TRYING to get all perspectives on the Internet filter regime, I’ve had the opportunity to interview another interested party regarding the proposed Australian Internet Filter, the Electronic Frontiers Australia.

I spoke with Colin Jacobs of whom is representing them as Internet censorship spokesman.

I have transcribed the interview as best as I can below:

Ben: Tonight we have Colin Jacobs representing Electronic Frontiers Australia. Colin is a board member for the EFA and joins us to talk about the Governments proposed Internet filter. Colin how are you?

Colin: Not to shabby, how are you?

Ben: I’m good thank you. You’ve been doing media interviews all day I hear?

Colin: Yes, this would be number five.

Ben: That’s good. Now tell us, what does Electronic Frontiers Australia do? What do they serve for in Australia?

Colin: We are basically a grass roots lobby group for Australian Internet users. We’re funded by memberships and individual donations. Our job as we see it is to lobby for better policy and for the rights of Australian Internet users.

Ben: Is it a lobby group that sits in parliament, or is it an external third party?

Colin: Certainly an external third party. All volunteers at the moment. We do things like media releases and put together policy analysis documents. There’s a good one on Internet filtering on our website for instance. We make submissions to parliamentary enquiries, that sort of thing. We actually keep quite busy. There’s a few techies and a few lawyers, making up the mix.

Ben: And what is your role with them?

Colin: At the moment I’m the Internet censorship spokesperson. I spend a lot of time doing outreach to the media and others on the Internet filtering campaign we’re talking about tonight.

Ben: This whole Internet filtering thing that is going on has only hit the mainstream within the last week or so. The Government I believe wants to perform live trials and are expressing (or they’re about to, I’m not sure if they have) put out an expressions of interest to ISP’s in Australia saying they want to perform live trials and will be asking ISP’s “will you participate”? Now do you think the Government will find willing Internet Service Providers to perform such a live trial on putting Internet filtering in to place?

Colin: It’s a good question. Part of it will depend on actually what they have to do, of which the Government has been pretty tight-lipped about. However I can state with out to much speculation that the ISP’s are pretty reluctant to take part in any of this. They know their users are mad and some of them have been hearing from their users that this is not a service they are interested in. However some of the ISP’s (especially the smaller ones) would be worried that if they don’t partake, they wouldn’t know what was coming down the pipe because the Government might keep it all secret. They would be worried that they would be at a competitive disadvantage. Under those circumstances it might be hard to blame an ISP if they decided to participate because if it’s going to be the law, the more you know about it, the better you can prepare.

Ben: From a technical perspective, can you explain to us why people are in up roar about this, why people are so upset? Surely some people I know have been taking the Devils advocate and saying “If it’s illegal then it shouldn’t be there in the first place”. What is it that is making people so angry about having a two tiered system? If you could explain that as well?

Colin: Well the Government went to the last election promising that there would be a mandatory clean feed that is a Internet feed that filtered out all material inappropriate for children. For children of what age and stuff wasn’t really specified. Their sticking by that plan. However it’s now come to light that there will also be a secondary filter that is for illegal material of which you can’t opt-out of. That’s what we know now, and this was confirmed last week in Senate estimates of hearings. People do ask: “Oh but the illegal filter, surely you’re not in favour of child pornography” and the answer is of course no we are not, we’d love to see it stamped out, and if there was software or some magical hardware box that could stamp out child pornography we would probably be in favour of it. However there is a few reasons why we can’t endorse any plan like that. First is the technology just doesn’t exist. No matter what they do, there has to be some collateral damage. Speed of the Internet, the cost of administering the system will cause the cost of Internet access to go up. Over blocking and under blocking are certainly  things to worry about, who decides what is illegal? The list would be secret. There would be no way to know how stuff got on there, and how to get something off. The list would have to be secret because otherwise the Government would be publishing a list of illegal websites you could go and ‘check out’. And finally, and perhaps the best argument is that it wouldn’t actually prevent anyone from accessing illegal material because of the way the Internet works. Anyone with a little bit of technical know-how could bypass it and get in to a website that was on the blacklist using a proxy or a VPN or some other technology. I’d be very sceptical that most consumers of child pornography are just browsing the open web because of the fact that it can be filtered and tracked. They would use things like Peer to peer and other protocols and technologies that would not be subject to filtering at all. So for a huge amount of money, tens of millions of dollars, and a huge cost to our Internet competitiveness, we would effectively achieve zero. So in terms of cost benefits, it’s pretty hard to make an argument for that as well.

Ben: As you say, Peer to peer. Now that was never tested in those filtering products that were tested. That was one of the things that wasn’t able to be filtered out successfully, now was it?

Colin: No, I mean the filters are only for web traffic. That makes sense from a technical point of view. You can find all of the packets that were sort of coming back form a particular port, and assemble them into a webpage. Peer to peer is very distributed, the packets come from all over the Internet. They come in random order and so on. Filtering them is not on the cards at all, and that sort of renders the whole thing ‘moot’ when it comes to child pornography at least.

