Here are some preliminary notes from interviews so far that paint a picture of an optimistic, but fearful Kyrgyzstan.

Kyrgyzstan is hurtling towards Central Asia’s first parliamentary elections on October 10, but the situation remains fragile.

People worry that the inter-ethnic violence that began in June between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz, killing more than 300 people and displacing nearly half a million, will continue to affect the historic poll. People are wary of old political forces manipulating the vote through bribery and intimidation. The interim government must convince a skeptical public that it has purged corruption and can restore KG’s failing economy. US and Russia – who see this nation of over 5 million people as straegically important (the US airbase at Manas outside the capital Bishkek, provides a launchpad for operations in Afghanistan) – are watching the outcome closely.

Fearful ahead of elections

Karakul Lake, in the far west region of China that borders Kyrgyzstan. James West 2007.

“I think the biggest thing we’re afraid of is conflict”, says Aida Alymbaeva, the director of the Social Research Centre of the Amerucan University of Central Asia. After April’s demonstrations forced the once-lauded President Kurmanbek Bakiyev to flee the country to Belarus, opposition parties sprouted promising to deliver change to Kyrgyzstan, a post-Soviet republic suffering from unemployment, a poor economy and a dramatic rise in energy costs.

But with new parties come old tricks, says Alymbaeva.

“We are not very optimistic because we know who these parties actually are. And we don’t actually see new faces, and we don’t see new programs from the parties. We see the old faces, elite groups who are fighting for their power”.

Alymbaeva says parties are prepared to do whatever it takes to gain power: organising riots and paying militia. Parties are out-bribing voters in regional areas – where 70 per cent of the population lives – with cash offers.

Alymbaeva says political groups like the newly-formed Ata-Jurt Party are simply assemblies of old politicians that served under the now-discredited and overthrown Bakiyev government. “We see their faces, and we see their slogans saying that they’re the party for prosperity and for development etcetera et cetera, et cetera”, she says. But we don’t believe them. Because these are the corrupted people.”

Alymbaeva is hesitant, but optimistic. “The best scenario will be if it’s a true and open election process, so we can start rehabilitating our country”.

Mirsulzhan Namazaliev, the 22-year-old director of the Central Asian Free Market Institute, a think tank promoting market reform advocacy across the former Soviet republics, also lacks faith. “Big government is not working, because it’s always accompanied by corruption. So the only way that we see the way forward, is to minimise it”. He admires the Rose Revolution in Georga in 2003, which saw a younger, more professional band of post-soviets come to power. He wants that to happen in Kyrgyzstan.

Namazaliev once took to the streets to protest. During the Tulip Revolution in 2005, when he was 17, Namazaliev was arrested twice. In all, he’s has been arrested seven or eight times. “It also made me very politically active, and very stubborn”, he says.

This time, he won’t protest. “Everyone can go out”, he says. “It’s very easy. I did it before. But right now what I need to do is help to save the country. I need to help the propose reform ideas”.

One such way his think tank is helping – with assistance in part from the US government of US$7000 – is to promote peace in Osh, a city regarded crucial to the country’s future stability. His group made 2,500 t-shirts bearing the slogans “I Want Peace in Kyrgyzstan” and “One Country, One Nation, One Future” in three languages.

Namazaliev says the purpose was to stop locals “listening only to their emotions”, and promote the idea that “ethnicity and nationality doesn’t mean anything for us, because we’re all living in Kyrgyzstan and we’re all citizens of Kyrgyzstan”.

Recriminations in Osh

The situation in Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s southern city of a quarter of a million people, a mix of Uzbeks and Kyrgyz, remains tense.

One long term expatriate resident of five years recently contacted me by email claiming, “the police and army is systematically taking in custody young Uzbeks, beating them up, some have died”. The expat writes that the Uzbeks are then forced to pay ransoms (he claims up to US$20,000) to get out of jail. “Nationalistic groups are freely driving/walking around and are threatening Uzbeks,” he claims. He told me to keep his identity confidential for fear of reprisals.

Alymbaeva agrees that there have been violations of human rights and recriminations in Osh. Both sides blame each other for starting the violence, brewed by simmering resentment between the groups over status, pay and official representation in the government. Now, Alymbaeva says, local Kyrgyz police and security forces are performing random arrests on Uzbeks in retaliation. “For example, they seize anybody, especially young Uzbek people, and they seize them and put them into into the prison and then say, ‘these crimes were committed by you’. Even innocent people are blamed for the crimes.”

Roza Otunbayeva, the president of Kyrgyzstan’s interim government has admitted that security services in the south of the country are targeting Uzbeks.

“Yes we have violations of human rights,” she told AFP in a recent interview. “I must tell you that there are some such cases. I can’t deny this. I am in struggle with all my law enforcement myself,” she said.

Linar Zairov is a Kyrgyz voice that has become prominent on Twitter. The 32-year-old Assistant Professor of Economics now living in America says the Western media isn’t presenting the whole picture. “It has become a tradition for many journalists stationed in Central Asia to take a rumor or unsupported claim and present it as a fact. I am hoping that my commentaries and tweets will force journalists to differentiate between opinions and facts,” he wrote to me by email.

In another interview over Skype he asked, “Why is it that Kyrgyz victims who were just as brutally murdered are not being reported? Not even mentioning them, there’s no acknowledgement that they even suffered”.

“As of today, every claim that has been made by every media outlet is just plain false, because they don’t know. No body knows right now. Everything’s based on eye-witness accounts, and most of these eye-witness accounts are from the Uzbek side”.

Zairov blames poverty. He says that the armed forces is Osh attract uneducated employees. “They have a lack of moral judgement, they blur the line between right and wrong. So you have these guys out there consistently violating basic civil rights of citizens. That’s the key issue, that these guys are really underpaid”, he says.

Humanitarian Response

The road to the Karakul lake, in far west China. James West 2007.

