Mark Newton: Hello, Mark speaking.

NPD: Hello, Mark, I'm sorry to wake you up at 1:00 [a.m.] this is Brian Boyko at Network Performance Daily.

Newton: Yeah, G'day Brian. I haven't actually gone to bed yet. It's been a long night.

NPD: Could you tell me a little bit about what the heck's actually going on?

Newton: Yeah, I can - the current [Labor] government went to the last election [in 2007] with a very sort of understated policy. They didn't actually come out and talk about it until about two days before the election. To implement what they called a "clean feed" based on the British Telecom system that's been implemented in England. And, they went to the election also saying that people who didn't like it would be able to opt-out. A couple of weeks ago, the minister for our communications released a report which had been conducted on filtering software and hardware systems, and the report was released with a great deal of fanfare - the government sort of praised their virtues and said that all the systems work great. I went through the report and picked at the pieces and came to the conclusion that what the report actually said was that none of the systems actually worked very well. The systems that had the best accuracy slowed down the Internet. And the systems that didn't slow down the Internet were fairly bad as far as false positives and false negatives.

So, I published those details, and I also tipped off some journalists about the fact that the ministerial press release that had announced this stuff had also backtracked on the opt-out election promise. So, that got a little bit of controversy. And since then with the criticism escalating, the minister for communications tried to quell my criticism by placing pressure on my employer, which was just completely inappropriate, and that got the mainstream press interested. And there have been a number of stories and headlines and what have you ever since.

NPD: Could you tell me a little bit more about what kind of numbers we're looking at when you're talking about how it degrades Internet performance the more accurate it is?

Newton: Yeah, the best one that they tested, as far as accuracy, still had a 3% false positive rate, and degraded the speed of the network in excess of 70%. They did also -- they tested six products. They sort of inhabited a spectrum where the performance was inversely proportional to the accuracy. So you could have a very low accuracy filter that only slowed the network down by a few percentage points, but I don't think the government's really interested in low-accuracy, because that would let through too much stuff that-- oh, I don't know, whatever it is they want to block.

So when you get the accurate end of the spectrum, you're left with really serious performance degradation. And the testing regime already interfered with the performance in the first place, because the organization that did the testing set up a Cisco [Catalyst] 6500 as a test environment. All these filtering systems have one gigabit Ethernet interfaces on them, and they set the test environment up so that the filtering system would be saturated with several thousand simultaneous sessions. And you sort of do the math on the amount of bandwidth per user that they were simulating, and it was only about 40 kilobits per second (3.2KB/s) per user. Even with that awful traffic rate, they were still seeing performance degradation in excess of 70%. So we're really talking about dialup speeds here.

NPD: A lot of people that I have met online who are from Australia, they say, America's got a lot of problems but one thing we do have compared to Australia -- there's a little bit of jealousy over our broadband Internet. Does this just exacerbate the problems? What is the status quo of Australia's Internet?

Newton: There are a couple of things that make the Australian marketplace a little bit different from the American marketplace. Firstly, the international capacity that connects Australia to the rest of the world has largely been funded by the Australian end of the connection. So, Australian investors have fronted the money for the cable systems, and bought the capacity to connect Australia to the U.S. To a certain extent that means that the U.S. ISPs sort of get their backchannel traffic back to Australia almost for free. And it means that for the network capacity which is kind of hidden in American retail prices for network access is actually quite upfront in Australia.

In Australia, it costs somewhere between $100 and $150 dollars ($60-90 USD) per megabit to get traffic to Sydney to Los Angeles. And that has a fairly profound effect on the cost of Internet access in Australia. The distances involved also have a fairly serious effect on latency. Australia's about 150 to 170ms away from anywhere serious on the Internet, so when you start putting in filtering systems, latency's already bad enough but you introduce more performance degradation, costs are already bad enough and then the government mandates that an ISP has to install millions of dollars of additional stuff in order to do filtering, we start having some really serious effects on the cost of network access performance resulting from this policy.

NPD: Is this something that ISPs are required to implement in order to remain in business in Australia?

Newton: The answer is "not yet." The government is still doing trials, and there's a serious amount of opposition to this, whether it actually goes ahead is still an open question, although the government sounds quite serious about it. Another difference between Australia and the United States is that Australia doesn't have a 1st Amendment to the Constitution like the United States has. So Australia has no constitutional basis to free speech. And if the government decides that it wants to impose a presumptive impediment on some kind of speech, then it actually does have the legislative power to do that.

Now, Australia has been a nation for a couple hundred years now, and our system has worked fairly well because we still do have checks and balances and the government knows that there's only so far it can go before it gets pushed back from the people. So we haven't really had to deal with pernicious censorship systems before, even though we don't have a 1st Amendment. Now, this is something new coming up, and it's -- more than a little bit irritating.

