Australian Goverment Releases Paper Detailing Filtering Pilot

Ban.This.URL, a blog documenting and examining online censorship in Australia, reports that Australia's The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) has released a paper detailing the technical specifications of Australia's proposed Internet filtering plan.

In the paper [PDF], the filtering pilot is detailed:

"To the extent possible, the aim is to test a range of different types of filtering including:
• ACMA blacklist filtering only (for a blacklist of up to 10,000 URLs); or
• ACMA blacklist filtering plus the filtering of other content using different approaches
to filtering which would, for example, include:
- Index filtering of different sized blacklists;
- Dynamic analysis filtering;
- IP versus URL filtering;
- DNS poisoning.
The Pilot seeks to test a wide range of filtering solutions and is deliberately flexible."

The paper also addresses the issue of circumvention:

It is acknowledged that filtering can be circumvented by motivated people with a
sufficient level of technical knowledge.

The Pilot will seek to test the ease with which different filtering solutions can be circumvented and the capacity of filters to detect and provide warnings on circumvention attempts.

You can download the paper here.