(7 November 2008)
SAGE-AU proposes three-step safe Net plan for families
7 November 2008
IT professionals' advocacy group SAGE-AU has proposed a three-pronged plan that can protect families from objectionable Internet content without slowing Internet performance to a snail's pace.
SAGE-AU (the System Administrators Guild of Australia) is a not-for-profit professional organisation representing system administrators in Australia. System administrators are the technology wizards who keep computers and networks working, including much of the Internet in this country.
SAGE-AU President Donna Ashelford said the Federal Government had been widely criticised for the current incarnation of "Labor's Plan for Cyber Safety". "The proposed plan, which aims to filter and block objectionable material in a compulsory manner, is not technically sound," she said.
"SAGE-AU fully supports any practical initiatives to protect children from viewing objectionable content on the Internet, but we oppose the current plan based on the technical issues involved and the appearance that alternative solutions have not been fully considered.
"If implemented in its current form, the Government's proposal will punish the vast majority of home and business Internet users who never come into contact with objectionable material by slowing down all Internet access. Additionally, it will prevent access to many resources that are not objectionable.
"Finally, those who create and traffic in objectionable material already use methods of encryption that will not be stopped by the proposal."
Ms. Ashelford said SAGE-AU recognised that some parents were concerned by Internet content they regarded as objectionable. "Those parents should be empowered to implement filter rules that they believe are best for the welfare of their families," she said.
"As an organisation representing the systems administrators who run the country's networks, including much of its Internet architecture, SAGE-AU puts forward the following three suggestions to address the short-comings of the government plan."
1. Encourage "family-friendly" ISP services
Ms. Ashelford said a Family Friendly ISP program, run by the Internet Industry Association (IIA), was already available. "It appears that many families are not aware of this program's existence," she said.
"Participant ISPs currently offer 'clean feed' services to customers who desire them and have been doing so for several years. Many of these ISPs have invested considerable resources into refining their services, which occupy a competitive niche in the Australian ISP marketplace.
"These family-friendly ISPs build their brands around their filtering services. The most likely side effect of the Government's proposal will be to cause many of the companies who have done the most to promote 'clean feed' services to close their doors."
SAGE-AU proposes that the Government leverage its existing relationship with the IIA to support and promote the Family Friendly ISP program. The $44m budgeted for 'clean feed' services could be provided as grants and subsidies to participating ISPs, enabling them to offer their 'clean feed' services at price points that are competitive with the services offered by more traditional ISPs.
A model similar to the Australian Broadband Guarantee, wherein a participating ISP is subsidised for each subscriber, will stimulate this sector of the industry and consequently improve the quality and accessibility of the services they offer to the Australian public.
The Government could also use its resources to assist with the promotion of both the IIA Family Friendly ISP programme and qualifying ISPs. This is consistent with the Government's election promise to provide clean feed services with an opt-out for adults.
2. Improved parent education
Ms. Ashelford said the Government should invest in ongoing education to assist parents to ensure their children were not exposed to objectionable material. "SAGE-AU welcomes the budget allocations accompanying 'Labor's Plan for Cyber Safety' in this area and fully supports the initiative," she said.
3. More rigorous enforcement
Ms. Ashelford said SAGE-AU supported the allocation of increased budgets to assist the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) to discover and remove illegal content from Australian hosts. "The Government should provide more resources to the ACMA and the AFP to improve this enforcement process," she said.
"We recognise that the majority of illegal content is hosted overseas. We suggest that the Government opens discussions with authorities in other countries to ensure objectionable content - particularly when it is illegal in both countries - can be dealt with cooperatively and removed from the Internet."
SAGE-AU believes that imposing Internet filtering requirements on all ISPs may drive criminals towards encrypted Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which will complicate the role of the AFP in securing evidence to support convictions. The modifications proposed by SAGE-AU provide a sound, workable solution that satisfies the Government's stated goals without forcing criminals into modes of operation that make their Internet activity impossible to monitor.
Media assistance
Donna Ashelford on 0401 714 350 or email
Iain Robertson on 0407 757 622 or email
About SAGE-AU [www.sage-au.org.au]
SAGE-AU [www.sage-au.org.au] is a not-for-profit professional organisation representing system administrators in Australia. It promotes the development of the system administration profession via online communication forums, regional monthly meetings, regional symposiums and an annual national technical conference. SAGE-AU members work in all varieties of profit and not-for-profit industry, education, research and government. Roles range from junior administrators to chief information officers.
