Image from Boy on a Stick and Slither copyright Stephen L. Cloud. Reproduced with permission.
In the first part of this Article, I talked about the technical reasons commonly given for deploying web content filtering software, or "censorware". If content filtering software worked as reliably as claimed, and if it were not easy to circumvent, these technical concerns may, if we are prepared to put moral concerns to one side, be considered justification for censorship. As I have already argued, the software is not reliable or unbreakable, and will never be so, because what is expected of it is technically impossible. As a purely academic exercise, therefore, let's take a look at some of the other problems censorware claims to address, and why it would be morally wrong to deploy censorware, even if the software posessed all the magical powers people expect of it.
We'll also take a look at just a couple of the countless ways to circumvent censorware.
As before, the opinions expressed in this post are my own, and do not reflect the opinions of any other member of the Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club, or the club as a whole.
Employee TimewastingIf your employees are spending a significant proportion of their day avoiding work, you have a HR problem, not an IT problem.
Web surfing is hardly the only activity that can be used as a comparatively pleasant and readily obtained substitute for the work a person is paid to do, but it is unique in that it is practically the only such activity where imposing a blanket restriction on the means to engage in it is considered a legitimate first step to addressing low worker productivity.
Few employers confiscate non-work-related books or magazines from their employees as they walk throught the door. It is not common practice to automatically blacklist the telephone numbers of all employees family and friends in case one employee might one day abuse the ability to make personal calls. Employees should consider the blacklisting of web sites as outrageous as being frisked at the door for contraband reading material or trying to make a phone call and hearing a recorded message that tells you that checking up on a relative, reserving a table at a restaurant, or rescheduling a dental appointment from company premises is verboten.
Because circumventing censorware, for any reasonably technically literate computer user, takes a matter of minutes, the only employees likely to be significantly inconvenienced by censorware are those who were not intending to use the web intensively enough to justify spending those few minutes on the problem. Dedicated work-avoiders, on the other hand, will happily spend as much time as is necessary to do this; it's more satisfying than doing real work, after all. Your best employees meanwhile will be frustrated and offended by your lack of trust.
If you don't already have a HR problem, installing censorware is a very good way to create one.
Won't Somebody Please Think About the Children?This is a delicate issue, which I cannot address here beyond a few inadequate and flippant remarks. This is perhaps appropriate, as most of the noise made about keeping children "safe" and "protecting" them online is nothing short of ridiculous and deserves scant attention.
The Internet is a public place. If you are responsible for one or more children who you would not be happy to see roaming the public streets unsupervised, you should not be letting them roam the Internet unsupervised. Software will not replace supervision in the latter case, any more than it would in the former.
There are some weird, disturbed people abroad, who appear to believe that if you ruthlessly expunge from a child's senses all references, suggestive or explicit, to sexuality they will simply fail to notice the onset of puberty, and you can thereby keep them sin-free indefinitely.
To me this seems as practical and morally worthy as administering first aid to someone hit by a bus by trying to take their mind off it. It's been a while, but from memory, while puberty doesn't strike quite as quickly as a bus, it feels at least as psychologically wrenching, and it can take a bit longer to get over. Nevertheless it appears the belief that, armed with the right software, the onset of sexual maturity in children is something we can and should ignore has been endorsed by both major political parties in Australia as an integral part of "protecting" children and keeping them "safe" online.
Pubescent children are curious about the adult world in general, and sex in particular. Trying to address, or rather avoid, the accompanying issues through censorship is like trying to hold back the tide with a salad fork. Children old enough to be curious about sex are also old enough to have been curious about computers for some time. Putting your faith in the ability of censorware to stop children accessing material that they will, by sheer force of hormones, find endlessly fascinating, is self-delusional. If your children are growing up, you would be well advised to start treating them like the young adults they are and squarely addressing their real problems and the real dangers they face. No magical software Mary Poppins is going keep them "safe" and absolve you of the responsibilities of a parent.
If you are managing an organisation that provides Internet access to children and worried about the legal liability that comes from this, be aware that promising parents that their children will not, and indeed cannot, access "harmful" material via your network is asking for trouble. If you are not in a position where you can provide Internet access without making this promise, then you are not in a position where you can provide Internet access.
See also:
- News.com.au: Student cracks Government's $84m porn filter
- Electronic Frontiers Australia Media Release: EFA appalled by filtering
Whether you are a parent, a business, a government, or some other kind of institution, deploying censorware implicitly says more about your attitude towards your children, staff, clients, or citizens than you might be comfortable admitting explicitly.
