This is the transcript of a speech given by Thomas Beagle at Kiwicon in Wellington on November 6th, 2011.

Hi everybody. I'm Thomas Beagle from Tech Liberty. We're a lobby group dedicated to protecting civil liberties in the digital age.

I'm going to talk about how the government is protecting us by using technology to make us safer and happier people – while possibly not caring so much about our freedom.

Now, in the tech field we often laugh about the government and the law being one step behind - I bet more than one of you has looked at the new copyright law and thought "Ha, they're cracking down on torrenting but these days I get all my content via usenet!"

The problem is that this goes both ways. Sometimes it's the government that is using the new technology and the it's the laws we use to protect ourselves that haven't caught up with it yet.

Automated Number Plate Recognition

I'm going to start with automated number plate recognition because there's a good chance many of you won't have heard of it and it provides a good example of the way digital technology is changing things. But what is it?

It's pretty simple really - it's a camera that gets installed in a police car. It recognises the number plates of passing cars and checks them against a central database. Get a match to a "vehicle of interest" and the police can pull over the car and have a little chat with the driver.

Now you might think that sounds pretty innocuous, it's just automating an existing manual process. And it means that the police will spend less time and money catching more bad guys. How could anyone have a problem with that?

Of course, you lot have probably already worked out the problem. It's more than just a simple database lookup - it also includes the date, the time and the place. And it’s doing it for every car. And it’ll end up being installed in every police car. So the police are going to end up with an ever-growing database of car sightings that will let them know where you have been.

Tracking someone used to be hard.

Automated number plate recognition is going to make tracking easy. You don't need a whole team of people, you don't need to install a GP tracking device, you don't need to get a court order to access mobile phone data - you just install ANPR devices everywhere and then you can ask the database whatever you like. Because you're storing historical data, you can even go back in time - "Where did car X go on the night of May 5th?"

It's the sort of information that a totalitarian regime would love to have. It's the sort of information that an over-zealous police force obsessed with green or brown terrorism would use. But is it the sort of information that we want our government to have about everyone?

At one time the answer would have been no. When tracking devices became practical, the law was changed to make the police have to have a warrant before they could use them. Of course, the law change was partly to enable police to trespass to install the devices, but us civil liberties types have to take what we can get. This new automated number plate recognition system could be implemented without the need for any law changes or any oversight - and the NZ police are trialling it at the moment.

Search warrants

Another example of how the government’s use of tech is outpacing the laws we use to protect ourselves - the common or garden search warrant. Let's say that you're suspected of embezzling funds, or armchairs, from the company you work for. A complaint is made, the police investigate, they get a search warrant and kick down your door.

In the old days you'd expect them to take any sort of financial papers, documents, etc, etc. But would they take your old love letters or the family photo album? Of course they wouldn't, and the terms of the search warrant wouldn't let them.

Things are different now - sure they'll take any papers they find but they're also going to take your computer and any other digital storage on the premises. And, well I don't know about you, but my entire life is on that computer. My business files, my letters, my medical records, my family photos, ... my not so family photos... all in the hands of the police. All available to be indexed and searched with the police able to keep a copy indefinitely.

Once again, the law hasn't changed but the digitisation of information means that the effect of the law is much more oppressive.

Customs

And while I'm on the subject of searching computers, did you know that Customs have the power to seize any digital device or storage coming into the country and examine the contents? They can even take copies of the device for review later.

This is not just theoretical – they have been doing it. We got a complaint from someone about them taking his netbook as he returned from holiday in Samoa, and of course there were the Switched on Gardening people who had their phones and laptops taken every time they crossed the border.

In theory Customs can only do this to look for contraband or censored works, but it seems very likely that they are using this power at the behest of the police to do the searches that the police legally can't. You might want to bear this in mind the next time you cross the border.

Civil liberties

The question has to be - do we want to live in a society where our movements and secrets are open to the authorities? It's traditional to mention Orwell's 1984 at this point - not least because it is such a terrifying view of the surveillance state that we're rapidly developing the ability to implement.

How do we decide what is acceptable and what isn't Trying to come up with answers to this question is one of the reasons we founded Tech Liberty. We saw that one of the best ways to look at this is through some rather old rights such as freedom of speech, the right to due process, the freedom from unreasonable search, and the recent addition of the right to privacy. And some of our new laws are stomping all over them.