But NGOs continue to witness intimidation of Uzbeks in the south, making is hard for Uzbeks to seek help.

“The worst issue however is the invisible but permanent state of fear in which people, especially the Uzbeks, live”, says Anja Wolz, Médecins Sans Frontières Field Coordinator in Osh in a media statement. They are the target of frequent raids by security forces, followed by arrests and terrible abuses in detention centres. This fear, along with the remaining presence of armed men in and around some health facilities, renders access to health care very difficult for them.”

Olga Grebennikova, the media liaison officer for UNICEF in Bishkek, the capital, says people are still afraid. “Mistrust is tremendous, tremendous”, she says in an interview from Bishkek. “The level of fear is tremendous”.

In response, UNICEF opened a field office in Osh, diverting most of their resources to the south of the country. UNICEF medical kits helped around 6,000 deliveries by midwives, and the organisation trained 2500 medical staff around the country. Forty-two child friendly spaces have played host to 5000 children, to ensure they’re safe. And a new back-to-school program is being rolled out, but they only have 20 per cent of the funding required to launch the US$4.8million program.

“This impact on children is long-lasting. If we don’t take any measures, especially for children, it will last forever for them: this feeling of distrust, this feeling of fear, this feeling of conflict around them.”

The man who would tell his three daughters that virginity “is the greatest gift that you can give someone”, now appears to have been given a campaign gift by the Virgin bike team.

Tony Abbott confirmed an arrangement on Triple M’s The Cage show in Brisbane this week.

PRESENTER: Is that a Commonwealth bike you were riding?

TONY ABBOTT: Look, I was riding a beautiful bike that was lent to me by the Virgin cycling team.

He’s talking about the Virgin Blue RBS Morgan Cycling Team. It comprises 13 competitive riders from each mainland state. The bike and kit was loaned to the opposition leader by team manager and owner, Chris White, from Pegasus Racing. White met Mr Abbott through a business associate, and bonded – how else? – over a bike ride.

“I’ve got a lot of respect for Tony and his ability to keep fit and healthy in a busy schedule,” says White, from Brisbane. “And I’ve got a lot of respect for the drive and enthusiasm he has. So I think he’s really well positioned to lead the country well. He leads by example.”

The bike kit given to Mr Abbott is built for speed. Perched on a Merida Scultura road bike, a series that can retail for up to $8,500, Mr Abbott wore a 2XU Custom Spec racing jersey, worth up to $160, featuring “compression Lycra for less muscle fatigue and increased endurance”.

White has accompanied Mr Abbott five times on Brisbane streets. They roll out at 5am, ride for no more than an hour and a quarter, and notch up 30 kilometers. White says they’ve been trailed by reporters twice.

“It’s pretty inspirational what Mr Abbott is able to achieve in a day”, says White. “I’m happy to help out to make that work for him, wherever possible.”

But during a campaign, with its added financial scrutiny, does Tony Abbott need to declare this “help” under the Commonwealth Electoral Act?

The Funding and Disclosure Guide for Candidates and Senate Groups, handed out by the AEC, stipulates that detailed disclosure must be made of gifts totalling more than $11,500.

Chris White says no commercial arrangement was made between his cycling team and Mr Abbott or the Liberal Party, and says he only has only a “vague understanding” of the electoral rules of disclosure.

The deal is beyond politics, says White. It’s pure cycling.

“The cycling community you’ll find where ever you go in the world, is really a close-knit community. Being a Brisbane-based team… we’re happy to help out when he’s in town from one enthusiast to another.” White also adds it’s rare for a racing jersey to appear without corporate sponsorship on it.

“I get nothing out of it except for an hour, or an hour and a quarter of exercise”, says White.

Regardless, Virgin admits their brand has been getting a lot of screen time on Abbott’s chest. And while Chris White says he has a “fair degree of autonomy” from Virgin Blue when dishing out its brand (“I don’t need to go seek their counsel on things”), the exposure hasn’t gone unnoticed over at the airline’s marketing team.

Virgin Blue says it was unaware of the deal before Mr Abbott began cropping up in early morning press photos. Nevertheless, they see it as a plus.

“We’re thrilled to have such a prominent figure who is at the moment in the spotlight wearing the Virgin cycling uniform with pride”, says Danielle Keighery from Virgin Blue.

So does Virgin Blue see any – is it irony? – in Australia’s outspoken opponent of sex before marriage wearing the word Virgin?

“I don’t like having those connotations”, says Keighery. “When it comes to Virgin Blue, it doesn’t necessarily have sexual connotations with it. Virgin Blue’s one of the biggest airlines in the country, and the brand is known for other things rather than that”.

Does Virgin agree with his policies?

“This isn’t a political thing. It’s literally him wearing our cycling jersey. He’s a very fit guy, we’re quite happy for him to do that.”

Electoral law expert, and author of the forthcoming book “The Law of Politics”, Graham Orr from the University of Queensland, says this kind of arrangement may need to be declared for public scrutiny.

“It’s arguable that it’s a provision of a service, just like leasing a car is providing a service,” says Orr. “And it’s also arguable that it’s a gift to him as a candidate… it’s sort of all part of his campaign strategy to appear like a robust and healthy character fit to be Prime Minister”.

Even then, says Orr, the value of the loaned bike and kit would need to have a cumulative commercial value of over $11,500 for it to be declared, which is difficult to prove.

In any case, we’ll need to wait and see whether Mr Abbott chooses to disclose the gift to the Registrar of Members’ Interests 28 days after he is re-elected into office.

That threshold is lower, at just 300 dollars, and covers gifts for which there may be a perceived conflict of interest, or any sponsored travel or hospitality received where the value of the sponsored travel or hospitality that exceeds $300.

