Re: [ProgSoc] FW: [SAGE-AU] new censorship legislation out (fwd)

[Telford Tendys <telford@nospam.progsoc.uts.edu.au>]

> Couldn't they just put all the kiddie porn onto IRC channels, classify
> them as chat rooms and get away with it?

Not if there was a reliable way of accessing it so that each person
could go there and get some because then the complaint can request that
the ISP block that method of access. What you can do on IRC is hang around
a bit, talk to people, then offer to trade some material, etc. Since this
is not a consistent method of access and since the material itself that
gets traded will not be consistent either, there is no way to request that
it be filtered because you cant specify what you are trying to filter.

I see the current legislation as pretty toothless but with a major
nuisance factor for ISPs because of the huge ammount of work to be done in
classifying and filtering material. I guess that the censorship folks think
that it's great because they will have work to do until doomsday. 

>  Plus of course, once you encrypt
> something, it gets difficult to prove you have what they say you do.

Encrypting the channel is better than encrypting the storage because a line
snooper could gather enough evidence to prove that you have the material
somewhere in storage. However, encrypting the channel implies a private
intranet (even if it is using the internet as a carrier, it is not public)
so the legislation should not apply (unless you make the encryption password
public, in which case you have a public channel again and you may as well
not bother encrypting at all).

I gues that there is a grey area when sites themselves screen access to
just people that they think won't complain but that in itself is implicitly
a way of supporting the legislation because the number of complaints will
be reduced, thus making the legislation (statistically) successful.

	- Tel

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