Light Blue Touchpaper

There’s a short story by (I think) Stephen Leacock, which tells of declining standards. How an undergraduate, newly arrived at university, lived in awe of the sagacity of the professors, of the intelligence of the grad students, and the learning of those about to receive their degrees. By the time he was receiving his first degree, he and his class were merely of average competence. By the time his PhD was awarded there were few of his cohort with any real learning; and standards had slipped so much over time that when they made him a Professor he and his colleagues hardly knew anything at all!

Having now reached the point in my life when I’m older than half the British Cabinet, it’s perhaps no surprise to read that UK cabinet minister Andy Burnham (born when I was in the Lower Sixth), has come up with some ideas about regulating the Internet that I am deeply unimpressed with.

In a Telegraph interview he proposes that ISPs should be forced to provide censored access to the Internet with only child-friendly sites visible; that the industry should have new “take-down” targets for bad material (presumably shorter ones); that it should be easier to sue for defamation online; and that the web should be labelled with age-ratings the way that video games and films are. Of course he realises he can’t do this alone, so he’s going to ask President Obama to help out!

Unfortunately, Mr Burnham doesn’t know anything about the Internet and seems to be arguing by analogy, and with a childlike hope that merely wishing for something will make it come true.
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Part of the encyclopaedia website Wikipedia was censored in the UK between Friday 5th December 2008 and Tuesday 9th December 2008. Errors in the way that this was done has shown up a number of inconsistencies in the blocking mechanisms employed.
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Last week the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee published a report of their inquiry into “Harmful content on the Internet and in video games“. They make a number of recommendations including a self-regulatory body to set rules for Internet companies to force them to protect users; that sites should provide a “watershed” so that grown-up material cannot be viewed before 9pm; that YouTube should screen material for forbidden content; that “suicide websites” should be blocked; that ISPs should be forced to block child sexual abuse image websites whatever the cost, and that blocking of bad content was generally desirable.

You will discern a certain amount of enthusiasm for blocking, and for a “something must be done” approach. However, in coming to their conclusions, they do not, in my view, seem to have listened too hard to the evidence, or sought out expertise elsewhere in the world…
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The second edition of my book “Security Engineering” came out three weeks ago. Wiley have now got round to sending me the final electronic version of the book, plus permission to put half a dozen of the chapters online. They’re now available for download here.

The chapters I’ve put online cover security psychology, banking systems, physical protection, APIs, search, social networking, elections and terrorism. That’s just a sample of how our field has grown outwards in the seven years since the first edition.

Enjoy!

The latest issue of the journal “Index on Censorship” is dedicated to the topic of Internet censorship and features an article, “Shifting Borders”, by Ross Anderson and me. In it, we argue that it is wrong to claim that the Internet is free from barriers. They exist, and while often aligning with national boundaries they are hopefully lower.

However, the changing nature of the end-to-end principle is increasing the significance of barriers that stem from industry structure — which companies are hosting controversial information, where they do business, what markets do they compete in and what corporate partnerships are involved. The direction these take will have a significant impact on the scale of Internet censorship.

The rest of the journal is well worth reading, with authors including Xeni Jardin, David Weinberger and Jimmy Wales. I can especially recommend taking a look at Nart Villeneuve’s article, “Evasion Tactics”, also published on his blog. Unfortunately access to the full online version is restricted to subscribers.

As we all know, the web contains a certain amount of content that some people don’t want to look at, and/or do not wish their children to look at. Removing the material is seldom an option (it may well be entirely lawfully hosted, and indeed many other people may be perfectly happy for it to be there). Since centralised blocking of such material just isn’t going to happen, the best way forward is the installation of blocking software on the end-user’s machine. This software will have blacklists and whitelists provided from a central server, and it will provide some useful reassurance to parents that their youngest children have some protection. Older children can of course just turn the systems off, as has recently been widely reported for the Australian NetAlert system.

A related idea is that websites should rate themselves according to widely agreed criteria, and this would allow visitors to know what to expect on the site. Such ratings would of course be freely available, unlike the blocking software which tends to cost money (to pay for the people making the whitelists and blacklists).

I’ve never been a fan of these self-rating systems whose criteria always seem to be based on a white, middle-class, presbyterian view of wickedness, and — at least initially — were hurriedly patched together from videogame rating schemes. More than a decade ago I lampooned the then widely hyped RSACi system by creating a site that scored “4 4 4 4″, the highest (most unacceptable) score in every category: http://www.happyday.demon.co.uk/awful.htm and just recently, I was reminded of this in the context of an interview for an EU review of self-regulation.

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A couple of weeks ago, right at the end of the Oxford Internet Institute conference on The Future of Free Expression on the Internet, the question was raised from the platform as to whether it might be possible to construct a Best Current Practice (BCP) framework for censorship?