Until earlier this week, the Sex Offenders Search application was placing several sex offenders on Sydney suburban streets. At Byran Avenue in Normanhurst, a leafy cul-de-sac leading to a park, the application listed a six-foot two white male with a record of indecent solicitation of a child. In San Souci, a man was listed as being guilty of “lewd or lascivious battery” of a victim aged between 12 and 15. Another was a blue-eyed man, supposedly living in Fairfield West on Corona Road, with convictions involving the rape of teenager.

The high-rating app is designed by Florida-based company LogSat for American families, using publicly available, privately maintained American data. It’s also available from the Australian store as a free “lite” version, or for purchase as an extended-feature version for $2.49.

The application page in the Apple iTunes store claims: “Our world can be a dangerous place. Knowledge and awareness are our first line of defence”.

One resident (who didn’t want her name revealed) was gobsmacked that sex offenders were being pinpointed near her Kings Langley address in Sydney’s western suburbs. “It’s pretty scary that any company can create an application like that and put it on the internet,” she told Crikey, “because then that information is available to anyone who can start harassing people.”

Residents along her street in Kings Langley were being listed by the application as living alongside 12 registered s-x offenders, each in a different house. In her case, next door was the house of a man guilty of sexual contact with an individual younger than 11 years old.

“I can tell you no one of that name has ever lived here,” she said.

iTunes states the application was released here on December 9 last year, with updates for the iPad coming at the beginning of April. In the States, the app enjoyed a run in the top paid applications in the US shop and received national media coverage. One Fox report called it “a new powerful tool to spot sex offenders”, featuring a mother who even recognises one of the men in her search.

The application designers say there were 44,231 downloads from the United States in the last week. There were 51 downloads from the Australian store.

Using red pins embedded in a Google Map, the application locates almost 600,000 s-x offenders in America, including photos, descriptions of their crimes and even height and weight information. The sex offender located by the software on Bedford Avenue in Normanhurst actually lives on Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn. Similar glitches are apparent in London, Paris and other cities checked by Crikey.

Roberto Franceschetti, the designer of the application, confirmed by email that the addresses had been mapped incorrectly. After reviewing his database, Franceschetti discovered about 200 incorrect entries in the southern hemisphere.

“At first glance it does appear that the majority of these 200 individual[s] are listed as ‘deported’ by various law enforcement agencies here in the US, and have been assigned an incorrect address in their records that resolves (again, incorrectly), to Australian co-ordinates,” he said. The company is now manually double-checking the data.

The application is downloadable in all countries that have access to an iTunes store. Franceschetti said all false searches have been removed from Australia, but problems persist in other countries.

He has not been contacted previously by Apple Australia about the erroneous results, which doesn’t ask designers to tailor products for different jurisdictions (Apple refused to comment when contacted by Crikey). The accompanying blurb on the iTunes store does let the customer know that the application only uses US data.

Stephen Blanks, secretary of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, is concerned the product is available to Australian consumers. He told Crikey: “Companies such as Apple, which deal in products that reveal personal information, have an important obligation to ensure that their products comply with Australian privacy standards. Apple needs to demonstrate a commitment to privacy by removing this app from its Australian store immediately, and disabling the app for anyone who has purchased it in Australia, and refunding the purchase price.”

Blanks also highlighted the problem of mistaken identity, saying the application posed a risk to people with a similar name in the vicinity of a search.

In response to the so-called Megan’s Law (named after a seven-year-old New Jersey girl was raped and killed by a paroled s-x offender in 1994) , all states of America are required to make information available regarding registered s-x offenders. While individual states decide what information is shared, and how, the federal Department of Justice runs a national s-x offender database.

The Australian National Child Offender Register (ANCOR) allows police to share information between jurisdictions on convicted offenders, but there are no publicly accessible registries. In 2007, the Australian Institute of Criminology raised several concerns with a public registry, including that offender compliance varies, offenders can still “go underground” and that the focus on a few known offenders may distract attention from the more common intra-familial abuse. That was backed by research from the New Jersey Department of Corrections, which found Megan’s Law has no impact on reducing sex crimes.

The Sydney resident thinks Apple should apologise. “This is something you can’t ignore. You can’t sweep it under the rug,” she said.

Here’s what Stephen Conroy told Australia Talks:

CONROY: The key here is that the advocates particularly – and this is a US-based argument, particularly – is that the Internet’s something special. It shouldn’t be regulated by anybody, for anything, about anything. And while that’s a great philosophical debate, the Rudd government takes the view that the Internet is just a communication and distribution platform like any other form of communication and distribution platform. And that the laws that apply in the physical world should apply in the virtual world. And this is a piece of legislation as I said that is designed to try and make it the same in a library, the same in a newsagency, the same at your cinema, the same on your TV, and the same that currently applies under Australian law for Australian hosted websites. And that the laws should apply across the distribution platform. The Internet is not a mythical, incredible thing. It’s something… it’s the most extraordinary human invention in many, many years, and it is doing incredible things all across the globe, but it also has a darker side to it unfortunately, and what we have to do is educate people, and that’s why the policy initiatives I mentioned at the beginning of the show cover a whole range of different aspects of educational programs. But as a government, if someone said, ‘Look, here is one of the 355 websites that include child abuse material, what are you going to do about it?’ And if the answer is, ‘Nothing’, well I think that’s a failure for a government in a responsible society.

You can listen to the whole program here.

Australia Talks

Let’s pull apart that quote.

1. The Internet actually is very different (from any other communications and information distribution platform)

The Internet is an interactive, generative space. Unlike watching TV or reading a published book, Internet users no longer simply consume. We snap, edit and post, share and link, discuss, find and organise – the whole Web 2.0 deal – sometimes to great political effect, like in the case of the Iranian protests; we go ‘hyper-local’, in the case of the Moscow subway bombings yesterday, where YouTube clips back-filled professional stories with amateur footage, and gave instant access where TV cameras could not go.

