Next they neutered newzbin2, yet I said nothing, because usenet is for dweebs.

Presently they prohibited the Pirate Bay, and I did not protest, because I’m not a fan of TV or film.

When they plundered the Pirate Party UK blog erased the EDL website, I kept quiet, because I am not a Pirate I disagree with their politics and methods.

And when they censored the churches, I didn’t complain, because I am not religious.

Then they blocked my blog, and I don’t know if anyone spoke out about it, because they blocked everyone else’s too.

The wires used to resonate with the buzz of seventy million voices. Now inside the Great British Firewall we hear just an empty echo: Lily Allen, singing into a cultural vacuum, while the BPI rubs its hands in glee…

(With apologies to the memory of Pastor Martin Niemoller.)

Updated 2012-05-03 to refer to a real instance where a registered UK political party might be censored.

I’ve written to my MP today to ask for his position on the issues raised by the green paper. I’ve also asked that he challenge Ed Vaizey and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to open up their opaque round-table discussions on the Bill, which have thus far excluded all but one set of stakeholders. The government is making choices behind closed doors that will effectively carve up digital power between private interests. Citizens and human rights lack representation in this policy-making process yet if we act quickly we can change the direction of this legislation before any politicians have to make a “U-turn”. Why not write to your MP today and make your own views known?

In my opinion, and that of a great many other technical experts, the proposals are risible and cannot hope to achieve their stated objective of reducing illicit online file-sharing. Meanwhile they will cost billions to implement – costs that will be passed on to householders and businesses – and will reserve to a few corporations monopoly control over our online experience. (I suspect this last point is the real objective of the legislation!) The Government seems to think the world-wide web is a content distribution system, similar to television, whereas in fact it’s a communications network like the Royal Mail or the telephone. It is nonsensical to try to regulate the latter class of systems in the same way as the former. Imagine how daft Ed Vaizey would sound if he proposed steaming open all our letters to check whether we’re sharing photos in violation of copyright law, or tapping everyone’s phone calls to ensure we’re not using trademarked phrases in a way that might mislead our audiences!

Perhaps the worst effect of these proposals would be the extent to which they would violate our right to privacy and freedom of expression. Automatic censorship requires surveillance, because ISPs and search engines would have to examine every webpage request we make in order to check whether we’d asked for one of the blocked sites, which would be a gross invasion of privacy. Secondly, since filtering systems are notoriously inaccurate, the owners and users of many legitimate websites would have their speech censored arbitrarily. Redress for this might prove difficult to obtain since the proposals include replacing court oversight and due process with industry-led self-regulation.

The Open Rights Group have been trying to participate in the round-table discussions being held by DCMS yet it seems their views are not welcome there. I understand they were involved initially but have been excluded subsequently. In order that we can all trust and rely on the resulting legislation the DCMS must commit to a more open and transparent process from now on. How does Mr. Vaizey intend to ensure public confidence in the Government’s copyright enforcement regime? Will he commit to setting out a clear consultation process, being transparent about with whom the DCMS is meeting and in what capacity, and ensuring that all stakeholders receive a fair hearing? Will he end the private round-table discussions that prioritise one set of stakeholders and invite organisations such as ORG to participate again? Will he commit to basing copyright policy on evidence not industry spin? Enquiring netizens need to know!

This session was on the Communications Capabilities Development Programme Green Paper. At the time this was due to be published imminently however nobody had yet seen the details. The Government had held discussions with various stakeholders, though, and some information had begun to emerge – not all of it good!

On Sunday 1 April the Government released further details of their plans to the press (and our suspicions that they’re not good were confirmed!). I’ve posted a round-up of relevant links on my delicious account.

The panel consisted of Pete Bradwell (campaigner at the Open Rights Group), Jeff Lynn (chair of COADEC) and Theo Bertram (UK policy manager at Google UK). The session was chaired by Alec Muffett.

Theo Bertram’s introduction

Jeremy Hunt recently gave a speech in which he identified “four pillars” (presumably in the fight against illicit sharing of copyright material without a license): payment processes, advertising revenues, ISP blocking and removing sites from search indexes.

In addition rightsholders have proposed a search-engine code of conduct. There are three main areas with which Google has issues. These can be summarised by the phrase “legal sites first.”

