Internet porn and surveillance is all the rage in the newspapers today. The general sense of middle England, as far as I can see, is that they want to police to snoop on their children (to stop them seeing stuff like The Daily Mail) and their neighbours (in case they are terrorists or child pornographers) but not on themselves. Hhmmm. No good will come of this. The bad news is that government ministers have decided to do something about.

Minister explains why we MUST force Google to crack down on web filth

[From Why I, as a mother, am determined to protect my children from the depravity of internet porn: Minister explains why we MUST force Google to crack down on web filth | Mail Online]

The woman quoted here is Maria Miller, the MP for Basingstoke. Her background is in advertising and marketing, which is why I suppose she sees Google as the gateway to world. But my point is that if MPs do decide to go ahead with some “dangerous dogs”-style legislation, whereby internet companies are forced to block certain websites and charge their customers for the privilege of being censored, I suggest they use Parliament as a test case for a few months. The news that parliamentary PCs are used to access foot fetish, adultery, gay cruising resources and, most intriguingly, a website for women who posed naked next to cats, suggests that the Parliamentary firewall might be a hard case to test bad law.

Harry Potter, a barrister specialising in obscenity cases, said: ‘Having viewed the material, it does not in my opinion fall foul of the law as constituting extreme pornography. It is, however, undoubtedly hardcore pornography.’

[From MPs¿ computers used to access porn sites, including foot and fat fetishism, more than 2,500 times | Mail Online]

Seriously? “Harry Potter”? The man’s life must be a misery. Anyway, it won’t work, of course. Even if the internet titans that Maria refers to were able to come up with software that could distinguish between an MP viewing legal foot fetishism and an MP viewing illegal “extreme” foot perversions, the firewall will be trivially circumvented. I was using a customer’s network the other day when I clicked on a link to a story about credit card fraud. The story turned out to be in the Sun newspaper, and the customer had sensibly blocked access to Britain’s favourite newspaper’s website on the grounds that it contained “nudity and/or content of an adult nature “. So I logged in via a VPN and carried on. I did the same at a friends house when I was checking something on the Pirate Bay. Virgin had blocked it, so I went to by VPN. The last time I was in the US and wanted to listen to the football on BBC Radio Five, iPlayer told me that I couldn’t, so I logged on via a VPN that made me appear to be in the UK and listened to the match. And if I was a pervert MP looking for porn when I should be voting on an Internet censorship bill, I would do the same thing.

In fact, I saw an article about people snooping on Wi-Fi in cafes and hotels so I decided to go via VPN whenever out and about. I’m sure I can’t be the only person who has gone down this route and I’m sure that the use of VPNs will continue to grow significantly over the coming years. Every time someone gets a letter from their ISP complaining on behalf of record companies that that person has been visiting filesharing sites, the VPN vendor’s share prices will go up accordingly.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, you have to imagine that the “declines” reported in file sharing and cyberlockers severely undercounts those things too, as using some rather basic tools can let people hide that sort of information from being collected — and the efforts by Hadopi to “educate” the public likely educated them about how to use VPNs

[From Three Strikes May Decrease File Sharing, But If Sales Keep Dropping, Who Cares? | Techdirt]

Now, you have to wonder if this is a good thing. After all, if the copyright mentalists and MPs drive us all to use VPNs for everything, life will actually get harder for the forces of law enforcement who have legitimate reasons to want to monitor Internet traffic. If everything is encrypted, PRISM will need more computing power than the planet has to offer in order to track to down international ne’er-do-wells. Hollywood’s stupid deep packet inspection (DPI) nonsense won’t work, but nor will anyone else’s. So my challenge to MPs is this: tell us what you want. Do you want the Internet set up so that Sony, the Daily Mail and the Bulgarian Mafia can see what websites you are visiting, or not?

 

us gov inspected In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen megabytes