The Internet is very unlike other media. We can do it all from our mobile phones, uploading experiences from wherever there’s a few bars signal. We’re productive, participating members, with the tools to match. For older industries, there are handy bottlenecks in the production process where government can get in and make laws. But traditional policies find it hard to regulate user generated content and social networks – they fall through the gaps. The Internet demands new questions about how to enforce law in a world of networked production, where consumers are also authors. What do we do with copyright? How do we protect privacy and prevent fraudulent activities, like spam? Who is liable for publishing material on a social-networking platform? How do we ensure equal access to technology?

The Internet is very much unlike other communications platforms, and demands a new approach, not a super-imposing of old policies. This is because the Internet is actually set to change dramatically over the next five years – rapidly outpacing old policy ideas. The NBN will start to carry almost all of our communication and media needs – and see different sectors of government collaborate. TV, health, e-government, the Internet, VoIP… all of this will be deployed over the NBN. The Internet will be everywhere, highly-personal and mobile. Social networking has benefited from the wide-scale adoption of internet-enabled smart phones. Forty-three per cent of online Australians now own a smart phone. Relaxed cap plans offered by service providers have seen mobile social networking soar across 2009. A quarter of self-described ‘social networkers’ now do so on their phones, as well as on their home and work computers.

We saw how different the “Internet” is when Queensland Premier Anna Bligh wrote to Facebook, demanding to know what the company would do in response to several memorial sites being defaced. Debbie Frost, a communications executive with Facebook, in an interview with The Australian, said: ‘We didn’t build a site to be a publisher, we built it to be a platform. We built it to give people tools to share information with each other and I think the enormous success we’ve seen is testament to the fact that human people do want to do that and the vast, vast majority — hundreds of millions of people — are not behaving the way these few people did in Australia, so it seems to be going OK as a system’. Frost admits to some procedural sluggishness, however she claims that the problem is worse in the real world:

‘If I put up nude graffiti on the side of a church, how do you report that, how do you get it taken down in a way that’s good enough for you? It takes time in real life and on the web and we think our system is actually more responsive… If I phone you up and say really offensive things, does that mean the mobile phone operator is liable for that?’

In some cases, Facebook’s service agreement is more stringent than offline laws. They are cooperating with police on the criminal charges.

The Internet is a different beast, requiring governance, yes, but a different kind of governance. Social networking and user-generated content operate with a totally different production model in mind. The overwhelming desire to protect younger Internet users, and the consequent classificatory regime is subject to significant blind spots when it comes to such things as mobile Internet, and user-generated content. Introducing a mandatory Internet filter into an already band-aided system will only exacerbate the inconsistencies in the policy.

2. It’s not true to say the Internet is the ‘odd one out’; Everything is regulated differently.

To say the mandatory filter would miraculously create equality across platforms is wrong. State-by-state, platform-by-platform, media content is regulated differently. Online Games are one example. They are regulated like any other game (by the Office of Film and Literature Classification), but also by the ACMA, as they are considered to be online media as well. R-rated content in films watched by adults in cinemas is refused classification if it is in a video game. Another: It is possible to access X18+ videos in the ACT but not online from Australian-hosted sites. Currently no meaningful or thoroughly thought-out provisions exist for regulating the Internet on 3G networks to handsets, especially with regards to the proposed mandatory net filter. This creates a two-tiered and inconsistent content-regulation system. A user seeking content that could be blocked on one device can pull out a mobile phone to access the same content, unblocked. Different modes of self and co-regulation apply to almost every facet of the media differently, from talkback radio, to the Internet.

3. No one is saying ‘Don’t Regulate’.

The EFA is not saying this. No sensible person is saying ‘don’t regulate’. To characterise the position against a mandatory filter as ‘anarchic’, or anti-regulation, doesn’t address the concerns people have. My own view is that we do need to regulate, but in a manner that caters to the many ways in which people use the Internet, and the many various platforms for delivering content, in the number of locations they do it in, either publicly or privately. Right now, we have a fragmented, spotty policy with loads of holes in it. Introducing a mandatory scheme does not provide equivalency. It actually fundamentally misunderstands the medium.

UPDATE: For fear of sounding too libertarian (heaven forbid)… just read a great summary in Lawrence Lessig’s famous Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, writing in 1999:

Governments should intervene, at a minimum, when private action has public consequences; when shortsighted actions threaten to cause long-term harm; when failure to intervene undermines significant constitutional values and important individual rights; and when a form of life emerges that may threaten values we believe to be fundamental.

We cannot afford, obviously, to let the Internet off-the-hook. It’s about balance, writes Lessig. Balancing the risks and opportunities of an emerging world.

I produced Richard Glover’s Drive program around Sydney today. Recriminations were growing louder against Facebook for not taking strong enough action after the memorial sites for two dead Queensland kids were defaced with porn and offensive comments. And in another instance in Queensland, a Facebook user is claiming to be able to deliver a long-lost missing boy Daniel Morcombe, if the group attracts 1 million members. The Premier there has warned Facebook will loose popularity if they don’t do more to reduce offensive material.

It’s a serious question: If something happens to you or your family online, who do you complain to? Can you pick up the phone and call someone? What about this idea: an online ombudsman – a kind of referee of the Internet. Would that make you feel safer?

That’s what Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says he will look at.

The social networking giant will apologise, it says, and respond directly to the Queensland Government, but they say it’s hard to control individual actions on its site.

David Vaile is the Executive Director of the Cyber Law Centre at UNSW, and we interviewed him today about if this is a good idea.

The main problem, David says, is that it’s a fast moving thing, predicated on the disclosure of personal information. ‘It’s a very profitable model for them,’ he said, ‘and a lot of people particularly young people find that to be a lot of fun.’

But with increased level of the use of personal information, more risks are generated, and young people ‘have difficulty joining the dots’.

