From: frankferg@aol.com
Date: 2010-03-25 14:39:39
Hi Andrew, People publishing evidence should be aware of legal censorship. Warrant less wiretaps use to be illegal in States. Now we have TIPS Total Information Program System. www.theregister.co.u… The system employs the Swedish Netclean Whitebox content filter – website requests are filtered by Border Gateway Protocol against a blacklist held on a central server in the government Censorship Compliance Unit. The list is maintained by the Independent Reference Group which actively reviews banned URLs each month to eliminate false positives. Bans must be justified and signed off by three “warranted inspectors of publications”. Government statistics, published in 2009, suggest that the blacklist includes more than 7,000 URLs featuring child sexual abuse – or over ten times the number of links recognised by the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation. It has been built by the censorship unit since 2005 and is affiliated with Europe’s Cospol Internet Related Child Abusive Material Project. David Zanetti, technical spokesperson for Tech Liberty, said: “We fear that the filter will reduce the stability of the Internet in New Zealand. It is a single point of failure, introduces a new and very tempting target for hackers, and by diverting traffic will cause issues with modern Internet applications.” Tech Liberty is also concerned by the expansion of government powers that the filter represents. It entrenches the principle that the government can set up a new censorship scheme and block material with no reference to existing law. Worse, the filter list stays secret, in contrast to the censorship regime that operates in respect of other media, where the Chief Censor must publish decisions banning offensive material. John “big brother” Poindexter was who was indicted on seven felony charges is currently in charge of Internet censorship. www.fas.org/irp/offd… May all that read this be in Justice, Frank .