If — the argument ran — IF countries were transparent about what they censored, IF there was no overblocking (the literature’s jargon for collateral damage), IF it was done under a formal (local) legal framework, IF there was the right of appeal to correct inadvertent errors, IF … and doubtless a whole raft more of “IFs” that a proper effort to develop a BCP would establish. IF… then perhaps censorship would be OK.

I spoke against the notion of a BCP from the audience at the time, and after some reflection I see no reason to change my mind.

There will be many more subtle arguments — much as there are will be more IFs to consider, but I can immediately see two insurmountable objections.

The first is that a BCP will inevitably lead to far more censorship, but now with the apparent endorsement of a prestigious organisation: “The OpenNet Initiative says that blocking the political opposition’s websites is just fine!” Doubtless some of the IFs in the BCP will address open political processes, and universal human rights … but it will surely come down to quibbling about language: terrorist/freedom-fighter; assassination/murder; dissent/rebellion; opposition/traitor.

The second, and I think the most telling, objection is that it will reinforce the impression that censoring the Internet can actually be achieved! whereas the evidence piles up that it just isn’t possible. All of the schemes for blocking content can be evaded by those with technical knowledge (or access to the tools written by others with that knowledge). Proxies, VPNs, Tor, fragments, ignoring resets… the list of evasion technologies is endless.

One of the best ways of spreading data to multiple sites is to attempt to remove it, and every few years some organisation demonstrates this again. Although ad hoc replication doesn’t necessarily scale — there’s plenty of schemes in the literature for doing it on an industrial scale.

It’s cliched to trot out John Gilmore’s observation that “the Internet treats censorship as a defect and routes around it“, but over-familiarity with the phrase should not hide its underlying truth.

So, in my view, a BCP will merely be used by the wicked as a fig-leaf for their activity, and by the ignorant to prop up their belief that it’s actually possible to block the content they don’t believe should be visible. A BCP is a thoroughly bad idea, and should not be further considered.

At their conference in Oxford, the OpenNet Initiative have released the results from their first global Internet filtering survey. This announcement has been widely covered in the media.

Out of the 41 countries surveyed, 25 were found to impose filtering, though the topics blocked and extent of blocking varies dramatically.

Results can be seen on the filtering map and an URL checker. The full report, including detailed country and region summaries, will be published in the book “Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering“.

The 23rd Chaos Communication Congress will be held later this month in Berlin, Germany on 27–30 December. I will be attending to give a talk on Hot or Not: Revealing Hidden Services by their Clock Skew. Another contributor to this blog, George Danezis, will be talking on An Introduction to Traffic Analysis.

This will be my third time speaking at the CCC (I previously talked on Hidden Data in Internet Published Documents and The Convergence of Anti-Counterfeiting and Computer Security in 2004 then Covert channels in TCP/IP: attack and defence in 2005) and I’ve always had a great time but this year looks to be the best yet. Here are a few highlights from the draft programme, although I am sure there are many great talks I have missed.

• Bernd R. Fix on A not so smart card — one of the rare cases where key length (320 bit RSA) was the major weakness in a security system
• Caspar Bowden, Chief Privacy Advisor, Microsoft EMEA (and former director of FIPR) on Transparency and Privacy, covering Kim Cameron’s 7 laws of identity
• Ilja (who has an amazing ability to exploit seemingly unexploitable bugs) on Unusual bugs and You can’t make this stuff up
• Jacob Appelbaum and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann on Unlocking FileVault — Jacob was at the CCC last year giving a summary of disk encryption systems; now he is back to go into more detail on the one from MacOS X
• Joanna Rutkowska, author of the Nushu TCP/IP steganography scheme (which I discussed in my paper on this topic) and the Blue Pill virtualization based rootkit, will be talking on Stealth malware — can good guys win?
• Melanie Rieback on A Hacker’s Toolkit for RFID Emulation and Jamming — covering the RFID Guardian, as featured on Schneier’s blog, Boing Boing and Slashdot. Melanie gave a talk on an early version of this project at the International Workshop on Security Protocols so I will be interested to see how it has progressed
• Roger Dingledine (co-designer of Tor) on Tor and China — censorship resistance has been a major interest of mine, particularly since I started working for the OpenNet Initiative
• Rop Gonggrijp on We don’t trust voting computers — from the team who made a Dutch voting computer play chess

It’s looking like a great line-up, so I hope many of you can make it. See you there!

My book on Security Engineering is now available online for free download here.

I have two main reasons. First, I want to reach the widest possible audience, especially among poor students. Second, I am a pragmatic libertarian on free culture and free software issues; I believe many publishers (especially of music and software) are too defensive of copyright. I don’t expect to lose money by making this book available for free: more people will read it, and those of you who find it useful will hopefully buy a copy. After all, a proper book is half the size and weight of 300-odd sheets of laser-printed paper in a ring binder.

I’d been discussing this with my publishers for a while. They have been persuaded by the experience of authors like David MacKay, who found that putting his excellent book on coding theory online actually helped its sales. So book publishers are now learning that freedom and profit are not really in conflict; how long will it take the music industry?