BSD Unix-based appliance called WhiteBox from Swedish company Netclean (“We protect children on the Internet”). The government runs the filtering server and maintains the blocklist, which it advertises to ISPs using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). ISP routers then “know” that the best routing path to blocked addresses runs through the government’s filtering servers; all other requests route through the conventional Internet as usual and are never scanned or logged by the government.
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