(27 October 2008)
SAGE-AU calls for open talk on Net censorship
27 October 2008
IT professionals' advocacy group SAGE-AU has called on the Federal Government to embrace open discussion of its proposed Internet filtering regime in order to ensure the best possible policy outcome.
SAGE-AU (the System Administrators Guild of Australia) expressed its concern after reports that the office of Federal Communications Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy, had attempted to silence criticism by a SAGE-AU member of the Government's controversial plan to filter Internet content.
In a personal capacity, Mark Newton, a member of SAGE-AU, has strongly criticised the Government and its Internet filtering policy on the Whirlpool broadband forum. Subsequently, a policy advisor for Senator Conroy is reported to have expressed "serious concern" about Mr. Newton's comments to a board member of the Internet Industry Association (IIA) and requested that this concern be passed to his employer, an IIA member.
SAGE-AU is a not-for-profit professional organisation representing system administrators in Australia. System administrators are the technology wizards who keep computers and networks working.
SAGE-AU President Donna Ashelford said the Code of Ethics for SAGE-AU members required them to communicate with users about computing matters that may affect them. "It's reasonable to state that the issue of Internet filtering is one of substantial impact on all Internet users," she said.
"The Government's own figures indicate that all of the filtering systems trialled would impact Internet performance, as well as availability of legitimate services to varying degrees. To this end, Mr Newton has undertaken his duties under the SAGE-AU Code of Ethics to the fullest, and receives the full support for his position from the organisation.
"Accordingly, SAGE-AU calls upon the office of the Communications Minister to respect Mr Newton's professionalism and independence, as an upstanding individual member of the leading body of System Administrators within Australia. We believe that it is only through full and open discussion of the various options that the Government can achieve the best policy outcome for all Australians."
Ms. Ashelford said that SAGE-AU's position on the issue of Internet filtering was based purely on the technical feasibility of an Internet filtering solution. "Specifically, SAGE-AU remains concerned that the filters tested are unable to provide an effective, reliable filtering solution with the performance required for modern broadband connections," she said.
"The filters tested have demonstrated an excessively high exclusion rate of legitimate Internet content. To this end, SAGE-AU remains opposed to the implementation of Internet filtering in its current form and is concerned about any attempts to silence legitimate discussion of Internet filtering plans."
Media assistance
Iain Robertson on 0407 757 622 or email
Donna Ashelford on 0401 714 350 or email
About SAGE-AU [www.sage-au.org.au]
SAGE-AU [www.sage-au.org.au] is a not-for-profit professional organisation representing system administrators in Australia. It promotes the development of the system administration profession via online communication forums, regional monthly meetings, regional symposiums and an annual national technical conference. SAGE-AU members work in all varieties of profit and not-for-profit industry, education, research and government. Roles range from junior administrators to chief information officers.
(31st July 2008)
SAGE-AU CONCERNED WITH CONCLUSIONS DRAWN IN ACMA INTERNET FILTERING STUDY
31 July 2008
The System Administrators Guild of Australia (SAGE-AU) has raised strong concerns regarding a report issued on 28 July 2008 by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) entitled, "Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Internet Content Filtering".
The artificial conditions of the testing methodology, together with unacceptable limitations in the test's terms of reference, combine to reduce the usefulness of the report for real-world conditions.
Mark Newton, SAGE-AU member and network expert, pointed out, "The baseline performance test featured 30 users on a gigabit switch saturating the test web server at 425 megabits per second (page 30), and stated that that would be equivalent to around 20,000 end users each on 1.5 Mbps connections (page 31). However, 425 Mbps divided among 20,000 end users actually gives each user 21,250 bits per second, around half of what can be achieved with a dial-up modem."
"While it's probably true to say that filtering software doesn't present noticeable performance degradation when you've already artificially constrained the offered traffic rate to below dial-up speeds, it's difficult to see the relevance of that conclusion in a world where the Minister wants everyone in Australia to connect over 500 times faster," Mr. Newton concluded.
