Who watches the watchers?

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" The question has been asked since more than 2,000 years and translates to "Who will guard the guards?" In developed democracies the risk of abusing military power is rather low; people would not accept it and it's questionable if the army would fire on their own people. The means are more subtle nowadays and an overhauled translation is more appropriate: "Who watches the watchers?"

The threats to democratic states and societies are no longer foreign armies (except maybe for India and Israel and despite Cold War rhetoric during last year's conflict between Russia and Georgia) but terrorism and organized crime. In the last years they often had to serve as reason for undermining civil rights, e.g. with the USA PATRIOT Act.

In the latest installment German government or more exact federal police Bundeskriminalamt BKA signed contracts (German) with major internet service providers to block access to child porn sites, the law is still due. Nobody reasonable will argue against fighting child pornography, but what is currently discussed is more than questionable. There are 3 major points of criticism: relevance, effectiveness, appropriateness.

Relevance

A special investigator of Lower Saxony's state police says (German) the internet is used for communication, but commercial distribution happens via classic mail. Only later on material is distributed via P2P or Usenet - for free. So it will hardly prevent any production of child pornography since it does not dry out the cash flow.

Effectiveness

Different techniques are possible: manipulating DNS, filtering by IP or filtering by URL. The first one seems to be the means of choice - and is totally pointless. Scandinavian countries are using DNS manipulation. Minister of Family Affairs Ursula von der Leyen, who is actually pursuing the access blocking, claims 50,000 clicks are prevented (German) in Sweden every day while the CEO of Verband der deutschen Internetwirtschaft (German Internet Business Association) eco claims that most "clicks" are caused by search engines (German). Both statements can't be proven but the Swedish chief inspector against child pornography and child abuse concludes (German):

Our blocking measures don't help to reduce the production of pornography.

IP filtering can't be bypassed that easily, it needs for example a proxy server. More important is the potential collateral damage: Behind one IP address can be many web sites. URL filtering can also be bypassed via a proxy server, but it does not have the side effects of IP filtering. Checking every URL costs enormous resources though and is not feasible. Therefore the British use a combined approach of IP and URL filtering in their Cleanfeed system to reduce collateral damage and necessary resources - which doesn't always work out as we will see later on.

Appropriateness

An expertise released (both German) by the Research Services (Wissenschaftliche Dienste) of the German parliament Bundestag states that the blockade imperils the freedom of communication as granted by the German constitution. The Minister of Justice Brigitte Zypries expressed concerns (German) about "major constitutional risks" - her ministry was not involved in the process.

The most critical point is the lack of control. It's the BKA compiling the blocking list, it has (obviously) to be kept secret and nobody can control what is on the list. And what happens if the objectionable contents were removed? I'm not suggesting that anybody is trying to introduce censorship since I'm just not a supporter of any conspiracy theory. But the infrastructure for censorship is created and it can be abused in the future with less noble intentions.

To make matters worse police is prosecuting people publishing leaked lists. After WikiLeaks released the lists of Australia, Thailand or Denmark the house of German domain owner was searched (German) for "distributing child pornographic material". Also the house search of - take a breath - a blogger who linked in his blog to another blog which linked WikiLeaks with the lists was ruled to be legal (German)! This example also points to another risk of those lists in case they are published: They help to distribute child pornography by providing link collections. To make it clear: In my opinion that's not a justification to prosecute publishers of those lists but a reason to not create them.

Other side-effects

Related to the lack of control is the question which links get on the list: End of last year Britain's Internet Watch Foundation ruled about the cover of the album Virgin Killer by German band Scorpions:

As with all child sexual abuse reports received by our hotline analysts, the image was assessed according to the UK Sentencing Guidelines Council. The content was considered to be a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18.

The album was released in 1976 (!) and its cover has never been censored in the UK. It also used to be available on Amazon or other sites. After few days IWF rescinded the block. During the block British users could not access the page on the album (but the image by accessing the URL directly) and not modify any Wikipedia page.

The Australian list (of which it wasn't quite clear whether it is a fake or not) contained a dentist's website after it had been hacked, and artistic photographs by Bill Henson. Australian Communication Minister Stephen Conroy admitted they were added to the blacklist in error. But since people make errors who is controlling them?

Another critic is CareChild, a society to fight distribution of child pornography and child abuse, calling the plan of Minister of Family Affairs Ursula von der Leyen "symbolical politics" (German) promoting the distribution rather than fighting it. To prove their point they performed a test (both German) with 20 domains from the Danish list, 17 hosted in the U.S., 1 in England, 1 in the Netherlands and 1 in South Korea and Portugal (all different providers). Within hours 16 domains were switched off, the other 4 were determined to be according to the laws and the operators could provide necessary "record keeping documents", i.e. proving the age of the performers.

Quoting the Chaos Computer Club:

A statistical analysis of filter lists (German) from Switzerland, Denmark, Finland and Sweden revealed that more than 96% of the servers they banned are located in western countries, particularly the USA, Australia, Canada and the Netherlands. It is quite implausible that these servers and their operators cannot be shut down and prosecuted by means of international cooperation by law enforcement authorities. There is clearly a lack of political will here to establish appropriate priorities and to make the necessary resources available.

Both CareChild and CCC conclude that the blocking lists might encourage law enforcement agencies to simply put web sites on those lists rather than actually taking actions against their operators.