But I promise this isn't a recruitment session! Instead let's start running through some of the things happening at the moment in New Zealand.

Control of the internet

The big one is control of the internet. Over the past 7 years there has been a three way legal combo attack that, as far as I'm concerned, means that the government has largely won.

The first part of this combo is the Telecommunications Interception Capability Act of 2004, known as TICA. It simply says that communications companies - telcos and ISPs - must provide facilities for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to be able to intercept communications - phone calls, data, etc. Sure, they have to have a warrant, but as our judges have declined just 1 of the hundreds of applications for interception warrants in the last three years, I think we can assume that that isn't too difficult to get.

Second is the internet filter implemented by the Department of Internal Affairs. There is no law enabling this and therefore use of the system is "voluntary" by the ISPs - but I note that in the UK they made moves to make a similar system mandatory after some of the smaller ISPs failed to realise they were meant to volunteer. Right now over 90% of New Zealanders get their internet through a connection that is censored by the government and, unlike the rest of our censorship laws, they refuse to tell us what has been blocked.

Finally, our new copyright law to stop the evils of infringing file sharing has two interesting provisions. The first is that ISPs are obliged to keep records of which account had which IP address at any one time. Secondly the government has decided to skip all that messy having to prove you actually did something bad, and has decided that they can penalise the account owner for anything done through their internet account.

So, this three way combo means that the government has established that it has the right to control where we can go on the internet, it has the right to monitor what we do, and if someone does anything it doesn't like, the government has someone it can punish.

Now this is currently being done with a fairly light hand - they only filter "the really bad stuff", they have to get a warrant to monitor or intercept, and no account holders have been fined yet (although the first notices have just gone out) - but it means that the tools are in place and ready to be extended as required.

For example, currently it's the Department of Internal Affairs who choose what to censor and I believe them when they say that they want to limit the use of the filter to child pornography... but they're not the only ones with influence. How about the courts - a judge in the UK has just ordered British Telecom to use their "really bad stuff" filter to block access to a file sharing site - because the tech is available. Or what happens if there's another media scandal about bomb-making instructions on the internet and some politician thinks that the government must come up with a solution - again, the technology is there and ready to be used.

Of course, you're all sitting here thinking "haha, I am elite masterhacker and I use encryption and VPNs, they'll never catch me!". And to a certain extent you're right - the careful and technically savvy person can avoid some of these things to a greater or lesser extent (although of course, your VPN has to come out in a legal jurisdiction somewhere...). But while this is all right for you and me, what about everyone else in New Zealand? Don't they deserve some freedom and privacy as well? When governments oppress people, it affects all of society.

Cameras

What else is happening? I think we can safely assume that the number of surveillance cameras, both govt and private, continues to rise. At some point the promise of facial recognition might even live up to its marketing claims.

But there are also special cameras. Customs have been trialling the naked body scanners even though the Aviation Crimes Act expressly forbids use of technology that shows the naked form. Customs claims that the law only applies to the use of scanners to detect weapons and other threats, whereas they're using them to detect contraband. In other words, either they're lying - or they're willing to invade your privacy by taking naked pictures of you to find counterfeit Rolex watches.

Privacy Act

Of course, we do have the Privacy Act. People and companies can't just give your private info away, right? Well, first you have to worry about the jurisdiction that your data is in - services based overseas may not have the protections we do.

But even in New Zealand the act includes a provision that you're allowed to release information "to avoid prejudice to the maintenance of the law". You may think that the police would need a warrant or court order to get Trademe to release information about you, but they're happy to admit that they will give the police any assistance that they request. Do you know whether the NZ companies you deal with will stick up for your privacy?

The Law Commission has just finished the review of the Privacy Act and we're expecting to see a bill to modify the law soon. The good news is that they intend to make the Privacy Commissioner a little less toothless. More interestingly, they've recommended making it a responsibility to notify people if security is breached and personal data is stolen. I think this is a good idea and, for any black-hats out there, it's going to make cracking the right targets just that much more satisfying when they're obliged to put out a press release telling everyone about it.