So to answer your question about the mandate - the previous government actually implemented a law that said that ISPs have to do government censorship, but another part of the law said that that requirement could be overridden if there was an industry code that said that ISPs had to do something else. This was largely done to appease the religious right in Australia. It was so the previous government could go to the religious right and go: "Here we go, we've implemented a law that imposes Internet censorship. You guys got to be happy now." And then sort of behind their backs, they would override those bits of the law with an industry code and everyone would walk away happy.

The problem is that the minister of communications can override an industry code, and we've had a couple of elections since that law went through, and now we have a minister who actually wants to override the industry code. So the - sort of piece of paper that is in place that says that ISPs don't have to do the censorship things that are already in the law in now under threat. And whether the changes to that piece of paper can get through the Parliament remains an open question, but it's something that we're looking at with some interest.

NPD: This is actually kind of interesting - and this is kind of getting into politics, but - during the last election - that was 2007, I believe, and Kevin Rudd [Prime Minister of Australia] actually ran on a platform - not as a main part of his policies but he actually made a point to attract the technologically savvy vote.

Newton: That's correct, yeah. It is actually true - he won the election billing himself as "the first Facebook prime minister." I've observed that his Facebook page hasn't actually been updated since the election, and that maybe he was just using the technology savvy voters, which he tried to appeal to. He actually made a number of commitments in the election which are sort of tangentially related to this, that are cause for some controversy at the moment. One of the commitments that he has repeatedly made, over and over and over again, was that he wouldn't misuse his majority - he [Rudd] actually won by a landslide. He said he wouldn't misuse his majority, that he would conduct a government for all Australians, but now he's put a communications minister in power who believes that a way to conduct government for all Australians is to suppress dissent by putting pressure on a critic's employer.

He also said that he would implement a national broadband network; the most significant contribution the current minister has made to that national broadband network has been to prevent it from being built by cancelling a contract that the previous government signed. There are whole rafts of commitments in place that just aren't being kept.

NPD: Well we hear about filters in China and Saudi Arabia, but there's also filters in Great Britain and so - are we talking about something very, very restrictive or something very very open.

Newton: I actually like these comparisons because the minister quotes them quite often and he always gets them wrong, and I think that's hilarious, and it demonstrates how clueless he is about this issue. So - let's look a few of the comparisons that he's made and a couple that you've made.

In our Senate last Monday, Sen. Conroy, who is our communications minister, said that other countries that had done something similar to what he is proposing include the U.K., Canada, Sweden, and New Zealand. Let's look at those four.

In the U.K., their Communications Act specifically prohibits the government from getting involved in decisions about content. The government isn't allowed to censor [the Internet] in the U.K. British Telecom has implemented a private scheme, which is opt-in, just like a lot of ISPs have probably done in the United States; they call that BT Cleanfeed. People who want to use it can. People who don't want to use it don't have to. So that's the U.K. - that's nothing like what Conroy is proposing.

His next example was Sweden. There's one ISP in Sweden who has done something a little bit similar to the U.K. The ISP is called Telenor. They operate a private opt-in scheme that their customers can use if they wish. They were embroiled in significant controversy last year when the police tried to put pressure on them to categorize BitTorrent traffic sites as child pornography, which is a fairly good example of the scope creep that these systems always have, and it was interesting that Sen. Conroy chose to use that as an example.

Canada - there are eight ISPs that have a cooperative arrangement with Canada's child exploitation tip line, they run a voluntary opt-in system which is targeted specifically at child exploitation. The frequently asked questions list for their project specifically says that there's no obligation to use it, no legal obligation, and many ISPs might have technical or other reasons for not participating in the scheme and that's perfectly okay. It's all pinned for the customers. So that's nothing like the Australian proposal either.

And, his fourth example was New Zealand. I spoke to the President of Internet NZ, which is a representative body of New Zealand ISPs and asked him specifically about the use of his country as one of Mr. Conroy's examples. And he pointed out that New Zealand, back in 2005, evaluated the British Telecom Cleanfeed system and concluded that it was only 10-15% effective and didn't meet their fitness for purpose requirements. Both of the major government parties there [Labour and National] have backed away from any plans to do anything like this. There is currently no system whatsoever for Internet censorship in New Zealand. So they're all four of Mr. Conroy's examples completely debunked.

NPD: This actually was a bit of a surprise to me because, in 2007, I was in New Zealand, and I have first-hand experience - most of the time I was on a dial-up connection, but I didn't have any trouble accessing Web sites, and I know that whenever - I know that a lot of these filters like SmartFilter and stuff like that - they block a lot of the Web sites that I go to - not that I'm a child pornographer or anything - but BoingBoing.net, and XKCD.com - stuff technically savvy people go to but for whatever reason, they posted something that tripped somebody's morality circuit breaker, and all of a sudden that's part of the filter.

