Australia's Idiotic War On Porn Returns, This Time Using Facial Recognition

from the this-isn't-going-to-work-out-you-ninnies dept

For years now, governments around the world have attempted to block, filter, or otherwise restrict the public's access to porn. And for just as long those efforts have routinely and repeatedly fallen flat on their face. Whether it's the UK's bungled and incoherent plan to employ age-checks to restrict porn access, or Utah's seemingly endless efforts to fiter porn entirely, history is filled with examples of how trying to thwart porn simply doesn't work. Filters are easy to bypass and tend to cause more problems than they solve. Waging war on porn at scale always ends in wasted money and headaches.

Apparently learning nothing from that time a teenage kid bypassed Australia's $89 million porn filters in a matter of minutes, Australia's back with a new idea to combat porn: restricting access to it via the use of facial recognition technology:

"Under the proposal from the Department of Home Affairs, a computer user’s face would be matched to images from official identity documents. It does not say how the user would submit a facial image at the beginning of each online session."

Obviously the government retaining a massive database of not only citizen facial scans -- but who is or isn't watching porn -- isn't being received well by privacy advocates. A parliamentary committee of the Australian House of Representatives began an inquiry last month fielding feedback on the effectiveness of age verification systems for adult websites and internet gambling. A filing from Australia's Department of Home Affairs championed the idea, suggesting an expansion of the government's existing facial recognition database to restrict access to online porn.

Beyond that, it's pretty clear that nobody can really explain how it will work, which is always a good sign for these types of efforts. And nobody in the Australian government wants to actually own or even talk about the dumb plan:

"The Department of Home Affairs did not respond to questions about the proposal, and the attorney general’s office, when asked to comment on the legal ramifications of the system, directed all questions to Home Affairs."

It's not clear how many times we need to go through this before governments realize that restricting access to internet porn on any meaningful scale is not only impossible given technical countermeasures like proxies or VPNs, it usually results in more problems than it causes -- be that legitimate websites being caught in the filter trap, or collected data being compromised by hackers or used by governments in ways not originally advertised.

In about two years after millions are wasted, Australia will shelve the project and lives will go on, with people worried about illegal underage access to porn doing what they should have done from the start: a little thing called responsible parenting.

Filed Under: australia, facial recognition, internet, moral panic, porn

High-Level DOJ Official Latest Gov't Employee To Be Caught Watching Porn While On The Clock

from the it's-always-those-wankers-up-top,-he-said-literally dept

It's good to know government employees are hard at work. (This statement mainly applies to male employees.)

Throughout the past several years, internal investigations have rooted out a bunch of government employees who are wasting tax dollars by visiting websites and viewing content no doubt strictly prohibited by workplace policies. We're talking porn. Lots of porn. Just incredible amounts of porn consumption.

These apparently non-essential personnel have racked up some amazing porn stats. Some SEC employees were reprimanded (but not fired) for spending up to 98% of their workdays watching porn. An employee at the US Geological Survey's [cough] EROS Center visited 9,000 porn webpages en route to infecting the agency's computer system with malware. An EPA employee spent their work hours compiling a comprehensive library of over 9,000 pornographic images.

It's not just the federal government either. The City of Baltimore's Department of Public Works discovered an employee was spending about half the work week (~20 hours) watching porn on the clock. Over in the UK -- home of the always-impending porn filters -- government employees accessed porn 300,000 times over a 14-month period.

Porn consumption is apparently a government tradition -- one that spans the world and is celebrated by all levels of governing bodies.

Here's yet another data point, emanating from the US Department of Justice. (via NextGov)

The DOJ's Inspector General was tipped to some in-office porn viewing by a high-ranking official. This was no office drone. This was a Deputy Assistant Attorney General. Its investigation confirmed what was suspected: more porn consumption on a government computer.

From the one-page summary [PDF] released by the OIG:

The OIG investigation substantiated the allegation that the then DAAG viewed sexually explicit images on the DAAG’s government computers, in violation of DOJ policy. An OIG forensic examination of two DOJ computers issued to the DAAG determined that the computers contained data regarding numerous sexually explicit website searches, visits to websites hosting sexually explicit videos, sexually explicit search engine terms, and sexually explicit images.