‘You may not realise that you’re hurting them… or yourself’, David said about young users of Facebook, who face a fundamental lack of understanding of the consequences online, which can push right out to criminal behaviour like stalking, harassment, and claiming responsibility for crimes.

On the other hand, he said ‘there’s a great danger that adults get into a complete panic’. While it’s tempting to lump Facebook with trying to regulate the darker stuff put up by users, David said ‘it’s not the role of Facebook to play the role of a policeman.’

It’s a balancing act, David argues, between keeping online businesses free flowing and profitable (and with 7 million users, and millions of individual transactions every day, that’s important), and picking up what different communities around the world find unacceptable.

The problem: ‘The earlier you to get it, the more expensive it is… it’s a real commercial issue,’ he said. ‘The reality is that you need a small trouble-shooting call-centre’.

Eariler, from my notes, David didn’t think putting an ombudsman in charge was a good idea. The regular ‘needs to be activist’, he told me, to achieve results on behalf of the public, like it has been in Canada. The status quo right now in Australia is decidedly un-activist, David told me.

He called it ‘another magic bullet… holding up something heroic’. But nothing can replace the more prosaic approach of educating young people about the consequences of what they do online while still protecting people’s right to privacy.

Another layer of bureaucracy won’t be the panacea.

Europe

A massive 3 year research project for the EU by Sonia Livingstone and Leslie Haddon (from the London School of Economics), EU Kids Online, says exposure to porn ranks second amongst ‘online risks’, behind plain old giving out of personal information, and before seeing something ‘violent or hateful’. Meeting an online contact in the offline world – which is probably the greatest fear in the community – is the least common risk (though admittedly one of the most dangerous). Across Europe, 4 in 10 teenagers have been exposed to online porn, although there ‘is considerable disagreement’ about it’s harmful impact on children. Far fewer teens report this exposure as distressing in any way.

America

(This info is drawn from the US Internet Safety Technical Task Force, and their 2008 report Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies.)

Roughly the same as the EU, 42 per cent of American teens have either sought out or accidentally seen porn, or done both of these; of these, two thirds had only stumbled upon it inadvertently. Nearly 1 in 10 were ‘very or extremely upset’. Older teens are more likely to seek out porn than younger teens. In fact, despite fears in the community, younger kids are more likely to see mags and movies before they see online porn; the Internet comes in third. It’s a sexy world offline, and online it seems. Of the teens that do see stuff online they don’t want to see, they don’t go back to it. So once seen, they tend to steer well clear of damaging material.

One of the great ideas behind the filter is protecting children, presumably from adults. But there’s evidence to say that when it comes to unwanted sexual solicitations, it’s not adults to be feared, it’s other kids. Most sexual solicitors are other adolescents (up to 48 per cent), or young adults (in the 20s%), with only 4%–9% coming from adults. The vast majority are dealt with by kids well, according to other research. Youth typically ignore or deflect solicitations; 92% of the responses amongst Los Angeles–based youth to these incidents were deemed “appropriate”. Chat rooms and instant messaging are still the dominant place where solicitations occur (77%). (NB. these solicitations wouldn’t be covered by a Net Filter – it’s just interesting to gauge what young people think are threats online).

The researchers included two questions with two ideas of how young people use the net. One: surfing. The other: emails and private communication. The numbers in the American report are for both. A note here: no private email or IM communication would be included in any Government attempt to filter the net. It also wouldn’t be considered classifiable by the Classification Board (personal communications are exempt).

Australia

In Michael Flood’s 2007 report on 16 and 17 year olds (Exposure to pornography among youth in Australia, Journal of Sociology, 43;45) he found that 84 per cent boys and 60 per cent of girls say they have been exposed accidentally to sex sites on the Internet. Flood does recognise that the younger you are, the less likely you are to inadvertently stumble across porno online, by drawing comparisons with the UK and the US.  He cites an Australian study among Internet-connected households with children aged 8 to 13 years, where 19 percent of children said that they had accidentally found websites their parents would prefer them not to see ‘a few times’. Almost half of the sites contained nudity or pornography.

It’s disingenuous to say a filter that blocks RC content at ISP level is to protect children. The vast amount of porn (described in most research as simply nudity or sex) would remain unblocked and freely available for kids to keep on stumbling across. The especially ‘harmful’ category of RC would be blocked for everyone; the rhetoric of child-protection is watered down when you look at the stats, and the case for more education, and a whole-population approach to empowering users comes into startling clarity.

I was actively seeking out porn at the age of 15 and 16, none of which would be blocked under the proposed scheme. Kids do it all the time, cos they’re horny; so I’m now looking into research about what teens themselves report as harmful, or not, to get away from adult perceptions of what porn means to kids.

“The good news is that those not wanting the government to filter their feed can work around any proposed filter so easily that one wonders why the government is even bothering”, writes Anthony Caruna in Hydrapinion.

“Any motivated user will be able to get around it, it will be quite easy, so who is this being targeted at?” asked Electronic Frontiers Australia vice chair Colin Jacobs.

They are right, of course. Getting around the filter makes the Government’s attempt look silly. There are loads of ways to circumvent Internet control – and you’ll get a list below. But there are are few problems with the assumption that these tools will render state control irrelevant. Biggest of all is the fact that – as if! – Australians aren’t going to re-route their entire internet experience through a proxy, in the rare likelihood they’ll stumble across uncensored RC content they don’t want to see anyway. Besides, not every one is technologically proficient, or motivated enough, to use proxy servers (there’s evidence of this in China).

Another problem is the live question of whether there will be end-user penalties if you do want to get around the filter. If you’re dodging the filter to see RC content, will the police come knocking if you’ve found access to it? What are the privacy implications of that? Will your ISP report you if they find out?