According to Wikipedia, Australia's "laws on Internet censorship are, theoretically, amongst the most restrictive in the Western world", but thankfully this has been "combined with almost complete disinterest in enforcement from the agencies responsible for doing so". Citizens of some other countries are not so fortunate. Amnesty International reports that:
"People are spied on, controlled, persecuted and imprisoned simply for criticising their government, calling for democracy and greater press freedom, or exposing human rights abuses online.
"Chat rooms are monitored, blogs deleted, websites blocked, search engines restricted and people are imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information."
If this concerns you, please consider helping Amnesty International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or Electronic Frontiers Australia. If you believe that censorship and spying is acceptable when you do it, be aware that you will be inviting some unflattering comparisons.
Circumvention 101: Web ProxiesThe simplest way to defeat censorware that depends on web site blacklists is to funnel your requests for web pages through a proxy server. Provided this proxy is not itself blacklisted, the content from that web site will pass through unimpeded.
Free speech organisation Peacefire.org provides a public web proxy service called StupidCensorship.com. Simply type the address of the blocked page you want to visit into the form on this site instead of in your browser's location bar, and the site will deliver the page to you. This works out to being a bit slower than a direct connection, but is preferable to not getting the information you want at all. This service supports browser cookies and JavaScript, so your favourite "Web 2.0" sites for wasting time at your employer's expense will likely work perfectly fine.
Many content filtering systems blacklist this site, so as well as being found at http://www.stupidcensorship.com it can also be accessed at https://www.stupidcensorship.com. Using "https" rather than "http" tells your web browser to access the site via network port 81, rather than the default web port 80. Many censorware systems only police traffic on port 80, hence the name of this site. At the time of writing, this works perfectly from within the Coffs Ex-Services Club network.
If you are not so lucky, Peacefire.org also runs a mailing list which will alert you to the availability of new proxies every few days, so you can easily keep ahead of the blacklists.
For the more technically inclined, you can also run your own proxy site from a computer of your own outside of the censored local network. Any computer with an always-on Internet connection (preferably a pretty fast one), such as your home computer, will do. If you're the only person who knows about a proxy, it's not going to get on a blacklist.
I tried out PHProxy, the software currently used by StupidCensorship.com, on a computer with a web server already installed, and found it very easy to install. There's also a Firefox web browser extension that integrates with PHProxy. With this, whenever you come across a blocked site, it's just one click to access it via a server running PHProxy, whether it's StupidCensorship.com, your own, or somebody else's.
For less technically-inclined users, Peacefire.org provide some software and instructions to get a proxy up and running on a Windows computer.
To verify whether you're accessing the web via a proxy, go to a site such as ipaddress.com; it should report that your web page request is coming from a different Internet address when you're using the proxy.
Circumvention 101: Anonymising NetworksOur first attempt to circumvent the Club's censorware used Tor. Tor is a system designed to obscure the source and/or destination of packets of data carried across the Internet. So (in theory) if you are using Tor, somebody monitoring network traffic at or near your Internet connection can't work out what web sites you've been visiting, and somebody monitoring network traffic at or near a particular web server can't tell if you've been visiting it. On it's own, Tor is not foolproof for providing complete anonymity, so I wouldn't rely on it to protect me from state persecution without some additional software to help, but it's more than enough to bypass content filtering software.
I've wanted to try out Tor for some time, so I was pleased to have the excuse. And rather helpfully, the club's censorware doesn't (at the time of writing) block Tor's website.
For Windows users the Tor project provides an all-in-one installer bundle including Tor, Vidalia, Privoxy, and Torbutton. Vidalia is a graphical interface for starting, stopping, and configuring Tor. Privoxy is a proxy server which is capable of many things, but here is used as an intermediary between your web browser and Tor. Torbutton is a Firefox web browser plugin which enables you to switch your use of Tor on and off with a single click. This is no bad thing, as the use of Tor slows down the loading of web pages even more than using a simple proxy server, and you probably won't want to use it all the time.
Setup on Windows is a breeze. Installing on Ubuntu, or any Debian-based operating system, is not much harder. I now use it at home whenever I'm doing anything that doesn't require lighting-fast download speed, on the assumption that if enough people use Tor now and then as they go about their usual business, it makes it much harder for anyone to fall prey to the accusation "You're using Tor, so you must be up to something!"
You can also eliminate the fuss of installing Tor/Vidala/Privoxy/Torbutton on every censorware-hobbled computer you use, and for that matter (much of) the evidence that you've been circumventing your corporate censorware, by using it as a PortableApp. I demonstrated Portable Apps a few Computer Club meetings ago; it's a suite of free software applications packaged to run (on a Windows system) from any portable device with sufficient memory that can be mounted as an external drive, eg. a USB memory stick. I use PortableApps to carry Firefox and a few essential work-related utilities around with me on my MP3 player in case of emergencies.