Newton: I think it's interesting - something you said there which is - coming back to the Australian debate again, you actually felt the need in that passage to point out that you weren't a child pornographer. Now, I would think that in any conversation with anybody, having to mention specifically that you are not a child pornographer would just go without saying. It would be outrageous to assume that somebody is. But Sen. Conroy has repeatedly accused people of being child pornographers if they disagree with him. Back on Monday, he accused Sen. Scott Ludlum from Western Australia - he said "Illegal material is illegal material; surely you are not suggesting that people should have access to child pornography."

[Ed. Note: The exact quote is: “Illegal material is illegal material. Child pornography is child pornography. I trust you are not suggesting that people should have access to child pornography”’]

It's outrageous to say to a Senator that it is even possible that he could suggest that people should have access to child pornography. And that has nothing to do with this debate. It's just the tactics that Conroy uses to shut down debate.

NPD: Well, I was just coverin' my bases, but that is a good point. But let's talk about child pornography and copyright infringement -- are these filters actually effective?

Newton: Absolutely not. The ones that were tested by the department can intercept HTTP and SMTP - a couple of them can intercept FTP. Peer to peer protocols were right out. None of them had any idea what a P2P protocol looked like, so they couldn't intercept them. Some of them were capable of detecting the presence of instant messaging, but couldn't do any screening or filtering on it. All of these products are basically aimed at the Web. It's like we're back in 1990 again, and the only part of the Internet that anybody cares about is the Web. None of these products have moved on to accommodate the reality that we have now in 2008 which is that over 60% of the backbone traffic on the Internet is BitTorrent. None of these products can understand BitTorrent and can do anything about it. So the most common means of distributing content is just completely not inspected at all.

The other thing that none of these systems can prevent is the possibility of someone running a VPN. I know that I can go to a provider in the United States, and give them $5 a month, and I can have an IP Sec over L2TP VPN that terminates somewhere in the United States. There is nothing the Australian government can do about it, and so one of the effects of their policy is going to be to drive the people who actually want to access illegal content towards encryption. And then law enforcement won't be able to use telecommunications interception warrants to tap their phones or monitor their traffic that would be needed to gather the evidence that would be needed to arrest and convict them if anything they are doing is actually illegal. So real child pornographers will get off the hook as a result of these policies.

NPD: What other options are there? If things like child pornography and perhaps bomb making materials - that sort of stuff - stuff that by any reasonable person's definition would be dangerous or illegal - is there a way to prevent access to the bad guys from having it while not preventing access from everybody else from accessing the political information and engaging in the kind of freedom of speech that Western democracies have grown accustomed to?

Newton: I think before we start having that conversation, we first need to agree on what "illegal" means. Now there is widespread international consensus that child exploitation material is illegal. I think you can go to pretty much any jurisdiction on the planet and say to the local police that there is a Web site somewhere in your country - that has material on it - that contains child exploitation images, and the police will actually remove that straight away. And people will get arrested, people will go to jail, in some jurisdictions people will get executed. So, the notion that you can just add this stuff to a blacklist and get on with your life is fairly bizarre.

But let's stop talking about child pornography for a second. 'Cause I made the point earlier that that's used by proponents of these things in order to shut down critical thought and terminate the debate. Because everyone agrees that child pornography is bad, and if you don't let things go any further than that, then you're actually missing out on a lot of the finer nuance of this debate. What else is actually going to be banned by this? It's not actually stopping at child pornography. Even today - they haven't even sort of finished "polishing the turd" yet to make the policy acceptable to the public, and today we already had in Australia the Christian Right come out and say that all pornography should be banned. And we had another special interest group come out and say that all gambling sites should be banned. Now these are things that are not illegal, but already we're having a serious conversation about whether they should be on a blacklist.

So I'd make the comment - and this is - I guess - bringing things back to the center a little bit: We have been living in a world now, with ubiquitous access to uncensored online services for about three decades. Society has not fallen apart. Parents are not bringing up children in moral values that make them turn into axe murderers and rapists. We are clearly, as a society, coping with this stuff. And it isn't actually a serious problem. And if you've been having something that isn't a serious problem, part of your life for thirty years, implementing government censorship to control that is actually a very radical position and rather than asking for what you can do instead, you actually need to be saying to the radicals, why are you doing this in the first place? Justify your existence. Tell us why it is necessary to even care about this problem. Because as society is clearly able to deal with it without anything like what you are proposing in place.

NPD: Alright, well thank you for spending this time with us - thank you again for doing this, and good luck.

Newton: Yeah, and thank you very much for taking an interest. It's been impressive to see how wide and far this issue has been going.