Legal: The government thinks Google is the internet and is magical. They think that binary instructions can decide whether something is legal or illegal in a nanosecond. This whole language about “legal” and “illegal” websites is already worrying. There is only copying that infringes copyright and copying that does not. Even if Google can recognise copyrighted material it can’t tell whether a copy of a piece of content is licensed. In fact judges often find this a difficult determination to make. Google can’t be a judge.

Sites: at the moment Google removes URLs from its index if they contain infringing content. The DMCA means rightsholders can remove, in theory, every page from the net as long as every page contains infringing content. What the government wants is for Google to remove whole sites – not just pages. Necessarily this means they want to remove non-infringing content! If site-level blocking is required surely there must be judicial oversight?

First: rightsholders would like their sites to appear at the top of search results for terms associated with their content. They want Google to push the “good” sites up and the “bad” ones down. This just isn’t possible. Google can’t identify good and bad. Also, if we’d had only a small cabal of approved sites listed in search rankings four years ago, YouTube would never have made it up the rankings. There would never be a British iTunes. It would be totally anticompetitive. We would also never have another artist become successful by being spotted from a pool of unauthorised talent – successful acts could only come from within the club not without.

We need to pick our moment and be careful of crying wolf – if we say this is the next SOPA, and it turns out not to be, we’ll lose credibility.

Jeff Lynn’s introduction

I’m the chair of the coalition for a digital economy. We represent the tech city, silicon roundabout startups. We help to support conditions for the creation of the next big internet properties.

The UK is a great place to grow a business. Great things will happen here so long as the Government doesn’t stop them. The government must understand the conditions that are required for success.

The fact that we don’t have the green paper in front of us today is an encouraging and interesting sign. It’s been expected since December and it’s slipped a lot. It was supposed to come out alongside the budget but there’s a view that now the local elections are coming up we won’t see it until May. What seems to have happened is that the government has listened to a few prominent campaigners. They don’t want a SOPA like situation – which activists were threatening based on an early draft.

The mood two years ago was that the government wasn’t listening to us. The fact that Number 10 is now paying attention is encouraging however we haven’t won yet and we’re nowhere near winning the understanding of government or rightsholders.

Talent moves – if the UK gets it wrong business will move.

We’re happy with the current direction of travel but there’s still a long way to go.

Pete Bradwell’s introduction

ORG has been campaigning for about a year against the closed round-table discussions being chaired by DCMS. We’re concerned about the lack of open policy-making and evidence based policy.

The government is making choices behind closed doors that are effectively carving up digital power between private interests. Citizens and human rights lack representation in this policy-making process.

This situation risks conflating good policy with the needs of the private interests in the room. It’s also anticompetitive. It hands decisions about what we’re allowed to do online to business. It also risks endemic censorship, adding a hidden layer of for-profit power betweeen citizens and the state, undermining what’s so promising about the open potential of the net.

What sort of due process should be involved when rightsholders make an accusation? What redress do site owners have when their sites are blocked or if they’re told to take down content?

It’s critical to keep making arguments about why these loose and vague discussions, and these secret meetings, are bad.

Questions

• The main issue is cooperation between ISPs and content industries. Google and other companies are already going in this direction. If there is no intent to profit then sharing shouldn’t be illegal. When will Google step up and say this?

  Content ID is softwhere on YouTube that automatically recognises that a piece of uploaded content is music or video and allows rightsholders to notify Google that this is their content and it should be taken down. It still follows the process laid down in law – it’s just more automated. Rightsholders don’t complain about YouTube any more because in some cases it makes them more money than iTunes!

  Key is for rightsholders to monetise distribution streams not stop them!

  Google supports all of the exceptions in Hargreaves.

  Tactics need to be considered – we’ve made lots of progress through level-headed and calm education. There’s not nearly as much opposition in government as COADEC expected. It’s a process of informing and explaining and reasoning with legislators. Ideological approaches don’t help our cause as much.

  Consumer focus have created the rights alliance to try to find middle ground between consumers and artists.