TICA and Search & Surveillance

Speaking of reviews, earlier I mentioned TICA, the Telecommunications Interception Capability Act. There's a general perception that the law doesn't work well, with both law enforcement and comms companies struggling with the lack of specifics. The Ministry of Economic Development is planning a review of the law next year. I think it's going to be one to keep a sharp eye on as law enforcement is never shy about asking for more powers.

The best example of that is undoubtedly the Search & Surveillance Bill. The Law Commission was asked to review and revise our rather chaotic laws around search & surveillance. Now, they could have had a serious look at what sort of invasive powers we let the government have in a free and democratic society - but instead they just gave the police and everyone else whatever they asked for. I still find it hard to believe that they thought it appropriate that even the local city council could apply for a search warrant to put a hidden video camera in your bedroom.

The original version was so over the top, and so badly drafted that it got sent back to be rewritten somewhat, and you can tell it’s still bad because then the govt chickened out and put the rewritten version on hold until after the election. Some of the things I'm particularly unhappy about are the lack of notifications - how can you challenge the government for doing an illegal search if you never find out that it was done? There’s also further erosion of the right to silence through the extension of production and examination orders to more types of crimes.

But one part you should all be aware of is related to searching computer systems. If you have "relevant knowledge" of the system being searched, you can be compelled to assist in the execution of a search. Refuse? You could be jailed for up to three months.

Now this could be unpleasant for a number of reasons - who wants to be caught up in someone else's drama just because you're a sysadmin or work at an ISP? But what if the assistance you're asked to provide is "Crack the encryption on these files"? How well do you think the average judge will understand that cracking a well designed encryption system isn't exactly trivial? After all, they watch TV, they know hackers can get into anything with few minutes work.

Why do we get these laws and why are they often so bad?

The final thing I want to talk about is - where do these laws come from and why are they often so bad?

Wikileaks very clearly showed that our new copyright laws are a result pressure from the US. And they’re still going – now it's the promise of a free trade treaty, the Trans Pacific Partnership, where the cost of joining and getting better access for our agricultural products will be gutting Pharmac and implementing stronger IP laws.

Then there's our local politicians who need to be seen to be doing something and are always happy to pander to the law and order trolls to get votes. Don't you trust our brave boys in blue? Of course they need more powers to stop these evil islamic Greenpeace terrorists!

Unfortunately "something" is often ineffective or has undesirable consequences. We end up with King Canute laws - someone is standing on the beach and ordering the tide to stop coming in, and it's not doing a lot of good.

Will our new copyright laws stop file sharing? No, but they have undermined our right to a fair trial.

Will the internet filter stop children being abused? Of course not, but it has given the government a new system designed for mass censorship.

Will naked body scanners stop terrorist attacks? Well, we don't have any terrorists so maybe this one will be effective!

Political solutions

Kiwicon is a very technical conference but these aren't technical problems with technical solutions. Instead they're political problems and the solutions also have to be political. The good news is that in New Zealand we do have, no matter how much people sneer at it, a working democracy.

You can get involved, you can give an opinion, you can help educate our politicians, you can influence our laws.

And this is the point where I say that Tech Liberty needs more people who want to be involved in that political process, that we have a website at techliberty.org.nz, and thanks very much for listening.

What inspired you to offer the service?

People will always choose the easiest way to get the latest movies and TV shows and downloading off the internet is it. Unfortunately options are now limited to VPN tunnels not only for p2p but also for using an American IP address to get access to TV sites like www.hulu.com.

Are you getting many customers and what do they want it for?

Yes I am. VPN tunnels have a number of uses that include getting an American IP address to watch tv sites such as hulu.com, encrypt internet traffic when they are using a public WiFi point and of course hiding their real IP address.

How do you feel about the fact that some of your customers will probably be using your service to break NZ law?

No Comment.

What sort of information do you keep about your customers?

We only keep the email address.

What sort of information do you keep about your customers connections? (Such as when they connect, how long they connect for, anything they do through the service.)

We do not log what the user does or transfers over our network but we do log the time of connection and disconnection. We use this data to strategically deploy network resources. We also log the country the user is logging in from, this helps us to detect hijacked accounts and abuse. We do not log IP addresses.

