I had the opportunity to Interview Mark Newton, a network engineer for Internode. We talked about the Australian Government’s plan to filter the Internet.

On Friday I interviewed Tim Marshall, Senator Stephen Conroy’s media adviser, about what was in fact proposed. I been since been told that I did not “probe” him enough for information.

I stated to those of whom have asked about this, that:

“Drawing blood from a stone isn’t easy”.

Whirlpool, Australia’s largest Internet Forum has been talking about this topic vigorously since ACMA released a report in June of this year regarding trials they were doing in Tasmania. Since then the Government have blatantly been ignoring the public, and industries opinion.

Net Neutrality is at risk as well, says Mark.

Attached is the interview with Mark Newton of Internode.

Image care of Aeriana on WhirlPool

This is a Podcast, scroll down to the bottom to download the MP3.

Transcription (Once again thanks to Sacky) now available on Whirlpool:

Ben: With me this evening is Mark Newton of Internode, network engineer, he is here to represent himself. His appearance will be as a well informed individual, and his words won’t necessarily reflect the views of his employer. Mark how are you?

Mark: I’m doing fine how are you?

Ben: I’m good thank you. Now basically tonight we want to discuss the current governments plans to filter the Australian internet. June of this year, ACMA the communications regulator released a report of which the previous government put forward. The government now in power decided that they would go ahead with the trials listed in it, and so they did in February of this year in Tasmania. Senator Stephen Conroy minister for broadbands communication and the digital economy has stated that “ISP filtering is one element of the governments $125.8 million plan for cyber safety, which also includes educational, international cooperation, research, and law enforcement. Now Mark first of all you are a part of the industry, what is your roll at Internode?

Mark: I’m a network engineer in the core network infrastructure team within the company. I look after things like our national and international networks, datacenter operations, power systems, Eastland networks, not a lot of stuff thats directly customer facing, but I look after most of the stuff that provides the infrastructure that our customer services are built on.

Ben: Great, now can you tell us briefly about the Governments proposed plans so far, or what you know as a well informed person?

Mark: It’s funny, after your interview last week I think we actually know a little bit less about it now than we did a week ago, because up until now the government has been trumpeting the Tasmanian studies as if it’s actually supposed to prove something, and during the interview that you had with Mr Marshall on Friday he effectively disclaimed it by saying that it wasn’t testing the kinds of things that the government would have asked it to test if they were in power at the time that it was commissioned, and so I’m facing criticisms of the governments proposals on a combination of things, on their public policy statements, ministerial press releases, and a large part of it has been that Enex trial from Tasmania, where I think it’s been reasonable to make the assumption that the government wouldn’t have bothered testing those things if it didn’t actually intend to pursue them, but now with Mr Marshall saying that isn’t the case and they paid to have them tested for no good reason, then I think we’re left with very few details about this proposal that’s going to end up affecting, well 21 million Australians as they go on to use the Internet.

Ben: It really is starting to get a little confusing, especially for me, as a person that’s trying to collate the information that is out there and put it in a logical sense and explain it to people that don’t know a lot about the Internet, but first thing if you talk to someone that doesn’t know a lot about it, they’ll be like “What? Australia is trying to filter the Internet?”, they don’t want that, they know that it’s a bad thing, and then you have the media misconstrue what is actually happening, but what amazes me is no one in the mainstream has actually picked onto this yet, it seems to be us. Maybe it’s because they don’t understand exactly what it’s all about and I don’t even think the government understands.

Mark: Well I think the government has to take a lot of responsibility for that. Ever since Senator Conroy made the policy announcements that he made last year, towards the end of last year around the time of the election campaign, there have been very well vocalised criticisms of the bonefides of a proposal like this, on financial grounds, on performance grounds, on public policy grounds, on legal grounds, even things like the unintended consequence of distributing a black list full of child pornography sites that could potentially be leaked to the child pornographers. None of this has been considered. All of it has been out in the public sphere for about a year now and the government simply couldn’t be bothered answering any of these criticisms. Instead they malign and attacks critics, and we had Senator Conroy earlier this year comparing people who are complaining about this proposal to child molesters, as if that was actually a useful part of the public debate. All along I think the one thing that the government could have done to ally a lot of these concerns is to actually come out and say what their intentions are, but here we are October 2008 a year down the track and we need Darren Pauly from IDG to go “Hang on a minute, that ministerial press release said that there was no opt-out, that’s directly in contravention with what the government said last December, and why are we only finding that out now a year down the track?”

Ben: I know, it really is starting to get a little bit ridiculous, now I want to know what do you know about the Tasmanian trial in weigh of statistics, in weigh of false positives, in weigh of if this does get to live trials in November like the government is saying they are going to release an expression of interest to all the ISP’s, in the hope that they accept the live trial, but they don’t even know that was what they were proposing in the first place, but they did it anyway. What do you know about it?

