The Australian Maginot Line - because it worked great last time

Peter Thrush of ICANN recently commented that the Australian Internet Filter proposal is akin to the Maginot Line of WWII French fame. We all know how well that worked.

This is a surprisingly good analogy. The Maginot line presumed that the attacker would do what was expected of them, and wouldn't take the defenses into consideration when planning what they were doing. In much the same way, the Australian internet filter presumes that if it blocks what people do now, they won't change their behavior to circumvent the blocking with trivially available tools and techniques like encryption, tunneling, outside proxies, etc.

We already know that's an invalid assumption - not only is it rather contrary to general human nature, but it's being seen over and over in China with the Great Firewall. This despite the fact that China's Great Firewall is much more restrictive than Australia's is ever likely to be even under the most moralistic, conservative, idiotic government. Let's not forget, also, that in China it can be unhealthy to circumvent blocks that prevent you from accessing or posting information that's not meant to get around ... something I don't see becoming the case here.

So - in much more hostile circumstances, people still just waltz through the Great Firewall. Heck, I've done it myself - I had a workmate in China who needed unfiltered access, and it was the work of a few seconds to help him set up an encrypted SSH tunnel to a proxy on work's servers from which he could get to whatever websites he liked and do so undetectably. It's not even possible to tell that the encrypted data is web browsing data rather than something else.

Once again, it's clear that the only way the internet filter can work is if it's a whitelist. If a site isn't approved, you can't access it. If a protocol can't be inspected and content-filtered, it's blocked. No encryption of any sort may be used. Even that's imperfect due to cracking of whitelisted sites and use of them for proxies, etc.

It's a dumb idea. Why are we still wasting time and taxpayer money on such blithering idiocy?