The extra steps involved in getting around net censorship are annoying, to say the least, and are only needed in the most oppressive Internet regimes that filter political content, like China. Your net slows. Graphics and video are limited. Naturally, getting around the filter will become a major story if it gets up and running (like when a 16 year old kid spent half an hour hacking and getting around the $116 million anti-porn initiative based on PC-based filters in 2006). And it will definitely show the absurdity of the filter.

But for those interested in the censorship debate, getting around the net doesn’t solve the problem of the filter in the first place. It’s still censorship. And once in place, it will have the full weight of the law behind it if you do anything wrong.

Getting Around The Filter

When I lived in Beijing, I was kicked off the internet a few times. In my mind, a giant police squad in a space-age control room was monitoring every tit and ball. In reality, the limited dynamic filtering in China may have flagged some key words (like Tiananmen, or Tibet) and traced my IP. My individual IP was blocked sometimes for hours, even up to a day. I started routing most of my risky browsing through a proxy server, which in China is itself considered a crime.

How does it work? In a great post yesterday by Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkley lays down the basics of circumvention:

Circumvention systems share a basic mode of operation – they act as proxies to let you retrieve blocked content. A user is blocked from accessing a website by her ISP or that ISP’s ISP. She wants to read a page from Human Rights Watch’s webserver, which is accessible at IP address 70.32.76.212. But that IP address is on a national blacklist, and she’s prevented from receiving any content from it. So she points her browser to a proxy server at another address – say 123.45.67.89 – and asks a program on that server to retrieve a page from the HRW server. Assuming that 123.45.67.89 isn’t on the national blacklist, she should be able to receive the HRW page via the proxy. During the transaction, the proxy is acting like an internet service provider.

(picture from Security In A Box: Tools and Tactics For Your Digital Security)

I used a service called Anonymouse in Beijing. But there are plenty of others. Reporters Without Borders publishes a Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents. I’ve combined their suggestions with those from a fantastic chapter in Security In A Box: Tools and Tactics For Your Digital Security, for this list. Feel free to add you favourite by commenting below.

(Also check out the brilliant Everyone’s Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship (PDF 1.5mb) from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto for even more suggestions).

Most Popular

Probably the most popular circumvention tool is a piece of software called Tor (China head Rebecca Mackinnon calls it “the tool of choice for circumventing Internet censorship in places like China these days”). It will provide anonymity as well as circumvention. Each time you connect to the Tor network, you select a random path through three secure Tor proxies. For cyber-dissidents, it offers sustained identity protection, and despite some online fearing for its flaws, a Uni of Colorado research team has declared it: “the most secure and usable privacy enhancing system available” (also via Mackinnon).

Databases of Proxy Servers

Public Proxy Servers (http://publicproxyservers.com) – a comprehensive live of anonymous and non-anonymous proxies, plus figures on their reliabilty and rating.
Samair (http://www.samair.ru/proxy/) – only anonymous proxies.
Rosinstrument proxy database (http://tools.rosinstrument.com/proxy/) – searchable
Anti Proxy (http://www.antiproxy.com/)
Multi Proxy (http://www.multiproxy.org/)

Public, Web-based circumvention

Anonymizer (http://www.anonymizer.com/)
Unipeak (http://www.unipeak.com/)
Anonymouse (http://www.anonymouse.ws/)
Proxyweb (http://www.proxyweb.net/)
Guardster (http://www.guardster.com/)
Webwarper (http://www.webwarper.net/)
Proximal (http://www.proximal.com/)
The Cloak (http://www.the-cloak.com/)
Psiphon2 (http://www.psiphon.ca/) is a private, anonymous webproxy servers system.

Other software downloads:

Sesawe Hotspot Shield (https://sesawe.net/Anchor-Free-Hotspot-Shield.html) is a public, secure, non-web-based, freeware circumvention proxy.
Your-Freedom (http://www.your-freedom.net/) is a private, secure, non-web-based circumvention proxy.

Problems with proxies

There are a few problems with proxies. Like any company, a proxy business is subject to the jurisdiction it operates under, and subject to investigation like any other. Rebecca Mackinnon writes a lengthy piece about the funding for some of these companies, especially tools supplied for the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC).  She writes that GIFC is funded by Falun Gong affiliates and the US government. Hal Roberts from The Berkman Center for Internet and Society also raises the possibility that your proxy service might sell you out: “Three of the circumvention tools — DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix — used most widely to get around China’s Great Firewall are tracking and selling the individual web browsing histories of their users” (While this has later been denied by the specific companies involved, it makes the issue about trust, and how much you know about the service you’re using. These services aren’t the cure-all solution to filtering).

It’s also a game of cat and mouse. According to the Security in a Box site: “the government agency in charge of Internet censorship in your country (or the company that provides updates for its filtering software) might eventually learn that this ‘unknown computer’ is really a circumvention proxy. If that happens, its IP address may itself be added to the blacklist, and it will no longer work”. Bang, there goes your free-ride.

In China, you’d expect users of the net to regularly use proxies. But they don’t. Evidence shows that there is little knowledge of them, or a wide acceptance of net restrictions. 95% of total traffic is to domestic Chinese content – so to begin with Chinese people aren’t looking very far for content. So it shouldn’t be surprising that according to a 2000 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) survey of Internet use in five Chinese cities, 10 percent of users surveyed admitted to regularly using, and 25 percent to occasionally using, proxy servers to circumvent censorship (via Human Rights Watch PDF 4.5mb). My experience was that those around me only used it when they really had to. Most Chinese just viewed the major domestic websites in China, and didn’t want their net slowed by a proxy. Certainly, I began accepting the limitations of riding in the Chinese internet ‘car’ — there’s just less to see, and less expression, harder to use… I better come to terms with it. While China is very different, it would be interesting to see whether the average Australian net user would want to opt-out of the filter by regularly using proxies. I seriously doubt it.