So in my humble opinion the blocking lists are not only questionable in pretty much every manner. When potentially illegal content is getting on those lists and nobody is allowed to control them they are also dangerous to the fundamentals of democracy with their lack of oversight. Read: Who watches the watchers? As I wrote I don't suggest anybody wants to introduce censorship. But with this populist acting for the sake of it the infrastructure for censorship is created. I don't want to rely on Plato's noble lie but not even provide the possibility to misuse.

PS: FoeBuD is starting an unfiltered DNS server (German) at 85.214.73.63.

Please tell Microsoft about this problem

If you are a Windows user you probably know this request quite well. No, this post is not yet another Microsoft or Windows bashing (though I switched to Mac OS X lately). It's only about an incident I had last weekend on the Times Square in New York where I really did not expect to see that message:



(I took the picture on Nov 24th 2007, around 4:30 pm.)

When I saw this on one of the big screens I really had to laugh. How embarrassing is this? For Windows and Flash (though I was surprised and impressed that these screens are running on Windows and Flash). It will be (justified) bad press for them though. Everybody sees his prejudices proved on the big screen. But it is especially embarrassing for the advertiser. How many thousands of people are walking over the Times Square on Thanksgiving's Saturday? At least it was incredibly crowded and I was probably not the only one who noticed that.

Killing Music

Do you remember "Copy kills music"? That was a campaign of the German department of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), an umbrella organization "representing the recording industry". In 1999 the campaign tried to prove with a ludicrous reasoning that copying kills music. What they actually meant and even said so in the text is that it endangers the earnings of the recording industry. The consequences read as dramatic as follows: The recording industry will no longer be able to finance risky projects off the mainstream and so the musical landscape will become desolate.

In my opinion it's the recording industry itself or better said its major players that needs to be blamed. Which were the last 5 qualitative albums released by major players? Nobody needs to wonder at the decreasing earnings which is caused mostly by the copying as I admit. But in the meantime you have to pay around 16 to 18 € for any CD in Germany in a shop, Amazon is around 2 € cheaper. And they missed the move to the internet. If there would have a been a platform like iTunes right from the beginning I claim they would have not these problems nowadays. By the way, this is no call to copy music. Just to mention it: I have far more than 400 original audio CDs.

Now it was Elton John who said that the Internet destroys music. At least he refers to the creativity not the money. The internet is supposed to be preventing people from going out and being creative. This results in only 10 fantastic albums per year - while there have been 10 per week in the early 70s. Maybe it's only the taste in music that has changed a lot in the meantime? For sure I don't consider many of those fantastic albums as fantastic as Elton John does. Anyway, he wants to shut down the internet for 5 years and expects better music to arise! And:

Hopefully the next movement in music will tear down the internet.

In my humble opinion both the IFPI and Elton John just don't understand what the internet is about - but on completely different topics. Elton John asks the people to communicate since this results in creativity. I say there is no better communication platform than the internet. Face to face would be better of course but there is not somebody for every interest around.

The IFPI says the internet endangers the recording industry's earnings and so the jobs. I say I don't care. This does not mean I don't care about the affected people - it's simply from an economic point of view. Or in other words: Who cared about the gunsmiths when they got obsolete? Things just change. And yes, I consider the recording industry being obsolete in its current form. I don't need their talent scouts and their marketing for mainstream music. They should only focus on the production and distribution of the actual recordings. Then they would not need to care about copying and to lobby for more restrictive laws. They require to access the internet connection data which internet provider need to store for 6 months in the near future in Europe (for those that like the lengthy German words it's the so called Vorratsdatenspeicherung). Those data were targeted for anti-terrorism investigations and should now be misused for civil law cases. That means I have to relinquish my fundamental right for privacy for a purely monetary interest of another party. In my opinion not even the so called war against terrorism justifies those restrictions of the fundamental rights since their effectiveness is at least questionable. You might remember that the US authorities had actually very many data about the 9/11 terrorists but this could not prevent their attack. But I completely digress ...

Back to the internet killing music in concerns of creativity and earnings. There is already an example that belies both fears: open-source software development. Who claims there is no creativity involved makes him/herself ridiculous. And there are also a lot of successful companies which base their business around open-source development. The secret is that they add value to the simply copyable source code by providing services, training or more trivial things as discs and documentation.

I really can't see why music should be so different from software. So what can the music industry learn from open-source software? How will it look like in the future? Actually we just need to look back before the arising of a music industry. Probably the music itself will get less important from an economic point of view. It's the additional value that will matter in regards of money. People will still buy audio CDs as they do now despite the possibility of just downloading the music. The performances/concerts will also get more important.

First steps have already been done. Most famous example of a successful career started in the internet are for sure the Arctic Monkeys (though I don't like the music). Another band following this example is Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (I really like it a lot). Furthermore the recording industry seems to recognize that any attempt to prevent copying is doomed to fail. (Don't consider Apple and EMI as benefactors, they made it for pure economical reasons.) I guess this change of view started with the huge disaster of Sony BMG's DRM based on a rootkit. Now only others need to follow and listen to their customers instead of fighting them.

I might conclude with a slightly modified version of the quote of Elton John:

Hopefully the next movement in music will tear down the music industry.

But since I need them for getting my audio CDs I guess it's more appropriate to conclude with a quote of one of their managers named Irving Azoff. Unfortunately I found this quote only used by somebody else as conclusion of a preview of the music industry in 2010 and have no idea in which context Irving Azoff used it originallybut here it goes:

When all the changes are done there will be still music.

Update: Universal joined the party

The Univeral Music Group has announced to sell some of their music without DRM - at least for the time being. And Amazon followed short after EMI what I missed at that time.