Do you think your business has an obligation under the Telecommunications (Interception Capability) Act to allow the NZ police or other enforcement agencies to monitor traffic?

No, I am not a network operator. A network operator means a person who owns, controls, or operates a public telecommunications network or a person who supplies (whether by wholesale or retail) another person with the capability to provide a telecommunications service. CyberDodge does not provide anyone else with the capability to provide a service and CyberDodge is not a public telecommunications network. Public telecommunications network means a public switched telephone network and a public data network. CyberDodge is not a public switched telephone network nor a public data network. A public data network means a data network used, or intended for use, in whole or in part, by the public and includes, without limitation, the following facilities: Internet access and email access. CyberDodge requires that you have internet and email access already. This law applies to ISPs, which CyberDodge is not.

Do you think your business has an obligation under the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Act to store customer IP addresses so that you can pass on notices?

No, I am not a IPAP. IPAP, or Internet protocol address provider, means a person that operates a business that, other than as an incidental feature of its main business activities, offers the transmission, routing, and providing of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing and allocates IP addresses to its account holders and charges its account holders for its services and is not primarily operated to cater for transient users. CyberDodge does not offer the transmission nor providing of connections for digital online communications. CyberDodge only routes digital online communications. This law applies to ISPs and CyberDodge is not a ISP.

A thread over on gpforums.co.nz has discussed problems Telecom users have had accessing content delivered by various CDNs (content delivery networks - used by many sites to handle video streaming).

Network traces showed a large amount of packet loss and the path taken by the data looked a bit unusual.

This appears to be the first sign of a site being either adversely affected or actually blocked by the DIA filter. We've also had confirmation of other ISPs (Internet service providers) believed to be using the filter having access blocked.

What we believe is happening

The filter works by creating alternative routes to particular network IP addresses and passing them onto the participating ISPs. Traffic to those IP addresses is then passed to the DIA and checked by the filter to see whether it is going to the blocked site or another site on the same IP address. If it is going to a blocked site, the user is redirected to www.dce.net.nz, or else it allowed through the DIA's ISP and out onto the Internet. (Read more in our Filtering Frequently Asked Questions article.)

Inspection of the traces shows that the traffic is going through an ISP with a relationship with the Department. The address 124.150.165.62 in the traces is from that ISP. The traffic is then going out through a link that the ISP has to Australia.

This ISP's link to the Internet appears to be either under considerable pressure or is simply broken. The level of traffic being dropped by it (as reported by users and our own investigation) is likely to be degrading access significantly to any site hosted - but not actually blocked - by any IP address the DIA is wanting to inspect.

What does this mean?

The site in question hosts anime (animated video from Japan and other countries). While we believe that some anime work has been found objectionable in New Zealand, we cannot find any reference to this site being banned by the Chief Censor.

Even if one video at the site has been blocked by the DIA, this blocking appears to be generally degrading performance to other material on that site or any other site hosted by the same content delivery network.

The Department has repeatedly denied access to the filter list in the expectation that hiding the list will prevent people from accessing it. As this story illustrates, it's not difficult to uncover the filter given the effects it has on an IP address being filtered/intercepted.

We're very interested in hearing from anyone else having difficulties accessing a site where 124.150.165.62 appears in a traceroute to the site. We're particularly interested in legal content being degraded by passing through the DIA's filter.

Please do your job.

Yours, Tech Liberty

We believe that secret censorship is a threat to our democracy. We need to be careful when giving our government the ability to limit what we can see and hear - which is why we require the Chief Censor to publish their decisions. This openness, the ability for anyone to review and challenge, helps prevent abuse of the censorship scheme.

One of our objections to the government's Internet censorship filter was that the Department of Internal Affairs has refused to release the list of censored sites. They say that they'll only censor certain types of material, but how can we know that they're sticking to this without being able to see the list?

The DIA did respond to these concerns by establishing the Independent Reference Group to provide at least some semi-independent oversight of the filter, although they had to be persuaded to let the IRG have access to the list of blocked sites. Then, from the minutes of the IRG's meeting on 15th October 2010:

Members of the Group were invited to identify any website that they wish to review. They declined to do so at this stage.