• Judicial involvement is easy to demand however if nobody is nobody paid to defend the public interest in an aversarial hearing then not all the arguments will come out in court and decisions won’t be balanced. In Newzbin, BT have been penalised for pressing too hard against the case for blocking, and have been slapped with a large costs order. Is there not a case for a statutory tribunal rather than judiciary?

  One of the frustrations with not being involved in the discussions, which are closed, is that those sorts of perspectives can’t be expressed and considered by legislators.

  No assurances received that “streamlined process” != “kangaroo court”.

• There is clear support for the idea that all non-commercial copying should be legal. Isn’t it the case that the vast majority of copying objected to by rightsholders is non-commercial? Surely this would be a thumping great exception rather than a small issue.

  Difference is whether it displaces consumer activity.

• What can we and ORG do to ensure ORG is in the room when these decisions are made?

  Talk to MPs. Try to convince them that the things we’re saying aren’t anti-copyright or in Google’s pocket etc. Explain the truth.

  Continue to press the case that this needs to be evidence based, open and transparent. Ensure the whole process is transparent. We need to open up the process so that other people can contribute.

• If a court decides that a URL links to tortuous or infringing material, do we think removing its URL is a proportionate response?

  Google already does this and it’s automatic. Applies by country on the appropriate services according to local laws. There is nothing magical about the Internet when it comes to Law. Concerns come when people say the Internet needs to be treated differently.

  Not a good idea in principal to solve a problem by reducing its visibility.

If I can do this in a week you can do it in your area too. If you’re into digital rights, and you want to meet up with others to discuss the pressing issues of the day, why not start your own branch of the Open Rights Group?

Here’s what we did:

• Choose how to communicate. We took ORG’s advice and set up shop on meetup.com, which is a paid-for service but with the advantage of being an integrated solution, however there are many other tools you can use to organise yourselves. The trick is to pick one and stick with it.
• Promote the group. We did this before deciding on topics or scheduling our first meeting so that people could express general interest without committing to anything. This encouraged participation. We started off with a post to the org-discuss mailing list and by spreading the word on Twitter, IndyMedia and Postcode Gazette.
• Gather your group’s preferences. We asked everyone two questions when they signed up: when can you meet and what would you like to discuss?
• Arrange a venue. We chose a dedicated community meeting-space rather than a pub, as this allows us access to wifi, a projector and a bit of quiet in which to hold our discussions. It’s also more inclusive of people who don’t drink alcohol. We won’t be forgetting the social side though – there’s a good pub close by and I’m sure the discussion will spill out into it afterwards!
• Meet! Our first meeting will be an opportunity to meet each other, discuss what we consider to be on topic, share the issues we’re passionate about and sort out the arrangements for subsequent meetings.

For future meet-ups the plan is to take what’s worked well for the London group and mix that up with the GIST foundation‘s wealth of experience running myriad special-interest tech-groups in Sheffield.

Each meeting will have a specific topic. One of us will present a short introduction and the rest of the time will then be given over to discussion. We’ll also be mixing in some practical sessions and we’ll invite local experts to give talks whenever we can.

We’re getting some support from ORG too. They’ll be promoting our group to local sympathisers using their mailing lists and they may also be able to send us interesting speakers occasionally.

During each meeting we’ll aim to come up with a list of practical actions for people to take afterwards (if they want to) such as signing a petition, writing to their MP or attending a protest. We’ll be reporting back to the community after every session so that others can read about what we think and share their own views. When other groups get going nearby we’ll go to their meetings and invite them to ours.

If you’re one of the many ORG supporters who wishes they’d get out of London and do more in your area what better way to make this happen than to kick off a local group? It’s really easy and you could find there’s a community of like-minded activists right on your doorstep. So what are you waiting for?

If you want to start up a local group feel free to ask questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to be useful. If you run a similar group already feel free to share your advice and experience!

Below are five technical and three ethical questions I think any geek or power user should ask of a prospective ISP.

1. What sort of IP addresses can you provide?

The IPv6 RFCs had been made by 1996, yet despite support for the protocol being available as standard in almost all modern computing devices, few ISPs seem to offer native connectivity. If you find an ISP that does then the killer question becomes whether they can provide a router that will handle IPv6 packets at your end. If they can’t then you’ll be building your own from a spare box and a couple of network cards. In this case it’s worth asking if they have people who can help you if problems arise and you need to troubleshoot.

