The Legislation That Could Kill Internet Privacy for Good

Re:The Legislation That Could Kill Internet Privacy for Good by benjiweber on Tuesday August 02, 2011 @03:27PM (#2838385)

In the UK, BT (The biggest ISP) introduced CleanFeed[0] and "strongly encouraged" (read forced) to be used by the government. It was claimed that it would only ever be used for blocking child sexual abuse imagery.

Recently a judge has ruled that BT must use the same system to block a website used to share links. [1]

The list of blacklist sites itself can only be edited by a small group (iirc 4 people) of unelected and unaccountable people at the IWF[2]

Cleanfeed is also pretty flawed, doesn't work with HTTPS, can be interrogated to get a list of blocked content (using TTLs) and misleadingly returns 404 for blocked content.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanfeed_%28content_blocking_s... [1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/british-tele... [2] http://www.iwf.org.uk/ [3] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/cleanfeed.pdf

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Re:The Legislation That Could Kill Internet Privacy for Good by pimeys on Wednesday August 03, 2011 @03:47AM (#2840208)

In Finland the government encourages the ISP's to filter a list of sites. The list is secret and managed by the police to filter out child porn. One of the sites included in that list is a site which is criticizing the filtering.

http://lapsiporno.info/english-2008-02-15.html

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Re:The Legislation That Could Kill Internet Privacy for Good by barrkel on Tuesday August 02, 2011 @05:31PM (#2838793)

Not only that, but it makes requests for non-blocked pages on the target server look like they're coming from a small group of proxies (I guess just one in practice). This plays havoc with other assumptions around load balancing and anti-abuse that don't assume entire countries are funneled through single proxies.

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