Now, we quite understand that members of the IRG don't want to look at those sites. But that's not the point - they have a responsibility to ensure that the filter "...is operated with integrity and adheres to the principles set down in the Code of Practice."

This oversight isn't going to work if the IRG don't exercise it. The filter list grew from 153 entries in June to 538 in November - surely it would have made sense to have a look at the list and select some of the additions for a brief review?

Recommendation

We recommend that at each meeting the IRG should randomly select a sample of newly added sites and review the content to ensure that the filter is not being abused. Anything less is neglecting their duty.

It seems that a lot has happened since we did our last update.

Increase in the number of ISPs

The ISPs using the system are now:

• Maxnet
• Watchdog
• TelstraClear
• Airnet
• Xtreme

Telecom are obviously next and Vodafone are also apparently well on the way to implementing it. According to the DIA, "Discussions are continuing with Ihug/Vodafone, Woosh, Orcon and 2degrees. Design changes are being investigated to adapt the system for performance on mobile devices." However public statements from Orcon have said they have no plans to implement the filter.

Even so, this means that most users of the Internet in New Zealand will be using a filtered connection.

The filter list

The number of entries has risen from 153 (as at 29th June 2010) to 538 (as at 2nd November 2010), representing 463 unique domain names.

What is being filtered

From the DIA's Independent Reference Group minutes: "Aware that the inclusion of drawings or computer generated images of child sexual abuse may be considered controversial, officials advised that there are 30 such websites on the filtering list. Nic McCully advised that officials had submitted computer generated images for classification and she considered that only objectionable images were being filtered. It was noted that images of popular television cartoon characters engaged in sexual acts, which are quite common on the internet, would not be added to the filter list."

Further reading

• Tech Liberty's Internet Filtering FAQ
• Tech Liberty's Internet Filtering Technical FAQ
• Which ISPs Will Filter?
• Why We Oppose Internet Filtering
• Stop the Filter campaign website

References

• http://www.dia.govt.nz/diawebsite.nsf/wpg_URL/Services-Censorship-Compliance-Independent-Reference-Group-Meeting-Minutes-15-October-2010?OpenDocument
• IRG 2nd Quarter Briefing Document from the DIA (not online)
• Letters from the DIA (not online)
• http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/telecom-installs-govt-website-blocking-filter-132625

• They completed trials of the system nearly two years ago.
• They have signed up just two small ISPs, Watchdog and Maxnet, although we believe that Maxnet are not using it yet.
• The list of banned webpages has only 153 entries on it (well down from the 7000 they were claiming earlier).

While they've been doing this:

• Internet NZ has announced their opposition to the filter on technical and practical grounds.
• Six ISPs have said they definitely won't use the filter, another couple have said they have no plans to implement it, and only three have stated an intention to sign up alongside the current two.
• Political pressure has forced the Australian Labor government to delay implementing their filter, and the opposing Coalition has said they'll scrap the system if elected.
• The US government has opposed internet censorship and stated their commitment to developing tools that allow people to circumvent it.

And all the normal reasons against the DIA's proposed censorship scheme remain:

• The filtering system only works against unencrypted websites and doesn't stop the main ways used to distribute objectionable images - torrenting, email, chat. Only 8.5% of the traffic going through the filter can be checked.
• It's easy for motivated people to work around the filter.
• Secret censorship (the list of banned sites is kept secret) is offensive in an open and democratic society.
• Better filtering solutions that cover a wider range of objectionable material are available for those who want them for their family or business.

Time to stop?

The filtering system doesn't seem to be getting anywhere and isn't going to work if it ever does - surely it's time to just close the project down. The money saved could be much better spent funding the DIA's efforts at infiltrating the groups that trade in objectionable images and shutting them down.

Which ISPs?

We've updated our list of which internet service providers will or won't be implementing the DIA's filter.

New additions to the not filtering camp:

• Unleash - "we will not be implementing this filter and we have no plan to do so in the future."
• Iconz - "ICONZ are not currently signed up to the filter, nor do we have any intention of doing so in the future."

And an ISP that will be filtering:

• Xtreme Networks - "It's a no-brainer for us, it's free."

That gives us three ISPs that will be filtering, six that won't, and two that are undecided. We're still waiting for hear from Woosh, FX, Compass, Inspire, and Actrix.

