First they came…

… first they blocked the child porn, but i did noth­ing for I am not a pedophile…
… then they blocked the small breasted women, but i did noth­ing for fear of being called a pedophile…
… then they blocked all adult sites, but I did noth­ing as they were “pro­tect­ing the chil­dren”………
…. then they blocked all objec­tion­able writ­ing, but I did noth­ing as it was in the “gen­eral publics best inter­ests”…
…. then they blocked all free music, but I did noth­ing as it might be copy­right infringe­ment….
…. then they blocked my writ­ing, because i was not sanc­tioned by the gov­ern­ment. and no one did any­thing because it was too late…

It has started, we now have un-elected offi­cials decid­ing what we can and can­not see on the inter­net. Except we don’t know what they are fil­ter­ing. They won’t tell us that. The Depart­ment of Inter­nal Affairs calls it fil­ter­ing, suck a nice unob­tru­sive name for C E N S O R S H I P.

But hang on a minute, in the Dirty Doc­tor of Palmer­ston North case a judge said that if the child porn is from over­seas it is not really the same as if it was here in NZ so not that big on the scale of offend­ing. Wel­come to the end of free­dom of expres­sion and the start of Net Cen­sor­ship. Wel­come to the true avbent of the Nanny State. Now they are decid­ing for us, with­out ref­er­ence to us what we can and can­not look at on the internet.

My tol­er­ance for this gov­ern­ment is fast expir­ing, ok it is nearly in need of resus­ci­ta­tion. Now, I’m no kid­die fid­dler or child-porn advo­cate, any­one who knows me knows I despise them. In fact I per­son­ally dobbed a creepy Scout Leader and got him chucked out. He sub­se­quently moved to Auck­land and last I heard was try­ing to become a Teacher. Lovely. But hav­ing a big fil­ter­ing fil­ter­ing god knows what on the inter­net, because they won’t tell us needs to be knocked on the head.

To make mat­ters worse, read this story of how the Iran­ian Gov­ern­ment shut down dis­sent. For all those peo­ple who had a lit­tle green box on their Twit­ter accounts, read this and be afraid.

“Col­lect­ing inter­cep­tion data is a process which takes place in the ‘back­ground’, assur­ing that the inter­cepted tar­get (end user) is never aware of a pos­si­ble inter­cep­tion,” the man­ual describes. “The max­i­mum num­ber of simul­ta­ne­ous active inter­cep­tion ses­sions is 50,000.”

This man­ual has been read by police offi­cers in Tehran. It ended up in my hands through the back door.

“Nokia Law­ful Inter­cep­tion Gate­way”, reads the cover page. This has been rumoured for a long while. Nokia Siemens Net­works has sup­plied Iran with telesur­veil­lance equip­ment, the details of which I have tried to track down since last sum­mer. Now, one of the prod­ucts that NSN sup­plied to Iran has been leaked to Fifi. This sys­tem enables just the type of sur­veil­lance that NSN has denied par­tic­i­pat­ing in.

It looks bad. The pack­age gives users exten­sive power to mon­i­tor cit­i­zen mobile phone as well as mobile inter­net usage.

But it isn’t ille­gal. Sim­i­lar sys­tems mon­i­tor our own telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions. The ques­tion isn’t about Iran, but more broadly about what kind of sur­veil­lance is per­mit­ted – or man­dated – in the net­works we use. Who con­trols them?

So what? I hear you say. Well it just so hap­pens our biggest Mobile player and also a rather large ISP has exactly the same gear as the Iran­ian mobile net­works. I know this because I asked Paul Brislen.

Nokia Law­ful Inter­cep­tion Gate­way (LIG), Has the Government?

So, I sent the arti­cle to Paul Brislen and he con­firms that they have the gear men­tioned in the arti­cle, in fact their entire net­work is pro­vided by Nokia. He thinks it is funny. Well read on;

Nokia Siemens Net­works refused to reveal what they had sold to Iran. “Just this small add-on”, the company’s media rela­tions office replied again and again when I ques­tioned them about it. “I don’t recall its name right now”, said Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Man­ager Riitta Mård. “It has noth­ing to do with inter­net surveillance.”

In fact, at least three sep­a­rate sys­tems were exported to Iran. Nokia built a GSM net­work; the GSM net­work was pro­vided with the LIG sys­tem that I acquired; and the LIG has been upgraded with the “add-on” that Mård described. Mård remem­bers the name of the sys­tem now: Mon­i­tor­ing Cen­tre (PDF). It’s a test plat­form that, accord­ing to Mård, only is only suit­able for mon­i­tor­ing tele­phone calls.

The com­mo­tion caused by the NSN trad­ing with Iran has been mostly about the Mon­i­tor­ing Cen­tre. The actual prob­lem now seems to be the more exten­sive LIG.

And this is where it gets inter­est­ing, even for the ordi­nary West­ern mobile phone user nor­mally untouched by Iran’s polit­i­cal storms. LIG, with its exten­sive mon­i­tor­ing capa­bil­i­ties, or a com­pa­ra­ble sys­tem by a dif­fer­ent man­u­fac­turer, is mon­i­tor­ing all mobile voice and data net­works around the world, includ­ing here in Finland.

And that dear friends is how a gov­ern­ment can shut down dis­sent overnight. Now you know how the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment man­aged to shut-up the free­dom movement.

In fact, it is pre­cisely because of us Euro­peans that these exten­sive mon­i­tor­ing sys­tems first became legal and then manda­tory world­wide. Europe has spear­headed the tran­si­tion from more restricted sur­veil­lance meth­ods to exten­sive sys­tems like the LIG: sys­tems that store all of the target’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions data dur­ing sur­veil­lance for future investigation.

Quis cus­todiet ipsos custodes?

Who indeed? Now do you all see why we need a con­sti­tu­tion like this. This sort of none­sense is why we need the pro­tec­tion of a con­sti­tu­tion espe­cially the First and sec­ond amend­ments. Now watch then imple­ment a more dra­con­ian s92a that that which we think there should be. The hug­ley ironic thing for me is the penal­ties for breach­ing copy­right is 12 times higher than a “seri­ous breach of the foun­da­tion of our law”, that being name sup­pres­sion. Name Sup­pres­sion is just one affront to our rights as cit­i­zens. Lit­tle by lit­tle they are being eroded away.

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Tagged as: censorship • Freedom of Speech • Internet Filtering • Iran