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(Originally posted, with minor changes, to The Information Policy Blog.)

Finland’s initiative to block access to child porn sites is also blocking over 1,000 legitimate websites — including one belonging to a vocal critic of Finnish censorship.

The initiative is the result of a law passed in 2006 to filter foreign sites containing child porn. Finland’s national police force maintains a secret list of sites that contain, or link to, content that they consider to be child porn. When they find a site, they add its IP address to their list — thus blocking, not only the offending site, but also any other sites on the same web server. (For more details, check out this excellent overview of the censorship process.)

“But that’s Finland,” you’re thinking. “Who cares about Finland?”

Alas, much the same thing happens in Canada. Project Cleanfeed manages a list of sites that it classifies as child porn. The list is kept secret from the general public, but the major Canadian ISPs — Shaw, Telus, Rogers, Bell, MTS Allstream, SaskTel, and Videotron — all use it to filter your Internet access.

There are all sorts of problems with the project. The group that manages Project Cleanfeed has a good reputation, but as Cory Doctorow has pointed out, secret lists are ripe for abuse. (Remember, the Finnish police are using a very similar process to block a vocal critic of their censorship practices.) There is an appeal process, but it’s overseen by the same organization that blocked the site in the first place, and you can’t appeal if you don’t know that your site is on the secret list.

The ISPs’ participation also sets a bad precedent, since it means that they are acting as monitors of site content, rather than as neutral common carriers. And if they’re already blocking some types of content, what’s to stop them from blocking other types of content? In fact, as I understand it, by violating their own neutrality, they may be legally liable for their failure to block other types of illegal or objectionable content. For those of us who support net neutrality, this is obviously of some concern.

(I wrote about Project Cleanfeed in more detail back in 2006, when the project first got underway.)

(Originally posted to The Information Policy Blog.)

The provincial government’s internal Internet filter is affecting ordinary Internet users in Tahsis, a small community on Vancouver Island.

An attempt to visit a pornography site, for example, would return a red screen with a British Columbia logo and a “** WARNING **” message: “This connection has been refused. The Internet site you are attempting to access has been designated by a web classification service as containing material that contravenes the BC Government’s Internet usage policy.”

The warning linked to a page that said, “Users must not access Internet sites that might bring the public service into disrepute or harm government’s reputation, such as those that carry offensive material.”

The local ISP is blaming the problem on “crossed wires” somewhere. Apparently, the ISP’s Internet connection is routed through the government’s network (presumably because Tahsis got Internet access through a provincial government rural broadband initiative). The filter is being incorrectly applied somewhere along the way.

According to the article, the same problem once affected the nearby town of Woss. It took six months to get the filter removed.