More material from the DIA

The Department of Internal Affairs has posted a couple of new documents on their website:

1. They have done their own FAQ in opposition to Tech Liberty's FAQ.
2. There is also an Information Pack (pdf).

Filtering Delayed in Australia

The fight against the Australian filter system continues. Significantly worse than the New Zealand system, the Australian filter will be compulsory, covers a wide range of material and there is no oversight of the list of filtered sites.

In a sign that protests are working, it was recently announced that passing of the filtering law will be delayed until after the election. Further links and comment from Electronic Freedom Australia.

See OpenInternet.com.au for more information about the Australian anti-filtering campaign.

The obvious question has to be, why was Tech Liberty announcing something that the Department of Internal Affairs had done? Where was their announcement that the filter had gone live on the 1st of February? Don't civil servants have a duty to communicate to the people that they serve?

Sadly this reticence with information has been typical of the Department of Internal Affairs in relation to the implementation of the Internet filter.

Deleting Public Records

Last year we used the Official Information Act to ask for copies of the reports that the inspectors has used to justify banning the websites on the list. The DIA refused. After we appealed this refusal to the Ombudsman, the DIA then said that those records had been deleted and therefore it was impossible for them to give them to us anyway. The Department has an obligation under the Public Records Act to keep such information.

We complained to the Chief Archivist, who investigated and confirmed that the DIA had deleted public records without permission. He told us that the DIA has promised to do better in the future, but naturally this didn't help us access the missing records.

The Secret Go-Live Date

Why has the DIA been so secretive about the filter going into operation? Here's two examples where we believe that they have failed to be open and honest about what they are doing, even in response to direct questions.

We wrote to the DIA and asked them, again, when the filter was going to go live. They wrote back on January the 20th and said that as they were about to make an announcement, the Official Information Act gave them grounds to refuse our request. This was 11 days before Watchdog was the first ISP to start using the filter. It's now the 16th of March, nearly two months later, and there's still no announcement from the DIA.

Secondly, on February the 15th we rang Keith Manch, Deputy Secretary of Internal Affairs, and directly asked him when the filter was going live. Keith is responsible for Regulation and Compliance and has been heavily involved in the implementation of the filter. Did he admit that the filter had gone into operation two weeks earlier? No, he carefully took note of our questions and then wrote in a follow-up email that as we had already asked those questions by letter he wouldn't answer. We finally got our answer on March the 8th, admitting that the system had gone live on February the 1st.

Open and Democratic Government

Tech Liberty is at the intersection of technology and civil liberties. We are strong supporters of the right to self-rule as expressed through democratic government. An important element of democratic government is the principle that government must be open and accountable, as without this governments tend to become corrupt and self-serving.

New Zealand recognises this and the Official Information Act and Public Records Acts are some of the ways we use to ensure that our government remains open and accountable. However, the law isn't enough on its own, it also requires a commitment from government departments to honour the spirit of the law and not try to use or misuse the letter of it to conceal information.

We don't believe that the Department of Internal Affairs has been living up to this standard when it comes to the issue of internet filtering.

Security risks of centralised filtering

The DIA's Internet filter will introduce a very tempting attack vector for those with ill intent. When their system is compromised we'll all be at significant risk of losing all of the money in our bank accounts. No, really, we will.

To fully understand how and why this will happen it's important to understand a little bit about how the routing on the Internet works, how the filter will work, and the methods and mind-set of the criminals currently working on the Internet.

Routing Primer

Routing on the Internet is based on hearsay. As a provider of services I tell my neighbours the IP addresses that I look after, and that if they have packets destined for my IP addresses that they should route those packets to me. My neighbour tells their neighbours, and so on. So when someone on the far end of the Internet wants to send a packet to an IP address I am advertising they ask their neighbours if any of them know a way to get to me. One or more of their neighbours will return a path that should get to me - this path is called an AS-path, and is the crux of BGP routing. Using a set of pre-defined rules the person at the far end decides which of their neighbours to send the packets to. Once the best path is selected the packets are handed over and the neighbour then repeats the process with their neighbours.