Tor (with Vidalia and Privoxy) has been packaged as a PortableApp. This means that whether you're in the Coffs Ex-Services Club or the People's Republic of China, you can plug your USB stick, MP3 player, phone, camera, or whatever into an available Windows computer, start your personal Tor-enabled Firefox web browser, and be circumventing the local censorware in seconds.
ObjectionsThe obvious kneejerk response to the arguments above is to accuse anybody who advances them of being a wild-eyed, bomb-throwing, chaos-loving libertine who wants to see every computer infected with malware, every child barraged by porn, subject to predation and "cyber-bullying", and terrorists and other criminals immune from prosecution for anything they do via the Internet. Needless to say, this isn't the case.
It is entirely appropriate to prosecute people who distribute malicious software. It is not appropriate to cripple computer systems in such a way that users can only install software or view files from "trusted" sources.
It is entirely appropriate for parents to impose their own limits on what their children can do. It is not appropriate for parents to expect the rest of society to enforce these limits for them. If you do not want your children reading certain books, listening to certain kinds of music, playing certain games, viewing certain kinds of content on the web, it is your your job to make your child aware of those limits, and to ensure that they are staying within them. It is not reasonable to expect libraries, broadcasters, ISPs, etc. to bear the cost of implementing foolproof mechanisms to "protect" your child (even if such things were possible), tailored precisely to your personal definition of "protection".
It is entirely appropriate to expect that when you pay somebody to do X, they don't charge you money for doing Y. However this cannot be taken by employers as a license to spy on their employees, or restrict what they are able to say or hear via one or another medium.
It is entirely appropriate to prosecute people for crimes facilitated by computer technology. It is not appropriate to outlaw, or arbitrarily disable, computer technology which might be used to facilitate crime. The burden of proof must be on those who wish to regulate a computer technology to demonstrate that it cannot have non-criminal uses.
The Internet is a minimalist system designed to copy bits of information from one computer to another. It is deliberately "dumb" about what it is transmitting, and this is the key to it's success. Were it designed to also facilitate fine-grained descrimination and control over what kinds of information can be copied and by whom, it would be a much less efficient system for performing it's primary purpose. This is the reason why the Internet succeeded over proprietary, top-down, controlled networks like Compuserve and the original incarnations of AOL and MSN. Despite the fact that it was harder to use, you could do infinitely more with it. If what you wanted to do could be done by copying bits of information from one computer to another, in principle the Internet could do it - without requiring the permission of the owner of the network, or any re-engineering of how the network worked.
It is safe to assume that few of the people involved the the early development of the Internet in the sixties and seventies forsaw anything like the World Wide Web - an Internet-based innovation which came decades later, much less blogging, BitTorrent, or Second Life (well okay, maybe Second Life, but only because it's so corny, klunky, and retro-futuristic). Technical measures designed to solve immediate problems by restricting what we can do with the Internet are not just inconsistent with principles that value human freedom, but potentially extremely costly, as they may preclude the development of valuable future technology which we cannot even begin to imagine.
With more well-established technologies, this precautionary priciple is the norm. It is generally the activity which is regulated, not the means to engage in it. It is illegal to drive above the local speed limit, not to manufacture, sell, or posess a vehicle that can in principle exceed a particular speed. If no motor vehicle could exceed 40km/h we would certainly see a drastic reduction in the number of speeding offences. In the early days of automobiles this might have been an attractive proposition to some, and a cost-free policy to people unused to travelling at that speed anyway. Now however, we are all familiar enough with the technology and it's uses to see the downside of this.
Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore famously declared that "the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." This belief may be considered techno-utopian unless you consider human beings a part of the Internet. Human beings tend to resist restrictions that they see as arbirtary and unfair - usually surprisingly effectively. As early 20th century American humourist Will Rogers observed, "prohibition is better than no alcohol at all." Copying bits across the Internet is much, much easier than any of the steps involved in producing and distributing illicit alcohol. Why then, when authorities want to detect and prevent illicit activity, are they so partial to focusing on that portion of the activity which is almost certain to be hardest to police?
There is a strong temptation to see new technology as not only frightening, but magical. If it runs on magic, you can do anything with it. In a magic-powered system, if you don't want to allow people named Jeff to read poems written by left-handed plumbers on a Tuesday, you can do it. Unfortunately the Internet doesn't run on magic; poetry, porn, and political polemic are all just zeroes and ones.
Just because you deeply and sincerely want to believe that your magic is more powerful than the bad guys' magic, doesn't mean that there is such a thing as magic.
Internet censorship is immoral and unworkable. Authorities should not delude themselves that this is a legitimate solution to any problem, technologists should not encourage that delusion, and computer users should not tolerate it.