The interpretation of the results is also cause for significant concern. The most accurate filter tested by ACMA incorrectly blocked Internet access 3% of the time. The report noted that the overblocking result was a significant improvement on previous surveys (pages 49 to 51), but failed to consider that medium-to-large Australian ISPs routinely carry in excess of 100,000 HTTP requests per second during peak times. According to ACMA's results, under ideal conditions with the best-of-breed filter in place, those ISPs would be incorrectly blocking over 3000 HTTP requests every second. It is difficult to believe that the helpdesk requests required to manually unblock that volume of errors will not come at a significant cost, or that that cost won't increase Australian Internet access prices, increasing the "digital divide" for sections of the Australian public already disadvantaged in terms of Internet accessibility and affordability.
The fact that few of the tested products are capable of performing their filtering functions on non-HTTP data streams is also a significant issue. In 2008, less than one third of the traffic carried by a typical Australian ISP's backbone is HTTP. The most prevalent means of distributing online content, including the content unsuitable for minors which Senator Conroy claims to want to address, is BitTorrent (a peer-to-peer networking protocol). Short of blocking peer-to-peer and instant messaging systems outright, none of the systems tested were able to filter these protocols.
David Jericho, an expert in high performance networking and member of SAGE-AU, calls into question the benefits of the touted Fibre to the Node (FTTN) network under a filtering regime, saying that "any benefits from a faster FTTN network will be undone by the delays and processing required by any content filters."
Don Gingrich, SAGE-AU member and lecturer in System Administration at RMIT University, says "Why should we, at significant expense, significantly reduce the performance of every part of the Internet in Australia for the dubious goal of possibly blocking part of the overall traffic in questionable material, when there is no absolute standard of what should be blocked?"
"From past experience in looking at how this has played out in other regions, there seems to be a near certainty that legitimate and useful educational sites will be inadvertently blocked as a part of any effort of this sort. 'A little bit censored' seems a lot to me like a 'little bit pregnant,'" Mr. Gingrich concluded.
There also remain privacy concerns with the filtering of secure web (HTTPS) traffic (page 45). Effective filtering of a HTTPS data stream can only be performed by compromising end user privacy, further affecting secure web applications including legitimate Internet financial transactions which are otherwise not the subject of any filtering or scrutiny. That is, HTTPS data streams can only be filtered by requiring individual ISPs effectively engage in a "Man in the Middle attack," making encrypted sensitive or confidential data available to eavesdropping within ISP networks.
The "Adaptability" section of the report contains the somewhat puzzling assertion on page 46 that an ISP-level filter can be set to an "Adult" profile which "... blocks only illegal content," then says, in relation to illegal content, "... only three of the filter products blocked greater than 95 per cent and none blocked 100 per cent" (page 50). How it is possible to set a mandatory filter to an Adult mode to "... create an open browsing experience..." when none of the tested products are capable of reliably distinguishing between permitted adult content and banned illegal content even under ideal experimental conditions - involving a mere 4000 web addresses - is a question which warrants strong consideration.
While the report exhibits considerable failings in its analysis of "Performance," "Effectiveness," "Scope," and "Adaptability," it is also notable for what it doesn't analyse: The terms of reference presented to the testing agency by ACMA specifically excluded examination of deployment cost (page 53). Public debate on the topic of the Federal Government's currently planned mandated Internet content filtering has existed for almost a year, and the Internet industry has consistently stated that the massive deployment costs required to build filtering into Australia's Internet infrastructure would require significant price increases to be imposed on families seeking Internet access from ISPs. In that environment, it is incredibly surprising that the Federal Government has not even started to address the question of cost. On this subject, Mr. Newton asked, "How is it possible that we have come this far, and covered this much ground, over this much time, without any attempt by the Government to address industry concerns about the on-the-ground practicalities of implementing its plan?"
Donna Ashelford, President of SAGE-AU, called on the Government to reconsider: "It is not too late to consider policy alternatives which meet the Government's stated aims without the deficiencies that accompany mandatory ISP-level filtering. Aside from the commercial and technical impact such legislation will have on a variety of sectors within the IT Industry in Australia, technical band-aids are invariably ineffective in addressing the root causes of social problems."
Media assistance
Donna Ashelford on 0401 714 350 or email
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About SAGE-AU [www.sage-au.org.au]
SAGE-AU (www.sage-au.org.au) is a not-for-profit professional organisation representing system administrators in Australia. It promotes the development of the system administration profession via online communication forums, regional monthly meetings, regional symposiums and an annual national technical conference. SAGE-AU members work in all varieties of profit and not-for-profit industry, education, research and government. Roles range from junior administrators to chief information officers.