Mark: Well, I mean your question starting out asking about the Enex trial, that’s readily downlodable on, I’m not sure if you have a link to it on your website.

Ben: The 90 page PDF report.

Mark: Yeh, it’s quite long, and I we should commend Enex for at least being thorough about this, they’ve outlined their methodology, they’ve described their results in quite a lot of detail and that gives us the opportunity to sort of pick apart and compare the results that the trial actually delivered, to what the minister said in his press release. When the minister came out in July this year, he sort of trumpeted the release of this trial. He said that one of the things that it demonstrated was that technology is advancing and filters are becoming better and you go down into the nitty gritty of the trial report and it doesn’t actually say that at all. The best filter that they tested had a false positive rate of 3%, and that filter the one with the most accuracy was the lowest performer, it slowed down the internet by 70%, and you know 3% of the false positives on a medium sized ISP backbone translates to several thousand bad blocks per second. There’s no discussion by the government on who’s going to pay for the support resources, that an ISP will need to deal with that problem, and you can just go on and on and look at the statistics that the government has used in this trial to say that it’s backing up their case when the trial doesn’t actually say that at all.

Ben: Yeh I’ve been reading through it slowly. I’ve read a couple of areas, and I’ve got to get through it. It does go very much in depth but as you say when you point out, go deep and dig in there to find out what the actual results are it does seem that if you look at even the best option for ISP’s it really isn’t an option that you could take on as an ISP. It’s going to cost more money for more bandwidth I suppose, and as you say the best option will slow down what is available and you’d have to purchase more and as you say once again it’s just… it really isn’t viable I don’t think.

Mark: Yeh, and there are other aspects to the trial where you don’t even have to dig deep, like look at the headline results for applicability to non-web protocols. I know as a network engineer at a large ISP that over 60% of Australia’s Internet traffic is Peer to Peer. Over 60%. Now none of the products that were testing by Enex can have even the slightest affect on Peer to Peer, and Peer to Peer is the single most common means of transmitting content around the Internet. So let’s say that your a nefarious sort who’s interested in transmitting around the information which the government claims is illegal. OK you can either put up a webpage, but you won’t do that if these products are deployed because webpages will conceivably be blocked if the products actually work, but on the other hand distribute exactly the same content with say BitTorrent, and there is no single filtering product on the market that can do anything about that. The best the filter can do is detect that there is some BitTorrent traffic on the network.

Ben: So now packet analysis type of thing? That slows traffic even more I believe.

Mark: Yeh, and for what it’s worth the vendors of Deep Packet Inspection systems are getting really excited by this.

Ben: Yes, lot’s of money for them.

Mark: I have had approaches from, your probably aware of the Sandvine system from Comcast, approaches from similar vendors who are pushing exactly the same product on Australian ISP’s, marketing them as things which are capable of inspecting Internet traffic, to determine whether it’s legal against the governments idea of the ACMA’s blacklist, and do we really want to have these sorts of products which I think if you asked the user of Comcast, besides that they’re probably quite unpopular, do we want those unpopular products to be mandated on every Internet backbone network in Australia, and once those products are there do you think ISP’s are going to be able to resist the temptation of starting to filter other bits of traffic. Like maybe BitTorrents using a bit to much network bandwidth, that’s costing a bit to much to service it, maybe an ISP can defer an upgrade on their backbone network by just clamping down on Peer to Peer a bit, and that will enabled by these sorts of systems.

Ben: So that would kind of encourage the net to become not neutral I suppose. It would get that into motion which would… we want to keep the net neutral I think, I know there was an interesting video cast on CNet with Simon Hackett the CEO of Internode regarding that which I’m sure if you want to find out that will be included in the show notes as well. Now, the next step of course is the government, I know probably not even the right step but anyway, the next step of the government as Tim mentioned in the interview I did with him last week, Senator Conroy’s office PR guy, he said that they’re going to look for ISP’s that they can test this out on. They’re going to do an expression of interest in the coming months, so what do you know about this so far?

Mark: I don’t know a lot about it, but there are two ways that I think an ISP could look at something like that. An ISP could either say “I want to be involved in the live trial because it’s probably the only way I’m going to get any detail out of the government about what they’re proposing” because in order to carry out a live trial the government would have to divulge to the ISP what they are plans are, and an ISP is probably at a competitive disadvantage if some other ISP knows what the government is going to do 6 months down the track, and they don’t so there’s one argument that probably strongly encourages an ISP to get involved in the plan just so they can work out what the plan is. There’s another argument that you see discussed quite frequently online which is that ISP’s should somehow boycott the plan. I don’t really think that’s realistic because at the end of the day ISP’s are companies, they do exist to make money, they don’t exist to rock the political boat and I would fully expect ISP’s to end up going along with whatever the government says or whatever the law says at the end of the day. I don’t think were going to be seeing boycotts.

