Australian Internet filters have backdoor

Adam Turner | Nov 3, 2008 11:13 AM

The Australian government wants to introduce draconian censorship and cripple internet speeds with a mandatory filtering system which any child can bypass in five minutes - Adam Turner shows how easy it is.

Communications Minister, Senator Conroy, is pandering to a handful of fundamentalist luddites with his plans to introduce mandatory internet filtering at the ISP-level. The government's own research reveals the filters will slow down everyone's internet access by 20 to 75 per cent, which makes a joke of plans to build a faster national network.

Of perhaps greater concern is the fact that supporters of filtering are already talking about expanding it to include other stuff they don't like, such as online gambling and "illegal" sites. Censorship is a slippery slope and the fact the government has tried to censor people speaking out against the filtering plans should be ringing alarm bells.

The government already tried giving away free desktop filtering software, but no-one wanted it. Now it wants to inflict filtering on everyone by introducing it at the ISP-level. The government's own research has shown filtering is not foolproof, yet talk of a "clean feed" could give many Australians a false sense of security when online and actually make them less safer rather than more.

The biggest joke is that plans for filtering won't stop anyone who is determined to access banned content, as there are free and easy ways to bypass any efforts at censoring the web in Australia.

One simple trick is to use a free web proxy, which acts as a middle man between you and the site you want to see. You'll find a long list of free web proxies and other such sites at FreeProxy.ru. Just enter the name of the site into a proxy site's search box - such as banned-site.com, and the proxy site will then call up the site for you. This way banned-site.com doesn't know who you are, but also your ISP doesn't know you looked at banned-site.com. Kids are already using these kinds of sites to bypass school filters so they can access Facebook from the classroom. It won't take horny teenagers long to use such sites to bypass ISP-level filtering.

Another trick for bypassing filters is to dig an encrypted tunnel to the United States. It sounds complicated, but it's free and ridiculously easy to do and not even your ISP can see what you're up to.

Two popular free VPN applications are HotSpot Shield (Mac and Windows) and AlwaysVPN (Mac, Windows, Linux). They add an advertising banner to your browser, but if you're prepared to spend $5 per month you could look at Witopia or VPN out. You don't need to know anything about networking and there's no messy configuration, you run the installers and they just work.

These applications give you dual citizenship as, with the click of a button, your computer looks like it's in the United States. This means you can access US-only content from sites such as Rhapsody, Pandora, YouTube and Hulu. It also means you're bypassing any content filtering performed by your Australian ISP, and there's nothing they can do about it.

Such tools are not illegal. They're primarily designed to protect your privacy when you connect to an insecure wifi hotspot. If mandatory filtering is introduced in Australia, you can expect many of the local ISPs to start bundling a VPN service with their internet packages - of course just so their customers are "safe" online, not so they can bypass the filters.

Australia's plans for mandatory content filtering will screw up the internet and give right wing nutjobs the power to censor what we see, yet it won't actually stop people who want to access banned sites.

If you're concerned about the government's plans for filtering the internet, it's time to speak up before it's too late. Visit NoCleanFeed.com, run by Electronic Frontiers Australia, for information on how to voice your concerns. Do it quickly, before some holier-than-thou git decides you're not allowed to see that site either.