Another significant problem is that proxies themselves don’t always offer unfettered access (just when you thought you could get away with it!) — because the bandwidth required to run them (like mini-ISPs) is expensive. As Zuckerman explains in his most recent post:

Proxy operators have dealt with this question by putting constraints on the use of their tools. Some proxy operators block access to YouTube because it’s such a bandwidth hog. Others block access to pornography, both because it uses bandwidth and to protect the sensibilities of their sponsors. Others constrain who can use their tools, limiting access to the tools to people coming from Iranian or Chinese IPs, trying to reduce bandwidth use by American high school kids who’ve got YouTube blocked by their school.

The other major concern is if the Government decides to enforce penalties for people using tools to get around the filter. Using proxies may in fact flag you to authorities. Like using a torch in a dark room to see things, it’s easier for others to see you and grab you. It’s illegal in China to use proxies, so you’re facing further risk there. In Australia, it is yet to be seen whether circumventing the internet filter will attract penalties.

But there is some precedent for some circumvention tools being illegal. Once law, the filter could be vulnerable to what’s called ’scope creep’, explains David Vaile from UNSW: “As powerful stakeholders lobby globally for a copyright filter, the potential for Australia’s ISP-level filtering project to extend to this area is cause for concern”. In the states, there is already legislation as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that makes it illegal to use circumvention technology to reverse-engineer rights controls on, say, your CD collection. Because of the free trade agreement with the US, Australia has taken on these regulations too. Writes the digihub blog of the SMH, ‘It’s now illegal to bypass Digital Rights Management technologies, which means TV broadcasters, record companies and movie houses are entitled to block any legal right you might have to make copies, and it’s illegal for you to bypass this.’ The DMCA prohibits even the possession of a circumvention device. So if scope creep happens, should we watch out when using circumvention software to get around the net filter?

And finally, circumventing censorship through proxies just gives you access to stuff overseas. Take down notices in Australia would still be issued – as they always have been – for any prohibited content hosted within Australia.

In the end, a government filter could just turn some Australians into fey cyber-dissidents by proxy. But I doubt many, if any, would regularly try to circumvent the internet in this way. We’re more likely to cop it on the chin.

Proxies do make the filter look silly, but they still leave the deeper gnawing question of the filter completely in tact.

[picture credit: via Flickr creative commons user atopeconlatxabaleria]

In the thick of researching Internet regulation, I hear one question over and over again. “Isn’t the Internet, by it’s very nature, free?” And the follow on question: “Is the government’s ISP-filtering plan against ‘the spirit of the Internet’?”

The gist is basically this: what impact will the filter have anyway? I’ll just get around it, because the Internet is free, always has, and always will be.

The question was asked another way by Richard Glover on ABC 702 Sydney the other day, when I appeared on his weekly ‘journos forum’. Richard said: ‘China can never succeed as an economic powerhouse unless it embraces the idea of open information flows and the real encouragement of creativity…’ Right at the heart of this question is the assumption that the Internet is free, always was, always will be — and that we’ve benefited from that.

I answered (paraphrased here): “No, the Internet in China has been enormously successful in preventing any opposition movement, whilst enabling the economy to grow enormously. It’s like hopping into a different kind of car, the experience of the Chinese Internet is completely different to ours here in Australia, and challenges our assumptions about the Internet being fundamentally free”.

The Australian experience of the Internet has made Australians (or at least the technologically proficient) default libertarians on this issue. Early results from Whirlpool’s annual Australian Broadband Survey show 91.8 percent of respondents do not support the idea of mandatory Internet filtering. (I say technologically proficient, because an earlier general survey conducted by ABC’s Hungry Beast showed a dramatic gap between the general public and net users, revealing that 80 percent of respondents supported the filter).

Net users in Australia have been schooled in that Cyberpunk idea: “Information wants to be free“; as soon as you put any block in the way, information, like water, will flow around and get to end-users. Where there is a filter, there is a VPN. Where there is a block, there’s a proxy server. The received wisdom is that the flow of information will always outpace the technology used to limit it. For educated, frequent users, this has been true since the net began.

This is because Australia has (largely) focused on regulating the on-ramps to the Internet (the ISPs, the pipes, the connections), and not the experience of the Internet itself, its content. We’ve opted for law-solutions, rather than technological solutions, to address community fears, like child porn. The result has been a reactive complaints process based on classification, rather than a stem-at-the-source content filter. We’ve stayed true to ‘Open Internet’ principles, allowing end-users to freely share over the open architecture of the Internet, and respond to problems in the courts and government administration, guaranteeing the transparency of process.

We’ve stayed out of any structural changes to the way the Internet works. Up until now.

David Vaile, a law professor at UNSW, argues that the proposed ‘Great Firewall of Canberra’ poses a fundamental threat to the Internet, as we’ve viewed it in the past: “As a cultural phenomenon, the Internet has generally supported freedom of communication. Filtering proposals sit unhappily with these traditional expectations”. He concludes that “the Australian filtering proposals are potentially an architectural change to a system initially designed to route around blockages, damage and obstructions (that is, the Internet) to one where these block points are mandated”. In other words, a filter would impose an architectural layer to the Internet that was never part of its initial design.

Peter Gerrand, Managing Editor of the Telecommunications Journal of Australia agrees, by arguing that Internet censorship is the biggest example of something that is anti the Open Internet movement. “The relationship with network neutrality is evident: this is the extreme situation in which particular website content is so heavily discriminated against that distribution to ordinary end users is totally blocked.”

These guys argue the proposed net filter is ideologically opposed to the Net Neutrality movement, which has taken off for very different reasons in the United States.

What is Net Neutrality?

Recently, Electronic Frontiers Australia launched a new campaign to re-double efforts against the proposed filter. It’s called Open Internet. It has three campaign messages. The filter will: 1. fail to protect children from inappropriate material; 2. fail to stop criminals from accessing and distributing child sexual abuse material; and 3. will block access to material that is currently legal to possess and view, just not to sell and publicly display.