The DAAG then lied about their porn habits. This is a bold move, considering lying to investigators is a criminal offense. Of course, it's only the rarest of government officials who are ever charged with lying to investigators. This one was no exception. The DAAG resigned before the investigation was concluded and no criminal charges were brought.

That's the quality of help we're paying for. They're people who should be held to a higher standard than private sector employees. But they never are. Fireable offenses rarely result in firing. Massive amounts of wasted time result in reprimands, rather than demotions or termination. And yet, we're supposed to act like the government has our best interests in mind when it engages in a tiny bit of oversight. These employees and their enablers are jerking far more than themselves around.

Filed Under: doj, porn, waste

Arizona The Latest To Explore Dumb Porn Filter Law, This Time To Help Fund Trump's Fence

from the filtering-the-naughty-bits dept

For some time now, a man by the name of Chris Sevier has been waging a fairly facts-optional war on porn. Sevier first became famous for trying to marry his computer to protest same sex marriage back in 2016. He also tried to sue Apple after blaming the Cupertino giant for his own past porn addiction, and has gotten into trouble for allegedly stalking country star John Rich and a 17-year-old girl. Sevier has since been a cornerstone of an effort to pass truly awful porn filter legislation in more than 15 states under the disingenuous guise of combating human trafficking.

Dubbed the "Human Trafficking Prevention Act," all of the incarnations of the law would force ISPs to filter pornography and other "patently offensive material." The legislation would then force state residents interested in viewing porn to pony up a one-time $20 "digital access fee" to whitelist the internet's naughty bits for each internet-connected device in the home. The proposal is patently absurd, technically impossible to implement, and yet somehow these bills continue to get further than they ever should across a huge swath of the boob-phobic country.

Once people have realized the ignorant futility (and under-handed sales pitch) of such model legislation, it usually fails to gain any steam in most states. But it's back this week with a decidedly new wrinkle in Arizona, where State Rep. Gail Griffin is pushing Arizona House Bill 2444. HB 2444 would mandate that any Arizona internet user would need to file a request if they want to access porn online, proving they're at least 18 years of age. Porn seekers would then pay a one-time fee of $20 (plus additional fees) to access porn. Of course since this effort (like past efforts) is technically futile, the proposal is going nowhere.

But it's getting some extra attention this week because the bill mandates the creation of something called the "John McCain Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation Prevention Fund," which, if past precedent for these bills holds, likely has less than nothing to actually do with, and was never sanctioned by, the family of John McCain.

That fund, in turn, would go to a number of different causes, including a program designed "to uphold community standards of decency" and develop "programs for victims of sex abuse." But Arizona's incarnation of this dumb law has a small wrinkle in that Griffin is trying to claim this money could also be used to help fund Trump's unnecessary border fence:

"At the top of the list of 10 explicit things the grants can be used for is “build a border wall between Mexico and this state or fund border security." Other grant purposes include mental health services, temporary housing, assisting victims, training, assisting school districts and assisting law enforcement. It is unclear if the McCain family is supportive of the legislation or a fund created in the late senator’s name."

Again though, that funding is never going to happen because this law, like the last fifty times we've covered it, isn't likely to pass. It isn't likely to pass because filtering porn on such a level is arguably impossible, as we've seen every time someone attempts to erect such government-mandated censorship of porn. And it's not going to pass because the folks behind the draft legislation it's based on not only have absolutely no idea how the internet actually works, they consistently misrepresent what the law is supposed to actually do (and fund).

But the real story here isn't the dumb filter, or the Trump wall wrinkle (though both will happily feed the clickbait machine for much of the week). The real story is how successful Sevier has been, despite his very checkered past, at getting more than a dozen state legislatures to mindlessly embrace terrible, unworkable legislation that happily gives a giant middle finger to the Constitution.