There are only a limited number of tools that can be used to influence the path packets take. One of the most influential is how specific the advertisement is. Say I want to send some packets to an IP address and two of my neighbours say they know a way to get there. One says it knows how to get to a range of 246 IP addresses, including the intended destination, and the other says it knows how to get to a range of 512 IP addresses that also includes the intended destination. I will choose the more specific route - the one with the smallest range.

In summary, routing is based on what my neighbours tell me, which is in turn based on what their neighbours tell them, and packets always go to the most specific advertised route. I have to trust my neighbours, just as they trust what their neighbours tell them.

What could possibly go wrong?

The Internet is founded on trust, but sadly some people break trust. The easiest way to break the internet is to advertise 'false' routes. If you were to do this, traffic intended for someone else's IP addresses would come to you - you just need to advertise their ranges in more specific advertisements, as packets will always choose the more specific route. This is a little bit spooky, because there would be no tell-tale signs that your packets were going the wrong way - none of the easy-to-spot phishing give-aways (malformed domain names) or slight-less-easy-to-spot-but-still-detectable DNS poisoning (an incorrect IP addresses - you all use a geo-IP tool in your browser, right?). It will appear that your packets have gone to the correct IP address, because they have gone to the correct IP address. It's just that the IP address is on the wrong server.

Could this ever happen? It has happened. Pakistan Telecom advertised the YouTube ranges and broke YouTube for a few hours. It got into the newspaper and everything. To combat this we can assume that YouTube changed their advertised routes to be more specific. If Pakistan Telecom has been a malicious attacker they would have done the same, and then YouTube would get even more specific, and Pakistan Telecom again, etc, etc. At some point (/24 in most instances - a 256 IP address range) you can't advertise a more specific route because your neighbour won't accept the advertisement, because their routers would run out of memory to hold all the routes. At this point you're at a stalemate with some data going to the legitimate place and some to the bogus place. I mention this limit as it's important to the attack vector later.

How the DIA filter will work

Here is what NetClean say about how their WhiteBox product works: "NetClean WhiteBox server contains the URL block list of the sites to be blocked. It looks up these URLs using DNS and resolves them to their IP addresses. These addresses are propagated to the networks to be filtered via BGP. Traffic to these IP addresses from the networks is routed through the tunnels to the WhiteBox server that checks the URL against the blocking list. If a match is made, a block page is sent to the requestor. If a match is not made, the request continues to the web site and it is accessed as normal."

In other words the DIA filter will essentially do the same thing as occured in the Pakistan vs YouTube issue, they will advertise a false route to divert traffic. The DIA filter will be a neighbour to our ISPs, advertising very specific routes (ie, single IP addresses) that are 'IP addresses of interest'. Traffic that would normally be routed over the public internet to those IP addresses will instead be routed to DIA. The DIA filter will then inspect the data and decide what to do with it. For the purposes of this article I don't know or care what happens to it: the data might be inspected and then passed on to the intended destination, or the packets might be discarded - what happens in the normal operation of the filter isn't relevant to this article.

Note that the advertised route from the DIA filter is more specific than is generally considered acceptable on the Internet at large. This means that in a turf war over IP addresses the DIA filter will always win. The ISP will always send data destined for the intended recipient to the DIA filter when the filter says it wants to receive it. So the DIA filter is a centralised management system capable of controlling data flow to any single IP address as it crosses any ISP.

What bad people are doing these days

The second piece of this puzzle revolves around the way criminal activity is going on the Internet. I'm not talking about script-kiddies defacing a few web servers, but the hardened criminals who are stealing millions of dollars to fund their other activities. I was recently at NZNOG, a seriously geeky conference, and a guy named Adam Boileau spoke on security - the same talk I believe he gave at Kiwicon last year. He reminded me that serious hackers are like any business people: they want to maximise the return on their expenditure. In other words, they want the biggest bang for their buck.

I'll take a short detour here - it's reasonably important to realise that the underground economy of data theft is reasonably mature. There are specific roles and jobs that are carried out by different people, and they sell the results of their efforts to other people who do the next part. So there are the people who break into home PCs and build botnets, which they then sell to others who will use that botnet for, say, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the web server of some organisation they don't like. Or one person will break into a system and steal a swag of credit card numbers which they'll sell to a second person who will verify which ones work, and they in turn will sell those to people who will use them to buy things (which they return for a cash refund or sell for cash).