Ben: They are a company they have to turn over money and they have to abide by the law, so aside from the whole censorship debate we know that there are some serious technical barriers and I know we’ve mentioned a heap of them before such as BitTorrent, but there’s also the technical barriers of core infrastructure being changed as well, would you like to list what such things would put pressure on an ISP?

Mark: Yeh sure, I touched on the support issue before which when I mentioned the false positive rate is the best product tested is generating several thousand false blocks per second on an ISP backbone, an individual user might only find that they have a false block every couple of days and that would be annoying, but for an ISP with hundreds of thousands of users, that’s going to be a continual torrent of phone calls from angry users who can’t access the bits of the Internet that they want to access, and ISP’s are going to have to provision call center staff to deal with those calls, and that’s going to push the price of Internet access up there’s just no getting away from that. The other part of the question that you asked was about the network engineering aspect of it and network architecture. Let’s think about the way networks are designed at the moment. Networks are designed right now to be distributed, we want to avoid as many choke points as possible both because choke points offer opportunities for congestion and because choke points offer opportunities for failure. If I have 50% of my network behind 1 router then when that router crashes I lose 50% of my network and that’s not acceptable so we’re trying to design networks to not be like that. Censorship systems by their very nature are centralised, there’s only 1 blacklist and the traffic has to be funneled through whatever system it is that’s processing that blacklist and that will inevitably cause central points of failure on a network traffic will need to be funneled into directions that network design principles would usually indicate you wouldn’t funnel traffic in that way. You would have to send it into the filtering system, if the filtering system breaks or runs out of capacity or something like that, there are going to be outages so it is going to make the Internet less reliable even if everything is working perfectly and of course we know from the Enex report that it can’t work perfectly anyway.

Ben: No indeed, now diverging a bit how real really are the chances of this actually happening? What do you think the government is going to do from now on and do you think it will go ahead?

Mark: I can only really draw on my experiences with how the previous government dealt with the same situation, and the current government is shaping up to be every bit as belligerent as the previous government in this area. The previous government almost never publicly announced something until they had already decided to do it. Because if you make the decision first, then the announcement then it’s to late for public process to change the decision, they can say “Nup, it’s already decided this is what we’re going to do”. Now it seems to me that Senator Conroy is following exactly the same tact that Senator Olsten did before him back in 1999 when we went through this again. I have at the back of my mind the decision really has been made, they’re going to do something but I also think they’re actually a bit to technically clueless to understand exactly what they’re going to do, and they’re probably going to seek assistance from ISP’s and like I said earlier I doubt the ISP’s are going to be the knights in shining armour for this debate.

Ben: Now they say that they have been liaising with people in the industry, have they been liaising with you? Have they been liaising with your colleges? Have they been liaising with anyone that you know of within the industry of ISP’s in Australia?

Mark: I guess it just depends on how you define liaising. I have colleges within the company that obviously have legal affairs, people that talk to the department about all manner of things, this would be one of them, but I don’t get the feeling… obviously I’m not talking for the company here but I don’t get the feeling that the minister is inclined to listen anyway. There’s liaising in the form where you ask a question because your interested in forming a view and your using the answer to the questions to inform that view so that it becomes the right one, and there’s the other form of liaising where you have already made up your mind and your just ticking off the box to say that you have consulted, and I get the feeling that thats pretty much whats happening here.

Ben: Now what chances are there for us to prevent all of this from happening? What can we do? I’ve tried emailing the minister personally as a public citizen who has the right to vote and no response. I know a lot of people on whirlpool which is where everyone usually in Australia will talk with each other in a public open forum about the Internet in Australia and especially this topic which has been going wild about it, but what can we do as a public citizen, as the public of Australia?

Mark: There are a number of things, I think writing letters to MP’s is probably more effective than email campaigns. I think the typical MP will look at the amount of effort that a citizen expended to express their point of view and judge that point of view accordingly, and if someone has just fired off a 3 minute email message or clicked the box to join an online petition or something like that, I’m not sure if that’s really worth much. On the other hand writing a real letter on real paper and putting it in a real envelope and using a real stamp and putting it into a real mailbox will get your voice heard a lot more effectively. Another thing I suspect we found during the last election that we might need another cycle or 2 to decide and to evaluate it, is that organisations like Get Up have an effect because they get heard in the halls of power in Canberra. Get Up have a campaign address, I’m not affiliated with them but I’ve noted that on their website they have a campaign address you can send to campaigns@getup.org.au. I’m sure that if they get enough public response out of petitions they’ll take it up because that’s what they’re for. That’s what they do, they take issues where the government has pitted itself against citizens and they represent citizens to the government.

Ben: Thank you very much Mark for coming to talk with us this evening, it’s been a pleasure trying to clarify all the points that are put forward, it’s been really great talking.

Mark: Thank you very much for your time.