Filed Under: arizona, chris sevier, donald trump, filters, gail giffien, human trafficking prevention act, john mccain, porn, porn laws, porn license, wall

Tumblr's New 'No Sex' Rules Show The Problems Of FOSTA And EU Copyright Directive In One Easy Move

from the intermediary-liability-protections-matter dept

As you may have heard by now, on Monday, Tumblr announced that in just a couple weeks it will be banning porn from its platform as part of a change to its rules. Now, of course, Tumblr has every right to run its platform however it sees fit, but it does seem notable that it wasn't all that long ago that Tumblr openly defended the fact that Tumblr hosts a bunch of "Not Safe For Work" content, explaining that they supported free speech, and didn't want to be in the business of carefully determining whether or not something was "artful" photography or just porn.

Of course, that was before Verizon bought Yahoo (which had previously bought Tumblr). And it was before FOSTA became law. As Wired points out, this move to ban all porn comes just weeks after Apple banned the Tumblr app from the App Store over some illegal images (even after Tumblr was alerted and took those images down). It's not hard to see how some execs at Verizon might have looked at all of this as a headache that just isn't worth it -- especially given the potential criminal liability that comes from FOSTA. Remember, a few months back, we noted that a bunch of online trolls were deliberately targeting women they didn't like on various platforms claiming (often without evidence) that they were engaged in prostitution. Many of those targeted used Tumblr. It's not difficult to see how Verizon just decided to rid itself of this whole headache.

But, beyond demonstrating the censorship problems of FOSTA, this move by Tumblr is also doing a bang up job demonstrating why mandatory filters, such as those pushed for in Article 13 in the EU Copyright Directive will be so harmful. Filters are notoriously terrible at accurately taking down only the content they're supposed to take down. Amusingly, one of the key talking points of Article 13 filter defenders is that "well, these platforms do a great job stopping porn, so clearly they can stop infringement." This is wrong on multiple levels, starting with the fact that the determination of what is "infringing" is entirely different from what is "porn." But, more to the point: the porn filters don't work very well at all.

Buzzfeed has a hilarious list of Tumblr posts that have been flagged as being adult content, that clearly... are not. Here are just a few:

Some are even claiming that reblogging Tubmlr's own announcement resulted in flags:

But for examples of flags that are perhaps even more relevant for those of us here on Techdirt, law professor Sarah Burstein, who runs a Tumblr and Twitter feed all about design patents (often highlighting how ridiculous those design patents are) found that a bunch of her design patent images resulted in flags as inappropriate content. I am not kidding:

Believe it or not, those are just a few examples from a much longer list of flagged posts about design patents for apparently violating Tumblr's "porn" filter.

While this is a complete travesty on a variety of levels, it demonstrates the utter futility of believing that filters will work and won't make a huge number of mistakes, pulling down perfectly reasonable content. Those working on laws (especially over in the EU) such as the EU Copyright Directive's Article 13 would do well to actually heed this message.

Filed Under: adult content, article 13, blogs, copyright, filters, fosta, porn, sex
Companies: tumblr, verizon

Employee Watching Porn At Work Infected US Government Agency's Network

from the inside-[hand]job dept

Watching porn at work is a federal government tradition. Federal employees from agencies like the EPA, SEC, and FCC have been caught watching porn enough times, a Congressional rep actually thought a new law was needed to stop it. The bill was redundant. All federal agencies forbid the use of work computers to watch porn but that hasn't stopped these stories from surfacing with disturbing frequency.

At a certain point, porn-watching at work endangers a person's job. At other points before that, it endangers the employer itself. Zack Whittaker of TechCrunch dug up a Dept. of the Interior Inspector General's report [PDF] indicating a porn-watching employee inadvertently tried to the take the agency down from the inside.

A U.S. government network was infected with malware thanks to one employee’s “extensive history” of watching porn on his work computer, investigators have found.

The audit, carried out by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s inspector general, found that a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) network at the EROS Center, a satellite imaging facility in South Dakota, was infected after an unnamed employee visited thousands of porn pages that contained malware, which downloaded to his laptop and “exploited the USGS’ network.” Investigators found that many of the porn images were “subsequently saved to an unauthorized USB device and personal Android cell phone,” which was connected to the employee’s government-issued computer.