So we've got a bunch of bad guys who want to break into as many systems as they can in as short a time as possible, so they can earn more dollars per hour from their activities. These people are often quite smart, and they can figure out that there can be several ways to get the information they want, some more efficient than others. For example, the bad folks looking to get internet banking logins that they can sell worked out that it's more efficient to poison DNS than to send lots of phishing emails. When you poison DNS you get a name server to return the wrong IP address when a domain name is resolved, and then the users web browser goes to the wrong server with their request. If the domain name is abc-bank.co.nz then when the user goes to their bank's internet banking login they actually end up on the bad guys' server, and send their login credentials to the bad guys who in turn use them to log into the real system. "Oh, but I have the fancy second factor authentication RSA dongle / battleship card / one time text system, so they won't get me..." I hear you say. Sadly the bad guys have thought of a way around this - as you type into the fake bank screens from their server they are doing the same into the real bank screens, using your second factor authentication in real time on your real account.

DNS poisoning is tricky for a user to spot, but not impossible. You can use a GeoIP tool in your browser to check that if you're logging in a New Zealand bank that the IP is from New Zealand. I use WorldIP for FireFox. If you use Internet Explorer do a google on something like 'internet explorer geoip plugin'.

The bad guy gets more bang for their buck by poisoning DNS than by phishing with email. Why spend a whole week building a botnet when you can spend an afternoon breaking into some established centralised control mechanism, like DNS?

Pulling all the pieces together

Routing over the Internet is controlled using BGP and a high level of trust. Malicious false advertisements can break routing and cause packets to go to the wrong server without any identifiable tell-tales for end users to be able to protect themselves. The DIA filter will exploit this to direct traffic from predefined IP addresses to their filter. The ISPs will believe and trust the routes advertised by the DIA filter. The bad guys find it more efficient to break into a single centralised control mechanism.

If you put this all together you get "lets make a legislated centralised (and explicitly trusted) way to divert traffic from it's proper destination which is virtually undetectable, and then when the haxors break into that system they'll be able to divert ABC Bank's traffic to their own server and BE THE BANK".

The filter system is introducing an architectural weakness into the New Zealand Internet. Not only is it a single point of failure, it is also a single point of attack. While we can expect the DIA to do their best to keep the system secure, we can hardly expect the Censorship unit to have the skills to do more than apply patches supplied by the vendor, and this will be a very tempting target for any number of malicious people.

About the author

Gerard Creamer is an Internet entrepreneur who owns several Internet based businesses, Paystation (electronic payments), Netspace (system hosting and collocation), and Face (web based system development). He is an active member of the NZ Network Operator's Group. Gerard lives in Wellington with his wife and four children.

Thomas Beagle, spokesperson for Tech Liberty, "We're very disappointed that the filter is now running, it's a sad day for the New Zealand internet."

The DIA refuses to say which other ISPs will be joining the filter, claiming the right to negotiate in secret. Tech Liberty understands that Telstra Clear, Telecom and Vodafone have said they will implement the filter, with Orcon, Slingshot and Natcom saying that they won't.

David Zanetti, technical spokesperson for Tech Liberty, "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 concerned about the expansion of government powers represented by the filter. It establishes the principle that the government can choose to arbitrarily set up a new censorship scheme and choose which material to block, with no reference to existing law. Even worse, the list of what is filtered is kept secret, in direct contrast to the rest of New Zealand's censorship regime where the Chief Censor must publish decisions banning offensive material.

The US government has recently spoken out against government filtering of the internet, with Secretary of State Hilary Clinton saying that "Those who disrupt the free flow of information in our society, or any other, pose a threat to our economy, our government and our civil society." She then said that the US is committed to helping people to circumvent government internet filtering.

About Tech Liberty

Tech Liberty is dedicated to protecting people’s rights in the areas of the Internet and technology. We make submissions on public policy, help to educate people about their rights, and defend those whose rights are being infringed.

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Internet filtering frequently asked questions and answers - http://techliberty.org.nz/issues/internet-filtering/filtering-faq/

Why we oppose internet filtering - http://techliberty.org.nz/why-we-oppose-internet-filtering/