All oppressive internet filters in the world started with the premise that they would only filter child porn. It’s the one thing most decent people can agree on – no one should exploit children for pornography, and it isn’t possible to make porn involving people under the age of consent in a non-exploitative way. So it’s an easy way to get a censorship system into place. One thing that tends to separate the “good” countries with the censorship from the “bad” ones is transparency. When the government hides what it’s doing, it can easily slip in blocks for websites critical of it. Thailand, for instance, began its censorship of the net about child porn, and now over 90% of sites added to its banned list are added for the crime of “lesse majeste” – or being rude about the King.

On a completely different note, my father was brutally raped as a child (aged 6. They forced him to wear a dress while they did it, too, because apparently raping a child was a lot less bad than being “queer”…) and has this to say about child pornography: he deeply wishes that the perverts who violated him had instead got their rocks off by taking photos and masturbating to them.

Not saying this to excuse the deeply demeaning and exploitative business of child pornography. It’s terrible. I guess I’m just saying that it’s important to remember why it’s bad – to remember who it’s hurting.

As to how we ought to protect our children… I’m not a mother yet. Might well never be. But I think extensive education as soon as a child is old enough to understand is a good start, and before that point in time, restricting access to the internet (including not giving a child a mobile phone with internet browsing! If they need a phone for their safety, great, there are lots of phones without internet access. I have one myself.), and supervising them thoroughly for the times you allow them on.

Another thing is the possibility of actually locating the harm in things, and treating the source, rather than the symptom. I was very glad to read in the first point on Steven’s reflections that he put “degrades women” at the top of his list of Why Porn Is Bad. Too many people I see saying it’s bad seem to think it is bad just because it is, but they’re happy to degrade women in ways that haven’t been specifically forbidden to them by their chosen authority. This, to me, looks like whoever is telling them what is bad is chosing one level up from where they ought to be – they’re addressing an example of what the problem causes, and not the problem itself. This is the same type of thinking that causes otherwise sensible people to try to ban the Gardasil vaccine – they believe that Sex is Bad without thinking about why, and thus they ban things that take away consequences out of fear that reducing the consequences will encourage the action. They also do this without thinking of the shockingly high percentage of women who will get raped at some point in their life [over 80% to the strictest definition of rape (sex that was not consented to freely, while the woman was in a sober condition and able to give true consent)- but still around a quarter even to a definition that most men agree with (sex that happened while the woman was sober, that she vocally informed the perpetrator that she did not consent to, that he ignored, whether or not force was used, or that was otherwised coerced in a relatively obvious fashion)], and also the high percentage of unfaithful partners [an interesting DNA study amongst a specific insular and highly religious community recently showed that more than half of all births were to biological fathers who were different to the man mentioned on the birth certificate. The reason why such an insular society was chosen was because it was then possible to track past historic trends, and prove that it was not the modern age that caused this - men sleeping with other women (pls see previous note on rape for reasons why I am not willing to place 100% of the blame on the women, here!) has been rampant for the past 1000 years+, especially men from wealthier and more powerful families (i.e. men who were harder to resist when they pressed - or, in other words, men who found it relatively easy to rape lower classed women), who were much more predominant in the gene pool.]. Because, of course, being 100% faithful to your husband and never sleeping around does not in fact protect you from disease if he cheats on you.

Okay, this has turned into quite a messy post, which veers off-topic quite a bit, so I’ll leave it there. Just one more thing, if you have the time: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ is an extremely interesting book (entirely free online) called The Authoritarians, which might explain why “censorship doesn’t solve everything, but isn’t it better than nothing?” (O.P., paraphrased) raises red flags for me.

Thanks,

-Opinionated Anonymous Feminist

No. ISP based filters are far too easy to circumvent and always will be so, particularly in the situation of home computers where the user can install software on the local machine.

Only in a corporate network environment, where the company owns the desktop machines and can set restrictive policies which prevent the user from installing software or booting from an alternate source (i.e. USB, CD-ROM, etc) is upstream filtering effective, but even then, browsing to a proxy will get around the filter.

Don’t put the kids’ PC in their bedroom, put in in a rec room or other area where you can see what they’re doing.

You can also install a spylogging application which will report to you what sites they’re visiting.

http://netwatcher.netguarder-inc.qarchive.org/_download2.html
http://remoteobserver.valixsoft.qarchive.org/

The problem with any client-side solution is that they can ALL be navigated around. For certain, the average teenager doesn’t know how, but some will, and word will spread. I truly believe ISP filtering is the safest option available today.”

ISP based filtering is even easier to beat than PC based filters. You can use VPN, offshore proxies or even Google as a proxy to beat any ISP based filter.

See:

http://www.currentdraft.com/2009/04/how-to-hack-australian-internet.html

Matt, there seems to be an odd perception that ISP filtering is much harder to get around than PC filtering. It might actually be swinging the other way now. Eg I’ve looked at Integard and it’s now pretty tough. Even with admin privileges you can’t just kill a process to get unfiltered internet. You can stop the Integard service, but that just kills your internet access completely. It hooks into the windows network stack from the looks of the registry.

Interestingly there are numerous methods to get around ISP filtering. Some of these don’t require admin access.

An unsupervised child on ISP filtered Internet is definitely more vulnerable than a supervised child on unfiltered Internet.

People are already creating guides for bypassing the government’s new filtering. How? It’s not in yet. No, but it’s not like no one has ever tried to filter a nation before. Professionals travelling into China routinely bypass the censorship.

eg

http://www.currentdraft.com/2009/04/how-to-hack-australian-internet.html

Software like Covenant Eyes that tracks and records what is being viewed online only works while the installed operating system is running…but it is not difficult to bypass the installed OS: just pop in a Knoppix disk and reboot. Of course there are ways to prevent that too, but how many parents will disable their computer’s ability to boot from CD/DVD/USB and password protect their BIOS? Do they even know what the BIOS is and how to get in?

- I agree entirely that getting parents to protect their kids is important and essential. But happens for kids whose parents don’t care? If only 50,000 parents downloaded the filter, perhaps they either aren’t educated (in which education would help), or just don’t care?

- I also agree that a change of heart, by God, is what is required. But this isn’t where we put a full stop is it? A change of heart will stop people stealing cars, but we still legislate against this and do what we can to prevent it.