John Linton
I'd almost got over my splenetic reactions to the pointless wafflings of people like Senator Conroy and the other Labour party twinks currently masquerading as a government of a country with a literacy rate above zero when I read this piece of nonsense last night:
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,23021828-15306,00.html
While understanding that the silly woman who made the selection of idiotic statements quoted in that article had absolutely no personal knowledge of anything she was saying she not only doesn't help in dealing effectively with the scum who display and deal in child pornography she makes the task for sensible people in dealing with that societal disgrace even harder than it already is.
Quoting "statistics" (that can only have been 'plucked' from someone's rear end) such as:
"Child pornography is one of the fastest growing online businesses generating approximately $US3 billion ($3.43 billion) each year."
AND
"It is estimated that 100,000 commercial websites offer child pornography"
AND
"more than 20,000 images of child pornography are posted on the internet every week."
may impress the local chapter of the Frenchs Forest women's weekly coffee klatsch but quoting figures without citing the research references belongs in 5th Grade 'debating'.
Such figures, as anyone with an IQ bigger than their shoe size would realise, are completely impossible to compile and even using the word "estimated" before one of the figures is a total nonsense as there simply is no way of estimating any of the quoted figures.
Of course child pornography being displayed on various web sites around the world is pervasive and could very well be increasing in number and degree of depravity exponentially to fill the needs of the insane, criminal and worthless people who display and access it.
No-one, let alone people who manage ISPs, is/are going to dispute that web sites exist in profusion that are criminal and should be removed along with the criminals who construct and operate them.
It just isn't the responsibility, and it's certainly not within the capabilities, of the management of ISPs to perform the policing and criminal detection and prosecution processes that quite firmly remain the elected responsibility of democratic governments.
Exetel, like I imagine any other Australian ISP, would have no issue with 'banning' a legally constituted government agency's list of child pornography web sites. It is a trivial task and the cost of doing it is unlikely to be very great. Steve's assessment of the scope of doing this is summarised as:
"If they are known web sites, so that they publish a list, it is quite easy - we just route those sites IP addresses to null0 on the border routers. It would mean someone would need to do that every time the list is updated.
That will stop anyone accessing them who doesn't take the very basic step of using an external open proxy.
If we have to prevent access to web sites based on some sort of real time block list, that is a little harder and we would need a server dedicated to that and put some work into a script to integrate it into our network operation. There are RBL programs for email and DNS to stop spam that have been around for a long time, so something similar for government censoring should not be too hard to arrange. Of course, RBL's, which everyone thought was a good idea in 1995, have proved enormously effective in the 11 years since - no one gets any spam at all now, do they.
If some sort of content analysis was needed then that would need a device like the NetEnforcer with some specialist software would have to be developed. I would estimate a 1-2 year development time and a total cost of around $500,000 at least. I doubt it would be much more effective than the other two methods though.
The problem is, the internet from its first conception was deliberately designed to get data through against all the efforts of an aggressive, determined enemy. The effort required to block data is vastly greater than the many, many simple and easy ways to overcome such a block. And no blocking method yet developed has proved very effective."
What would that achieve in terms of reducing the amount of child pornography available on the world's web sites? Close to, if not actually, zero from what I can see.
However, if a legally constituted democratic government agency actually knows the IP address of a child pornography web site (which presumably they have to do to be able to ask the ISP to block access to it) the question I want an answer to is this:
If the IP address of a child pornography web site is known - why doesn't the government agency use its 'sister government services' (the Australian Federal Police/FBI/UK Special Branch/Interpol/whatever) to use that information to track down, arrest and punish the owners/operators of such sites?
Exetel, like any other ISP, would instantly comply with any legal requirement to block access to a legally mandated web site list - it is as simple as loading the list into a core router/switching device. Obviously it would be equally simple, though more expensive, to provide a legally required list of IPs together with the names and addresses of the people who attempted to access those sites.
The point is that would do close to nothing/nothing to stop the depraved vermin who trade child pornography whose warped and dangerous minds know slightly more than Senator Conroy and Ms McMenamin about using encryption to display and transfer their criminal images.
Three bullets in the base of the brain for every paedophile will do infinitely more good than some pointless access list banning flim flam nonsense.