If your prospective ISP doesn’t offer native IPv6 you should ask about their migration plans and whether they are providing a 6to4 gateway in the meantime. If the answer is no and you’ll be stuck on the legacy system (IPv4) then find out how many static IPs you can have allocated to your connection and whether they cost extra to provision. This is especially important if you use peer-to-peer systems, play online games, take advantage of SIP-based VoIP or need to connect to VPNs, since making these traverse a NAT device can be a difficult. In the event that only a dynamic IPv4 address is provided I’d recommend looking elsewhere, especially if you’re planning to run any services from your connection.

2. What priorities and limits does your network place on different types of datagram?

Most ISPs use traffic shaping to manage how different packets flow across their network. The aim is to balance factors such as latency, jitter (packet delay variation) and packet loss according to the needs of the application being served by each transfer. Interactive activities such as telecommunications, gaming and media streaming are usually given priority over web browsing and email traffic, which in turn tend to be treated more favourably than bulk transfer protocols such as bittorrent.

A well-designed network management system will affect most users rarely as long as the service isn’t congested, however it’s still useful to be aware of your ISP’s practices so you can understand why your connection is performing as it does, and perhaps so you can schedule heavy usage accordingly. If you plan to make heavy peak-time use of data-hungry or latency-sensitive applications (such as video streaming or online games respectively) you’ll want to pay close attention to how the network manages such traffic. It’s also good to ask what happens in the event of congestion. Does the answer imply the situaiton is handled by deliberate and graceful service-degredation or are random latency-spikes and vanishing UDP packets likely to be the order of the day?

In my view the substance of the answer you get to this question is less important than its frankness (for typical patterns of consumption). Vague responses might suggest a service that performs better on paper than in practice.

I’d avoid any service that takes traffic-shaping beyond its quality of service remit by violating network neutrality. Nobody wants a two-tier internet where the tiers are controlled by a profit-making business.

3. Do you block certain types of traffic or access to certain ports?

ISPs are unlikely to block generic traffic-types from being downloaded to your network completely, though they will often limit downloads in some way (see above), however beware of ISPs that restrict what you can upload from your connection, especially when the transfer originates from the Internet, such as would be expected if you were running a server. Some ISPs make this difficult or impossible, so if you’re planning to host anything over the connection, seek assurances about traffic originating from both ends and travelling in both directions.

Port and traffic blocking is a particular problem with mobile broadband providers, whether your connection is delivered through a dedicated dongle, a separate device such as a MiFi or a mobile phone. Some networks do horrible things to certain types of traffic and it pays to be aware of any restrictions before you commit. The problem I’ve experienced most is that of mobile ISPs preventing me from communicating with my outgoing mailserver by blocking or proxying SMTP ports.

Most ISPs reserve the right to interfere with your data uploads on grounds of network health or self defence if one of your boxen gets rooted and starts sending out spam, DDoS or other malicious traffic. Few would quibble with this given the problems botnets can cause.

4. What network services do you provide to customers?

As your network’s gateway to the outside world your ISP is well placed to offer services that can make your life easier. All will provide DNS resolvers (of varying quality), however some may offer additional services such as NTP, 6to4 tunnels, domain name hosting, email, web hosting, FTP servers, game servers or mirrors of popular software. If such things are of interest then it’s worth asking what’s included.

Geeks crave knowledge and value control. ISPs can cater for this by providing connection details and control interfaces to customers. Ask whether they provide graphs or other details about your connection rate, peak latency, the amount of data you’ve transferred and similarly useful data. Can you adjust your line parameters if you need to? Can you control reverse DNS entries for your connection’s IP addresses? What monitoring and alerting facilities are available?

5. How good is the support for your service?

ISPs are rated on the quality of the support they provide by myriad magazines and review sites however most of these resources are aimed at lay audiences, so while they might indicate the general quality of support provided, power users often need to talk to our ISPs about issues their standard support scripts don’t cover. The ease with which you can get a technical expert on the line doesn’t seem all that important – until you need one! Find out how easy it is to escalate technical queries to the people who can help resolve them.