The official version -- with redactions -- provides a few more details. Loooooots of porn-watching going on here:

We found that [redacted] knowingly used U.S. Government computer systems to access unauthorized internet web pages. We also found that those unauthorized pages hosted malware. The malware was downloaded to [redacted's] Government laptop, which then exploited the USGS ' network. Our digital forensic examination revealed that- had an extensive history of visiting adult pornography websites. Many of the 9,000 web pages [redacted] visited routed through websites that originated in Russia and contained malware. Our analysis confirmed that many of the pornographic images were subsequently saved to an unauthorized USB device and personal Android cell phone connected to [redacted's] Government-issued computer. We found that [redacted's] personal cell phone was also infected with malware.

Like everywhere else this has happened, the DOI expressly forbids the use of work computers for porn viewing. It also makes employees sign a form stating that they understand what's forbidden and what can happen to them if they violate these policies. It's apparently not much of a deterrent. The report doesn't say what happened to [redacted] -- only that this employee admitted they were familiar with the policies they violated.

DOI also forbids connecting personal devices to work computers. That policy isn't being enforced either, apparently. If the DOI isn't actively monitoring work computers for these two violations, it really can't lay all the blame for the malware infection on its unofficial porn hub. Proactive measures are far more useful than post-infection policy patches.

Filed Under: department of the interior, government, malware, porn

The 'Men Of Notre Dame' Demand A Porn Filter That Won't Work To Keep Them From Watching Porn

from the pron dept

A brief review of the many, many stories we've posted on porn filters should leave you with two undeniable conclusions: porn filters are generally terrible at actually keeping dedicated pornography viewers from watching porn and porn filters are generally fantastic at turning the attempt to block porn into an orgy of collateral damage, typically to do with educational sites. This hasn't stopped many organizations and governments from trying to save all the children and the dignity of all the women by putting these filters in place, of course, but it needs to be repeatedly noted that these attempts are routinely futile.

Rare, however, is the group that demands the porn filter to stop themselves from seeing sex acts. Rarer still is the group that does so in as insulting and sanctimonious a way possible. To see that kind of rare gemstone of silly, you apparently have to travel to Notre Dame, where "the men of Notre Dame" have demanded a porn filter from the school.

Read the whole post, if you can stomach it, but the writer kicks the whole thing off with back to back paragraphs that make it clear it's themselves they want to handcuff here.

As the men of Notre Dame, we request that the University implement a filter to make pornography inaccessible on the Notre Dame Wi-Fi networks. This filter would send the unequivocal message that pornography is an affront to human rights and catastrophic to individuals and relationships. We are calling for this action in order to stand up for the dignity of all people, especially women.

Pornography does not come up often in casual conversation, but its effects are everywhere — even on the campus we call home. A survey conducted in 2013 showed that 63 percent of male Notre Dame students have viewed pornography on the university Wi-Fi network. National studies have demonstrated 64 percent of college men and 18 percent of college women spend time viewing online porn each week. In a given month, 86 percent of men interact with pornography.

A couple items of note here. In back to back paragraphs, "the men of Notre Dame" request the filter, and then cite statistics that indicate nearly two-thirds of "the men of Notre Dame" view pornography on the school's wireless network. If these men, these glorious, upstanding, do-right men, want so badly to stop porn from being viewed on school property, it seems they need only to, you know, fucking stop viewing it. Otherwise, it seems clear that this isn't "the men of Notre Dame" requesting a porn filter, but some small subset of those men attempting to force their desires on other people. There's a word for that, I think.

Secondly, this demand to censor the network comes also with the proclamation that they are not just making it on behalf of the "men of Notre Dame" but the "women of Notre Dame." It's quite a bold statement to declare that the women of the student body are apparently so enfeebled that they need these dudes to speak for them, but, as with the call for censorship itself, what's a little condescending paternalism among academic peers?

From there, the post cites all kinds of half-baked statistics that might be true but probably aren't, along with the kinds of scare tactics typically reserved for congressional hearings on the topic of pornography. But it's when "the men of Notre Dame" attempt to law-splain the validity of their request that apparently they turned lazy.

As the Supreme Court stated in Paris Adult Theatre v. Slayton, “A sensitive, key relationship of human existence, central to family life, community welfare and the development of human personality, can be debased and distorted by crass commercial exploitation of sex.”

