[pp.int.general] Mandatory Internet filtering becoming full spread in Australia

[Janne Paalijarvi]

Hello,

I decided to write some bits about the Australian Internet filtering,
which now appears to becoming full-spread, as described on their
governmental website: http://bit.ly/IcEZ6 . I'm opposing all kinds of
Internet censorship and I think many other pirates are feeling the
same way.

I'll quote shortly here the Australian governmental statement:

"ISP-level content filtering is already occurring in other countries,
including Canada, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the United
Kingdom.

The Government wants to ensure a similar level of protection for
internet users in Australia."


As a Finn it greatly pisses me off that Finland is mentioned there, as
a some kind of positive example of censorship. What a load of
bullshit, frankly. Internet censorship in Finland has been an utter
farce. I'll shortly describe what has happened here.

Finnish ministry of communications introduced a law about making it
possible for ISPs to censor Internet. Censorship was optional for
ISPs, but the minister of communications gave out a statement saying
that if not enough ISPs would start filtering, it would be made
mandatory. IIRC, most of the major telcos got onboard, but a number of
smaller, geekish providers resisted.

Technology used in filtering was mainly DNS-based. A Finnish Internet
activist Matti Nikki (from Sony DRM rootkit discovery fame) used a
bunch of web crawling scripts and reverse-engineered the list of
addresses (which is normally classified, and apparently there are next
to none possibilities to get one removed from the list). He published
his findings on a dedicated website http://lapsiporno.info
("childporn.info"). People audited the list, and found out (IIRC) that
there was <5% actual child pornography. At some point the list
contained quite outrageous misplacements, such as a memorial page for
Thai Queen, violin factory, and at some point even the World Wide Web
Consortium... There was also very high percentage of legit gay
pornography sites listed.

After the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) found out
that Nikki, going by the handle muzzy, was publishing the list, his
lapsiporno.info domain was placed on the list also! So now we had a
state-censored political activist in our living-room also, but we
still continue to hypocrisy over the Chinese censorship situation.

It seemed that an officer from NBI started to hold some kind of
twisted personal grudge against Nikki, who was later accused of
distributing child pornography because of his publication. The
censorship list is believed to be compiled by the aforementioned
officer and I personally think he has also something against the gay
community, because of the many gay sites on the list. Nikki was later
freed of charges, but his site is still on the censorship list. He has
complained about this on several juristic institutions, some of them
having not taken the case at all because they have interpreted the law
as Nikki having no chance to getting off the list. He is currently
complaining to supreme administrative court.

Then a quick anecdote about myself. At some point apparently a Finnish
ISP worker leaked the official censorship list to Wikileaks. Quickly,
a misspelled domain ymphets-stars.com was spotted. I registered it,
put some anti-censorship content online and contacted some decent
lawyers. I asked them to get my domain off the list. It took almost
half a year or so, until my site was free again.

Nowadays a lot of Finnish ISPs have made the filtering voluntary,
possibly because all the bad karma they have received from different
issues. Matti Nikki's fight however goes on.

As I pointed out earlier, what made me write this piece was that that
in the Australian governmental statement Finland was held as a
positive example of web filtering. This could not be farther from the
truth. If somebody of you "highly-ranking" pirates are going to have
for example interviews or debates about the Australian censorship
situation, you can possibly remember what is actually going on in
Finland and tell the audience about it. Remember this. Spread the
word.

For references, see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapsiporno.info .

Janne Paalijärvi,
member of Finnish Pirate Party