Internet censorship is a hot topic nowadays, even here in the Netherlands. A lot is written about the Dutch government trying to reduce the accessibility and distribution of child pornography over the Internet, which is in general a good thing. A bad thing, on the contrary, is the way in which they try to do that, knowing about the Great Firewall of China.

I, as a curious Dutch citizen want to test what my government is doing to my Internet accessibility, after hearing rumors of blocks being applied. And to be very honest, I am also interested in the technical solution.
So, where do you start if you want to test this? Well, not with a Dutch government site where the magic black list is hosted of course, but by just reading slashdot.org that links you (indirectly) to wikileaks.org where a list of pages blocked by the Danish government was posted:
https://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/Denmark:_3863_sites_on_censorship_list%2C_Feb_2008
Gosh, I wonder if this list might point me to some sites that are blocked in the Netherlands as well…

So, I started looking up url’s in the list at random. Most of them appear to be bogus sites, captured by domain hijackers and filled with total nonsense. But after 10 clicks or so, I found a website that was blocked: www dot am using – ki ds dot com. When opening this site via Dutch ISP UPC, I find the page to be on the Dutch black list, resulting in a “STOP” warning, as you can see here:

(the page doesn’t look very professional, which shows similarities to the technical solution that is used to block websites)

A remarkable thing is, that when I make a request for the site via dutch ISP XS4ALL, (I happen to have two Internet connections at my disposal) the site isn’t blocked at all. I know XS4ALL criticizes the way this filtering is implemented, but not blocking access to the site…
Well, it could be that they just have a more recent version of the black list already, who knows. But still, I’m curious whether other Dutch ISP’s like Tiscali, Planet, KPN and even SurfNet (a provider for educational and research facilities) block this site and others do not…
Update: I found out the blocking is an ongoing experiment in which UPC participates.

Above all of this, I very much agree child porn should be stopped because it harms children, but not by bringing down the Freedom of Speech and the Internet, while not solving the underlying problem at all. If there has to be a black list for the common Internet surfer (by that I mean that it helps against the creation and distribution of child pornography), then so be it.
But why can’t it be an open list, a list that is verifiable by everyone on the world, and a list that is used only for blocking what is considered real child pornography hosted on servers that cannot be taken down otherwise (because the server is located in a country where the Dutch government has no jurisdiction). The list should not be abused for blocking anything else but child pornography.

This obvious risk here is that the owner of the list might abuse it for blocking content that is unrelated to child pornography, but for example (seemingly) illegal content (warez) or blog posts with undesirable political content.

The problem with child pornography is way bigger then the Internet. Censoring the Internet in the current way it is done is not really going to do any good against child abusers. So why spend taxes on this solution that is probably not solving anything? Wouldn’t it be more effective to try and find the people creating and distributing the CP?

Access to whatever material cannot be blocked unless you apply strategies like described in Orwell’s 1984, where you have total control over people, where in this case you apply total control over the way in which the Internet can be accessed. The nature of the Internet makes this practically impossible without severely limiting ones freedom on the Internet, thus block a few sites by poisoning the ISP’s DNS server, like is currently done, is not going to work.

Governments should invest in catching the sick people creating and distributing the CP. As I see it, that is not done by obfuscating DNS request. IMHO the collateral damage violates the privacy and freedom of the common Internet user.

If you want to view the Dutch “STOP” website, you can just visit it:
http://212.142.48.139 (please note the stop sign, it animates, so cool)