The term ‘Open Internet’ comes mainly from the United States, where it is used almost-synonymously with the phrase “Net Neutrality”. Save the Internet, an online advocacy group, defines ‘Net Neutrality’ this way:

Put simply, net neutrality means no discrimination. Net neutrality prevents Internet providers from blocking, speeding up or slowing down Web content based on its source, ownership or destination… With net neutrality, the network’s only job is to move data – not choose which data to privilege with higher quality service.

Laurence Lessig has argued that the the growth of the Internet, and its innovation, is solely due to its open, ‘end-to-end’ principle. In his testimony to a US Senate hearing, Lessig declared that “if this Committee wants to preserve that growth and innovation, it should take steps to protect this fundamental design” (Lessig, L. 2006. Testimony of Lawrence Lessig on “Network Neutrality”).

This is the ‘Information wants to be free’ model. Net Neutrality states, among other things, that those companies or organisations providing the Internet should do so without discriminating either in the world of content or access. Basically, you should be able to get what you want, when you want it, without your service provider telling you no.

Google exec and public face Vint Cerf writes that net neutrality is at the heart of the Internet (he should know, he helped design TCP/IP): “The Internet is a general-purpose platform, not designed for any particular application and in fact neutral with regard to the applications it supports. End-users are in control of what content and applications they use and create”.

Vint Cerf argues that “no central gatekeeper should exert control over the Internet”. The architectural components of the Internet lend themselves to this reading. First, nothing is centralised. Users can communicate, and make applications for the Internet, from its edges, without having to go through some great big clearinghouse of ideas. In this system, there are no permissions given by any one in the centre of things – unlike cable network TV, users can swap and promote what they like. Only users discriminate, writes Cerf. “In sum: the very architecture of the Internet maximises user choice, creates a level competitive playing field, and promotes innovation”.

As soon as ISPs or any one else start to mess with the inherent user-free-market of the Internet, Cerf argues, that’s a threat to net neutrality.

It’s something that President Obama is committed to; it was one of his policy platforms. And the new FCC proposals due next March under Obama’s appointed head will probably enshrine detail around Net Neutrality.

Obama’s stance is a relief to organisations like The Open Internet. It’s a coalition of companies and organisations who, basically, want to keep the net neutral. Their definition of “open” is the same as Save The Internet’s:

Internet openness (network neutrality) means that users are in control of where to go and what to do online, and broadband providers do not discriminate among lawful Internet content or applications. This is the fundamental principle of the Internet’s design. It shouldn’t matter whether you’re visiting a mainstream media website or an individual’s blog, sending emails or purchasing a song. The phone and cable companies that provide you with access to the Internet should route all traffic in a neutral manner, without blocking, speeding up, or slowing down particular applications or content.

According to Google, a member of this group, some things are OK for network carriers to do, some things aren’t. In general: “outright blocking, impairing, or degrading Internet traffic should not be tolerated”. To quote from Google’s Public Policy blog, the following is out of order, and contravenes the concept of Net Neutrality:

• Levying surcharges on content providers that are not their retail customers;
• Prioritizing data packet delivery based on the ownership or affiliation (the who) of the content, or the source or destination (the what) of the content; or
• Building a new “fast lane” online that consigns Internet content and applications to a relatively slow, bandwidth-starved portion of the broadband connection.

So, to link this US history back to the Australian context, an Open Internet requires government not meddle with any technology that would impair the natural architecture of the Net. David Vaile, the UNSW law prof, concludes rather nicely:

The Australian government’s filtering proposal is inimical to both net neutrality and traditional notions of the limits of executive government’s rights to censor and restrain free speech. It is unlikely to work in practice to effectively address either the threat of child pornography/ child abuse material, or access to material with some capacity for harm. The current fascination with it may, in fact, be diverting us from the real task, which is how to listen to young people and work together with them to evolve an open and robust means for spreading the robustness and common sense they will need in the online future.

To put it simply, yes, the net filter is against some of the founding technological principles of the Internet, as described by those who advocate for greater freedom, and online rights.

But in the other corner: The Closed Internet, and China

But it’s no doubt that China has managed it’s digital economy just fine, thank you very much, by opposing the principles of Net Neutrality. And users in China, in my experience, don’t share the average Australian’s experience of the Internet as inherently free.

China net expert and academic Rebecca Mackinnon summarises this issue really nicely on her blog. China has always been a closed system, not an open one. She quotes Google’s Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President for Product Management:

Closed systems are well-defined and profitable, but only for those who control them. Open systems are chaotic and profitable, but only for those who understand them well and move faster than everyone else. Closed systems grow quickly while open systems evolve more slowly, so placing your bets on open requires the optimism, will, and means to think long term… Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. The future of entertainment is participation. Each of these futures depends on an open Internet.

Hence, Google’s gamble with China. They are banking on knowing more about the Net, and knowing it quicker, than China, to gain the upper hand in the information economy.

But, China’s economy continues to soar, and its Internet users continue to grow, despite its censoring regime being antithetical to net neutrality.

So who is right? Open us, or closed them?

MacKinnon — a big supporter of the idea of an Open Internet, wants to go further, than an Open vs Closed mentality, and beyond the rhetoric of any one company, country or organisation. The Internet, she writes, is large and multi-faceted enough to require a governance of its own. She was a founding member of the Global Network Initiative. It seeks to address (and redress): “increasing government pressure to comply with domestic laws and policies in ways that may conflict with the internationally recognized human rights of freedom of expression and privacy”, around the world.

So, no. The experience of China says that the Internet is not inherently free. And Mackinnon’s group understands that “Open” is a relative term that requires all stake holders to have a say in our lives online.

But Australia’s experience of the web has been fluid, chaotic and open, so far. We risk fundamentally rewriting our relationship with that word, ‘open’, if a mandatory filter is introduced.