Censoring the Internet

The ANC wants Internet filtering to be put in place in South Africa to protect children from child pornography.Deputy minister of home affairs Malusi Gigaba has tabled the Internet and Cellphone Child Pornography Bill, calling for "brakes and seatbelts" to be introduced to the South African Internet.

The Bill will also outlaw adult pornography, force Internet service providers (ISPs) to bear the costs of the filtering and will hold them liable if pornographic material is transmitted across their networks. Telkom, Neotel and the mobile carriers are not exempt either.

Section 2 says any Internet service provider or mobile phone service provider "who distributes, or allows to be distributed through the Internet or through a mobile phone in the Republic of South Africa, any pornography, shall be guilty of an offence and liable, upon conviction, to a fine or imprisonment for a period not exceeding five years, or to both a fine and such imprisonment".

The deputy minister has met with the Justice Alliance of South Africa (JASA), represented by John Smyth QC and Brendan Studti. JASA says the Bill is aimed at the total ban of pornography on Internet and mobile phones.

"United Arab Emirates and Yemen already have legislation in this regard," says Smyth. "Australia and New Zealand are currently seeking to do so."

But will the ban work? Marc Furman, member of the management committee of the South African Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA), says not.

"I think it`s very wrong-minded," he says. "The filters are not going to solve the problem technically and the reports I`ve seen show that they don`t filter porn, but have a chilling effect on everything else. I`ve taken a look at the Bill and it`s terribly broad and goes far beyond what it purports to protect.

"The Department of Home Affairs needs to apply itself slightly more specifically to the problem if it`s going to have the desired effect. This Bill doesn`t even apply to broadcast journalists. I understand that this comes from protecting children, but it`s not something that will pass constitutional must. The ISPs already are taking steps to address this issue. The Bill is taking a wrecking ball to a mouse."

In a written legal opinion, Smyth notes that the Bill seeks to limit the right to the freedom of expression, and possibly the right to privacy, in the best interests of the children of South Africa and to uphold the right to dignity of women.

"Internet pornography is such a readily accessible evil for children that the Constitutional Court, if the Bill were challenged, would be bound to hold that the section 28 obligation to protect, at all costs, the best interests of children would trump the rights to freedom of expression and privacy."

He also argues that the limitation of the right to privacy doesn`t apply.

"Since pornography is frequently being imported via the Internet and then possessed on computers and cellphones, the ease with which children may access pornography (that would otherwise be restricted by the Film and Publication Act18) at the touch of a button, must be taken into account.

"It should not be overlooked that many of the resultant acts of children viewing pornography (especially on the Internet and on cellphones) take place in private. In other words, where the reasonable risk of harm to children is likely to materialise in private, some intrusion by the law into the private domain is justified to minimise the risk of such harm."

THE FUTILITY OF FILTERING

Smyth may be underestimating just how impossible Internet censorship really is. Perhaps the most extraordinary description of how helpless governments can be when trying to combat child pornography comes from an anonymous document posted to Wikileaks, called: "An Insight into Child Porn". The German author claims to have many years in the child porn industry and understandably only calls himself "Mr X".

He says today`s schemes for bypassing prying eyes are technologically very demanding and extremely complex. It starts with the renting of computer servers in several countries, using either stolen credit card information or promotional cards from retailers.

"Using a false identity and well-functioning credit card servers are then rented and domains purchased as an existing, unsuspecting person," says Mr X.

"Most of the time, an ID is required and in that case they will simply send a forged document. There is yet another alternative: a payment system called WebMoney (webmoney.ru) that is in Eastern Europe as widespread as PayPal in Western Europe.

"Again, accounts are opened with false identities. Then the business is very simple in Eastern Europe: one buys domains and rents servers via WebMoney and uses it to pay."

Once the server is available, Mr X says an authorised administrator connects to it via a series of other servers using an encrypted tunnel. All of the content is encrypted and no logging is enabled. Servers hosted in Germany are prime candidates for illegal content, because they are fast, reliable and inexpensive. But they are also very difficult to detect and impossible to analyse should they be seized, he says.

"All the illegal files, such as pictures and videos, are uploaded on these servers. These servers use firewalls and are completely sealed and made inaccessible except by a few servers all over the world - so-called proxy servers or forward servers. If the server is shut down or someone logs in from the console, the encrypted partition is unmounted ...these proxy servers accept incoming connections from the retail customers and route them to the content servers in Germany - completely anonymously and unidentifiably. The communication link can even be configured to be encrypted. Result: the server in Germany attracts no attention because its IP is not used by anyone except for the proxy server that uses it to route the traffic back and forth through a tunnel - using similar technology as is used with large enterprise VPNs."

The proxy servers aren`t easily identifiable, since they host no content and simply forward incoming requests onwards. Mr X claims that domain names are also rotated and changed every few minutes to prevent intercepted requests from resolving to illegal content servers.

Ironically, exactly the opposite problem is faced by the proposed country filters. By routing all incoming requests through them on their way in and out of the country, they become a single point of failure. A compromised filter machine could become a rich source of child pornography sites if the ban list is leaked (as has happened to Finland) and a denial of service attack on the filters could cut South Africa off from the Internet.

Mr X concludes his thesis by saying: "If you still haven`t noticed: technology is not the solution to child pornography. No filters, no censorship and no total monitoring can change this."

Furman agrees. "We obviously want to make the Internet a safe place, but this Bill won`t do it."