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InternetMatters PR Campaign Starts Up

As part of the plan to filter the Internet the big ISPs also agreed to fund an awareness campaign to educate parents (the cynical among us believe this to be a PR ploy to gloss over the surveillance impact of DPI, filtering & the expansion of CleanFeed esque silent censorship).

The InternetMatters website itself ( http://www.internetmatters.org/ ) contains a lot of actually useful advice and doesn’t resort to scare tactics for sensitive subjects like Grooming or Bullying to encourage the use of filters.

Furthermore the website even tells visitors that No Filter is 100% effective;

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This leads onto a point highlighted in a recent tweet for the campaigns twitter account;

96% of parents believe it is their responsibility to keep their children safe (so not the ISPs) and no filter is ever 100% effective.

So why did David Cameron and Claire Perry insists that ISPs start filtering the Internet?

Why has TalkTalk deployed surveillance grade Deep Packet Inspection equipment on their network? Why does Sky and others interfere with in-transit packets to spoof responses to legitimate requests?

One answer is that this equipment makes it easier for the Police & GCHQ to intercept traffic. It also enables rights holders to arbitrarily choose where your packets can go by blocking ThePirateBay.org and others like it.

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    #CensoredUK Day of Action

    The Sex and Censorship campaign put out a call to arms earlier this week for December 12th to be a day of action for calling attention to UK Internet Censorship.

    As one of the technical volunteers to the Open Rights Group Censorship Monitoring Project I decided to track how the campaign went on Twitter using the DataSift platform.

    Tweets by Time of Day

    Message Reach

    Whenever someone sends a tweet it is seen by all their followers. Over the course of the day a minimum of 2,985,023 people saw the #CensoredUK hash tag.

    If we allow for duplicate tweets (same hashtag but different content) then the #CensoredUK message was seen a minimum of 3,959,409 times by followers alone.

    Everyone cares about Internet Filters

    Not that it was a surprise but it was interesting to see the rich mix of people (and reasons) for opposing ISP Filters.

    By using profile names one can extrapolate gender and see that a significant number of woman also took part in the discussion.

    Campaign Differences

    The Protecting our Children website has only inspired 1,391 tweets in the 5 months it has been online whereas the #CensoredUK Day of Action involved a minimum of 4079 people with only 1 day notice and 38,276 people have signed the petition to stop Internet Filtering

    Common Themes

    Worst ISPs?

    83% of tweets about ISP censorship mentioned the ISP O2 with BSkyB, ThreeUK, BT, EE and Plusnet also getting mentioned negatively.

    The only ISP to be mentioned in a positive light was Andrews and Arnold thanks to their strong stance against filtering.

    Does this make O2 the worst ISP for over blocking the UK Internet? Well once the Censorship Monitoring Project Probes start rolling out we’ll find out!

    Keep up the good fight everyone and if you want to know more about Internet Censorship or want to help fight it then look at donating / volunteering to the Open Rights Group.

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    Your Guide to Surviving The Claire Perry Internet

    The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
    -John Gilmore 1993

    The Internet as we know it is experiencing some of the most damaging changes in its history.

    The US National Security Agency and the UK’s GCHQ are undermining security and communications infrastructure at an unprecedented level, some of the ISPs we rely on are co-operating with Government plans to fundamentally interfere with packet routing, DNS resolution and end-to-end reachability in the name of “saving the Children” and “anti terrorism”.

    With the launch of consumer Internet filtering people will experience the curtailment of access to information and levels of arbitrary censorship unseen in decades. With systems like CleanFeed and Deep Packet Inspection your ISPs will be able to silently limit what information you can reach if it has been deemed inappropriate, extreme, or even just esoteric.

    Children and vulnerable adults will be prevented from accessing support networks, information websites and more. Overblocking will be the biggest barrier to information sharing in 2014.

    The people to blame for this curtailment of rights, this assault on the freedom of information and the sleepwalk into censorship are David Cameron and Claire Perry. They are MPs, they are supposed to be accountable to us. Write to your MP and insist that these measures be reversed and prevented from happening again.

    Until the blocks are repealed and outlawed this website will serve to help you evade ISP & Government blocks, avoid communications surveillance so you can utilise a free and open Internet as was envisaged.