It’s also useful to know how you can ask for support. Some ISPs reduce costs by limiting support channels to the bare minimum – perhaps an off-shore call centre full of people reading from scripts, or just an email form on their website. Other ISPs communicate with customers through a range of mechanisms: Twitter accounts, IRC channels and even SMS in emergencies. Text-based support can be especially useful for deaf customers or those who use screen-readers. Active user-communities, support forums, company blogs and well-maintained FAQs or knowledge-bases are often a boon to power users so check these out too.

6. Do you intercept traffic?

No ISP will answer yes to this as a straight question as to do so would be to confess to a criminal offence (in the UK, at least). The best ISPs will state explicitly that they will never look at your packets unless they are forced to by legislation or a court order. Some may also reserve the right to inspect the content of traffic crossing their network for fault-finding purposes or to defend against attacks. Such statements should be accompanied by a commitment to disclose each event to those whose data was compromised and to never retain logs for longer than is necessary for the task at hand.

I’d avoid companies that intercept traffic for other reasons – especially if they want to sell profiles of your browsing habits to advertisers – and I’d be suspicious of any company that refuses to rule out such unethical behaviour.

7. Do you censor the connections you sell?

Most UK ISPs censor their Internet connections. They subscribe to the IWF watchlist – a secret list of “bad” URLs compiled by a quasi non-governmental organisation. If your prospective ISP is a subscriber then the URLs on the list won’t be accessible to you. The stated purpose of this system is to block access to child-abuse images however recent legal rulings have forced ISPs to use the same system to censor websites that merely link to files others have made available (allegedly without a licence to do so from the copyright owner) – just like Google does. This is a slippery slope that’s already curtailing freedom of expression in the UK and I believe it should be resisted.

There is another censorship mechanism, much more frequently problematic, which is prevalent on mobile networks (at the time of writing), and which may become a problem on home broadband connections as the UK Government is pushing for it to be rolled out to these too. It’s touted as “adult content filtering” and it’s often switched on by default for new mobile customers. The trouble with these systems is that their definitions of “adult content” are arbitrary and it can be difficult for customers to opt out of them. Finding out if such a system applies to your network, and asking for it to be switched off up front, could save you from having to troubleshoot weird access difficulties later.

The Open Rights Group has a summary of current Internet censorship issues in the UK on its website.

8. How do you handle allegations of copyright infringement?

The Internet works by copying information therefore copyright is the de facto law of the Internet. There’s a war raging at present, between commercial copyright-holding organisations and consumers, for control over who gets to copy what and when. You may have read about the Digital Economy Act, ACTA, SOPA/PIPA, HADOPI and other such oddly-named legislative initiatives. These are all attempts by vested interests in the media industries to buy laws that restore their erstwhile monopolies on the distribution of media. Unfortunately these laws share another undesirable trait: they all have side-effects that curtail our privacy and freedom of expression.

ISPs are caught in the crossfire of this war. The media industries want them to behave as an Internet police force, monitoring the files we share, spotting transfers that look like they might infringe on their copyrights then imposing sanctions on us. Some ISPs take a dim view of this suggestion, arguing that forcing them to threaten their customers and violate their trust is bad for business, and would cost a lot of money to boot.

If you are unlucky enough to be accused of copyright infringement – which can happen regardless of whether you’ve actually downloaded something illegally because the standard of evidence put forward by copyright holders is usually very low – the economic incentives in the UK are such that ISPs are likely to behave as if you are guilty rather than spending time and money finding out the truth of the matter. You could find your contract terminated for breach of an Acceptable Use Policy, your personal details sent to the complaining party without your permission and a civil suit filed against you, all without adequate judicial oversight or due process.

Some ISPs have more reasonable policies in this regard than others. It’s worth checking how such situations would be handled before you commit to a contract – especially if you won’t be the only person using your connection and doubly especially if you plan on running a TOR exit node or an open wifi hotspot.

Did I miss out an important question or get something wrong? Which ISP would you recommend for power users and geeks? Let me know in the comments.

Thanks to @thegreatgonzo, @z303, @djb_ptigga, @kelly_plusnet, @tdobson, @secretlondon, @johnstovin & @owenblacker for their question suggestions.