Ben: When I was talking to Mark Newton of Internode of whom has definitely been one of the spokespeople as part of the public, as a well informed citizen. He was saying that pretty much 90% of Internet traffic is that type of traffic, is the Peer to peer and encrypted traffic, especially from Internode’s perspective. People are also saying “Well this filter is going to slow things down as well, and the Government wants to put forward a National Broadband Network investing 4.7 billion dollars in a National Broadband Network, and they want to put in a filter at the same time that’s going to cause degradation” it kind of seems a little silly, would it seem the same way for you?

Colin: Right, it is exactly at odds with their main policy they took to the election of ‘faster better broadband for Australians’. This means slower and more expensive broadband as the budget they’ve allocated is certainly not enough to off set that. Given the fact the filtering is widely unpopular amongst Australians, and dreaded by the Internet industry. Your guess is as good as mine why they are perusing it with such zeal. Again for protecting children, it only filters web content. The Government’s own studies looked at cyber safety risks. Those included things like inappropriate chats, cyber bullying, having your personal photos published without your consent, viruses, identity theft et cetera. There are some real issues that require parental supervision, and this filter would mitigate absolutely none of those because content risks were even identified by previous Government research as about the least significant of risks children face online.

Ben: In regards to false positives with such a thing, I know that there’s a couple of them on the top end, being things that were not meant to be let through that were let through, and things were meant to be let through that weren’t let through. Do you know the stats on that?

Colin: Yer, I mean the performance of the filters varied widely. We’re looking at a worse case scenario of about 3 percent of over blocking and up to 8 per cent under blocking. You don’t have to browse through many websites before you would see something that you’re not supposed to and 10,000 or so out of every million websites would be inappropriately  blocked by the standards of the Governments own tests. I don’t think that’s acceptable to anybody in turn or an Internet experience.

Ben: When I was talking to Mark (of Internode) he was also saying who is going to front up the cost for such a system? The Government is talking about putting a couple of million in to it, I think $125 [million] is the whole scheme and then $45 [million] for the actual filtering part of it. It’s a whole part of ‘protecting children from the Internet’. What part of that I suppose is going to be given to ISP’s for equipment, who is going to front up those costs? Do we know any of that information yet?

Colin: Not really, they won’t come out and say ‘here is the technical model that we’re going to force ISP’s to peruse’. The best case scenario would be of course that the Government wouldn’t mandate a technical solution, but the ISP’s maybe reluctant to do so and maybe they’ll decide to force their hand. It’s a bit early to say how the money will be allocated. The 44 million dollars is budgeted over the next 4 years ramping up in 2009. I don’t think that’s enough money to install a massive filtering system over the entire Internet infrastructure of the country. I don’t think it would deal with things like customer support issues which will escalate, and the on going costs forever of which the Government will have to fund. I think that will fall short regardless of the scheme that’s eventually proposed.

Ben: Definitely, if these live trials do go out in to the wild, will users have to be informed? Are there any laws that say that they [consumers] have to be informed that they are going to be put on to mandatory filtering?

Colin: That’s a contract between the Internet Service Provider and the customer. We wouldn’t have any objection if an ISP wanted to offer this as a commercial service. They’ll install filters, charge you an extra ~$5 or ~$10 a month and have a sort of special ‘slow lane’ or something like that. That would be perfectly acceptable, but as it happens it’s not really technological feasible, and there is no demand for it of which again sort of begs the question of why the Government is perusing it so zealously. I would be very surprised if the the ISP’s were willing to just drop it in the laps of their customers. It would be in violation of a contract if the customer signed up for unfiltered Internet and then, without their permission it was turned on. They would have to get the opt-in from their customers from the trial.

Ben: So it’s something that stands between the Terms of Service between the Internet Service Provider and the consumer?

Colin: That’s right.

Ben: The Government wants to put something at the Internet Service Provider level which is what we’re talking about. There’s other products out there that consumers can use and that the Government has actually put out available freely. Would you like to explain what they are?

Colin: Sure, the last Government actually had a scheme called ‘Net Alert’, which is still operating. Under that scheme the Government made available PC based filtering software that anyone in the Country could download and install and administer themselves to decide what’s appropriate for them and their families to see. The Government provided support for that as well. That’s still available as we speak, and no one could have any objection to that. It’s up to individuals to decide what goes on in their house hold. However the current Government has pulled the funding for that so that will go out. Instead allocating the money to the Internet censorship scheme we’re discussing.

Ben: What can we do as public citizens, as voting citizens to let the Government know of our opinion?

Colin: The best thing to do right now is to let both the minister and your local representative know, the legislation still hasn’t been introduced in to parliament, so there’s definitely still time to show them how unpopular this is, and how worried Australians are that their Internet service will become slower and more expensive. That includes opposition and independents as well because their votes will be necessary to get this though the senate if they go that route.

Ben: And for more information for the listeners, where can they head to?

Colin: http://www.nocleanfeed.com is the EFA’s campaign site about the filtering.

Ben: Ok, great. Well thank-you very much Colin for coming to chat, it’s been a pleasure talking with you.

Colin: You’re welcome