“We will be operating on the newly coined ‘Conroy rule’,” wrote executive director David Vaile and researcher Alana Maurushat of the University of New South Wales’ Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre in an email last week. Participants at the Internet Filtering Forum were told that “it’s a variant of the ancient and practical ‘Hitler’ rule on UseNet: the first person to equate free speech and child porn loses the floor, and all points.”

“This restriction on free speech will hopefully deter flame wars, so we can consider the technical and legal issues for the day more rigorously.”

The Internet Filtering Forum aimed to “shed light, not heat” on the legal, policy, technology and social issues surrounding net censorship, Vaile stressed to the audience at the beginning of the conference.

But at the end of the day, a show of hands amongst 50 participants revealed that no one in the room supported the filtering scheme.

Speakers argued that the filters would never work.

“If the government tries to legislate the technology, it’ll be out of date before the ink is dry,” said Colin Jacobs of Electronic Frontiers Australia“.

Siva Sivasubramanian, a security manager at a major ISP, agreed.

“Can filters be effective? As effective as a window on your house. Any child can push and shove and break the glass. It keeps the honest people out. Dishonest people will always be able to break in. It will stop honest voyeurs from becoming dishonest viewers.”

Speakers raised questions about the scope of the filters, such as their ability to look into HTTPS traffic, IPv6, encrypted data, and peer-to-peer traffic.

“There’s a question about whether HTTPS will be decrypted to be searched, and if so, how will the banks feel about it?” asked Donna Ashelford, president of the System Administrators Guild of Australia (SAGE_AU).

“The bottom speed for the national broadband network is 12mbit. The top speed of the filters is 12mbit,” she added.

Jacobs raised the question of filter logistics.

“iiNet is based in Perth. If you’re a user from the East Coast, and you’re accessing a site from the East Coast, does all your traffic have to reroute to Perth to go through one filter, or is iiNet supposed to have multiple filter points? What is the cost of maintaining these?”
Jacobs pointed out that in other countries, low network speeds were used to restrict access to “unwanted” content.

“In Iran it’s illegal to have a net connection higher than 128kbps, so that it’s extremely difficult to download movies or content from foreign websites.”

Most speakers referred to John Gilmore’s famous quote: “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

But Alana Maurushat hotly disagreed. She has a PhD in malware, and has studied net censorship schemes around the world.

“You say the internet routes around censorship? Ballhooey. It works in China, incredibly well,” she said.

People who try to access blocked content frequently receive a 404 error, and internet users are reminded that the government is watching by a cartoon policeman pop-up every twenty minutes.

“A lot of China’s censorship is self-censorship, because people know they can be arrested at any time in any place for doing something wrong,” she said.

“They have blacklists, they do deep-packet inspection of peer-to-peer traffic, they do decryption on the fly, and it costs billions and billions of dollars.

“Access to circumvention tools is limited, especially since sites like open proxies are frequently written in English, so there’s a language barrier.”

But the speech of the day was given by a sixteen-year-old student who spoke passionately about the need for education.

“I have been surfing the web for most of my school life, at school and home, with filters and without, and I have never accidentally stumbled upon bad pornographic material,” she said.

“We want education, not censorship.”