submission, suppression

Submission (oral): Suppression in Criminal Reform Bill

Text of Tech Liberty’s oral submission to the Justice and Electoral Select Committee concerning name suppression in the Criminal Procedure (Reform and Modernisation) Bill. (See our earlier articles.)

I represent Tech Liberty, we’re a group dedicated to defending civil liberties in the digital age.

Our submission concentrates on the issues around suppression. It’s split into two parts, starting with some general comments about suppression in the Internet age, followed by a discussion of some of the difficulties with making internet service providers liable for the actions of their users.

General Points

As a civil liberties group, we wish to start by reiterating our support for open justice whenever possible. We believe that the overuse of suppression weakens our justice system and therefore we support the bill’s measures to reduce the availability of suppression. We’re also pleased to see better guidelines about when suppression is appropriate and how it is to be applied.

However, we’re concerned that we’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, that suppression is rapidly going to get so hard to enforce that we’re going to have to give up on it – whether we want to or not. This because our ability to store and access information is changing so rapidly.
Continue reading Submission (oral): Suppression in Criminal Reform Bill →

article, copyright, suppression

Taking down websites you don’t agree with

17 Comments

This is a post about the tactics used to take down a New Zealand website hosted in the the USA and what they mean for the Internet. (Update post.)

The website

Soon after the Christchurch quake, a website (christchurchquake.net) was published that said the quake was God’s punishment for Christchurch’s tolerance of homosexuality, with God being especially annoyed by Gay Ski Week. The website also made a number of other very odd claims concerning a conspiracy of “Phoenician-descended swamp lesbians” headed by Helen Clark that had taken over New Zealand.

The takedown

The site is no longer available (Google cache here). This is because a number of people found the site highly offensive, and some of them decided that they would do what they could to get the site taken off the Internet.

The author of the site could not be identified so most action was aimed at getting Bluehost, a company based in the US state of Utah, to take it down. Two main tactics were employed:
Continue reading Taking down websites you don’t agree with →

filtering

Is this what the DIA filter looks like?

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What we’re seeing

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.

submission, suppression

Submission: Suppression in Criminal Reform Bill

Tech Liberty has made a submission to the Justice and Electoral Committee about the Criminal Procedure (Reform and Modernisation) Bill. (See our earlier articles.)

In this we argue that:

  • We are strong supporters of open justice and believe that overuse of suppression risks weakening our justice system. We recommend that discretion around suppression should be tightened and that most suppression orders should be for a limited time.
  • There are tremendous difficulties with defining “identifying information”, particularly when multiple sources may each have a separate piece of information that combine to break suppression.
  • That the nature of “publication” is changing as our personal communications are now conducted in public (Twitter, Facebook). We recommend the offence should be changed to punish those who deliberately breach suppression orders.
  • The nature of the “media” is changing as the Internet has allowed everyone the ability to publish, and that the law should not try to define a privileged class of media. We recommend removing the special standing for traditional news media.
  • That it is unjust to make ISPs responsible for the actions of their customers, and that doing so will lead to false claims. Furthermore that the definition of ISP is unreasonable in that it defines any person who runs a website as an ISP.
  • That ISP-based suppression is technically impractical as ISPs often will not have access to individual pages and would therefore often have to take down the entire website or even a server with multiple sites.
  • We recommend that clause 216 making ISPs liable should be removed in its entirety.

Download the full submission (PDF).

suppression

Remove ISP Liability from the Criminal Procedure Reform Bill

7 Comments

The attempt to make ISPs (Internet Service Providers) criminally liable for their users’ breach of name suppression orders is unjust and unworkable.

The Criminal Procedure (Reform and Minimisation) Bill is an omnibus bill that makes significant changes to the New Zealand criminal justice system. In its attempt to reform and streamline, it weakens the right to a jury trial, takes away the right to silence and forces defendants to help the Police make the case against them.

It also changes the law around name suppression. While we support the attempt to make name suppression harder to get, we have serious concerns about the attempt to make ISPs liable for breaches of name suppression online. Read section 216 of the proposed law and then consider some of these questions:
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copyright, guest article

Letter to Simon Power About Copyright Infringement

Tech Liberty was a co-signer on this letter to Simon Power about the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill.

The three main areas covered by the letter and briefing are:

  • Avoiding the possible reversal of burden of proof when people are accused of infringement (section 122MA).
  • Account holder liability for shared internet connections when the account holder would have no way of controlling the users of the connection.
  • Mechanism for activating the suspended “account suspension” provisions.

See our other articles about copyright issues in general and this law in particular.

ACTA, copyright, media release, TPP

Media Release: What, more secret treaty negotiations to change NZ’s copyright laws?

The fourth round of negotiations for the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) starts in Auckland today. Nine countries are meeting to develop a free trade agreement covering a wide range of goods, but it looks as though the copyright maximalists are using it as an excuse to push their extremist position yet again.

The leaked New Zealand position paper clearly indicates that some participants are trying to push a “TRIPS Plus” agenda – an extension of the internationally agreed provisions in the WTO’s TRIPS agreement. This agenda, as seen in the South Korean and Australian free trade agreements with the USA, typically includes “three strikes and you’re out” Internet infringement laws, punitive minimum damages for copyright infringement, and would also limit access to currently available generic medicines.

Thomas Beagle, Tech Liberty, “New Zealand has already dodged the bullet of “guilt upon accusation” when section 92A of the Copyright Act was overturned, and then again when public pressure fixed the intellectual property provisions in the ACTA treaty. It looks as if the TPP is yet another attempt to push laws that sacrifice civil liberties for media and pharmaceutical company profits.”

Transparency in Treaty Negotiation

The TPP negotiations are being held in secret with citizens of the countries involved not allowed to know what their governments are saying. The traditional model for negotiating trade treaties means that the citizens of the countries concerned only get to see the text of the treaty after it’s finalised, making any public consultation a sham.

Just like with ACTA, information is escaping and NZ’s position paper on intellectual property has been leaked. It shows that the New Zealand government opposes a further extension of intellectual property rights saying that the economic arguments to do so are weak.

David Zanetti, Tech Liberty, “We’re disappointed that we’re reduced to finding the NZ government’s position through document leaks. Why can’t these position papers be published for everyone to see? It’s not like they’re secret from the other negotiating countries.”

Tech Liberty believes that the TPP and other similar treaties should be negotiated in public in the same way that UN treaties are. While countries can keep their negotiating bottom lines private, the papers and drafts should be published for others to see. ACTA was originally going to be a secret negotiation but it was leaked – and we ended up with a better treaty as a result. See our full article.

Thomas Beagle, Tech Liberty, “Openness and transparency helped fix the ACTA treaty, we believe that negotiating in the open would improve TPP too. People have a right to be consulted and for that consultation to be meaningful it has to happen before the text is finalised, not afterwards.”

References

Tech Liberty article calling for transparency in negotiating the TPP: https://techliberty.org.nz/acta-vs-tpp-the-case-for-transparency-in-international-treaty-negotiations/

Articles about leaked NZ position paper on IP provisions (includes links): http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1012/S00046/leaked-paper-nz-us-rift-on-intellectual-property-in-tppa.htm

Link to NZ position paper (PDF): http://www.citizen.org/documents/NZleakedIPpaper-1.pdf

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.