Still wary about Project Cleanfeed Canada
Project Cleanfeed Canada sets out to emulate Project Cleanfeed in the UK. The idea is to stop the viewing of child porn at the ISP level. There’s not much confirmed information available besides that.
The CTV story coupled with footwork by Michael Geist gleans a little bit of information. It does leave me with a few more questions.
- Who is going to set the blocking strategies? Individual ISPs? It’s rumoured that image recognition will be used (see quotations and link below). I hope that ISPs will stick to that rather than blocking by IP. The last time a Canadian ISP tried that at least 766 unrelated websites were taken down while attempting to block a single site.
- Will this affect retail customers of these ISPs only? Telus provides a backbone to many ISPs and the last time they filtered something they did it at the backbone level.
- What will happen to the blocking records?
- Can the appeals process be started by Canadians or only site owners?
- Will the blocked sites appear to be a 404 file not found error like in the UK? How will sites know they’re blocked?
The Cleanfeed Canada launch is still weeks off at the very least. If these questions aren’t answered in the next press release it’s time to write a letter.
I’ll close with some more information dug up by Dr. Geist but not publicly released by Cybertip. These snippets are from Michael and hidden in the comments of his summary of his “risk worth taking” article.
1. Project Cleanfeed is not yet operating. My understanding is that they plan to go live early next year. I absolutely agree with those that argue that Cybertip must post all of this information. In a follow-up discussion with them, I understand that to be their plan.
2. Judicial oversight will occur before the project is launched.
3. Posting a raw number of sites blocked will publicly identify the growth of the list that should provide some sense of the scope of the program.
4. Blocking technologies do not block at the IP level, but are far more sophisticated, with potential blocking at the image level. That will significantly reduce collateral damage.
Update: More details have been released recently.