That is in fact true. That's what the Supreme Court stated in its 1973 ruling on a court case that allowed lower courts to indeed prohibit pornography from being displayed in a public movie theater, even if that theater was restricted to only consenting adults. Also in that narrow 5-4 ruling was the court drawing a distinct line from a previous case, Stanley v. Georgia, which had to do with restricting home viewing of pornography. In that case, SCOTUS struck down a conviction of a man with porn in his home on First Amendment grounds. It seems clear that Stanley is much more analogous than Paris in this case, given that we're talking about a school campus on which students make their home while classes are in session.

So, to summarize: a group purporting to speak for all of the men of Notre Dame, but which clearly doesn't speak for even a majority of them, requests a porn filter that won't work but will cause collateral damage, while citing a court case that doesn't really help their argument and insisting that they speak for women.

Sheesh, maybe the 'men of Notre Dame' should just stick to watching porn....

Filed Under: censorship, porn, porn filters
Companies: notre dame

Post Valve's 'Hands Off' Games Curation Announcement, Everything Is A Mess

from the shrugging-emoji dept

Back in June we discussed Valve's somewhat odd announcement that it was getting out of the games curation business, and opening its platform to what it said would be far more games. The restrictions on what type of content would now be allowed on the gaming platform was said to mostly be limited only to games that are "trolling" or "illegal." As with all things Valve, this apparent announcement aimed at transparency and making sure developers knew what expectations Valve had for games on Steam mostly achieved the exact opposite, with everyone wondering immediately what qualified as "trolling." Nobody could really agree on where exactly Valve would be drawing the lines on the types of content it would allow. That said, most people, including most of the participants of the podcast we conducted on the topic, essentially agreed that this would chiefly allow more games with sexual content onto the platform.

And, yet, it seems that even that hasn't been true thus far. Kotaku has a post up discussing the many, many sexuality related games that had been disallowed from Steam, but which were gearing up to be included based on the new policy. It seems the policy hasn't opened up the platform to many of them after all.

James Cox was finally feeling optimistic about his game’s chances on Steam. Last year, his horror-inspired exploration of what it’s like to look at porn for the first time, You Must Be 18 or Older to Enter, got booted from Valve’s walled garden, but then, earlier this year, Valve said it was getting rid of all the walls. His game was neither illegal nor a troll job, so it should have fit into Valve’s “allow everything” policy. Months and a rollercoaster of policy changes later, however, and Cox has no idea where his game stands. Its release is on hold indefinitely.

Cox is far from alone in his confusion. In the wake of a fiasco in which Valve apparently erroneously targeted a bunch of previously approved sexy games for removal from Steam, the company said last month that it was holding back games with suggestive content from release while it planned a new suite of filtering tools for the Steam store. These tools, which still are not available, will allow users to decide what kinds of games they see on the store.

In our podcast, I pointed out that this would be a problem. Valve essentially rolled its new policy out before it could be put into place, basically doing things exactly backward. If Valve had developed its filtering tools first and then rolled out the policy, allowing these newly allowed games onto the platform, much of the current confusion wouldn't exist. Instead, it told game makers the good news of the policy prior to them being able to make any use of it. What the hell was the point of that?

And even the policy doesn't seem to be cohesive within Valve itself.

Except that, according to Cox, Valve is still insisting that developers censor games that contain what the company perceives to be objectionable material. He said he spoke with Valve shortly after the company announced its anything-goes policy.

“I asked Valve if I needed to resubmit the game for it to be reinstated or if it would automatically be unbanned once the content control tools were released,” he told Kotaku in an email. “They told me that they still consider the game to be porn and that they can’t sell or distribute porn or content that is illegal.”

Which is leading us right back to a discussion as to what constitutes porn. Which, if you'll recall, is where this all started in the first place, as one person's porn is another's art. Cox's title, for instance, is a horror-type game based on the character's first life experiences with pornography, which is represented in text-based images. Valve told him he had to remove the porn parts of his game, to which he asked if just removing the ASCII art would be enough. It's been over a month and he hasn't had a response.

Meanwhile, other porn-y games are currently on the store. Some visual novel style games, however, are not. In other words, this has become a nightmare for developers, their having no idea what is allowed or not on Steam.

“I as a developer have no idea what the rules even are anymore, how to follow them, and what happens on Steam just seems to change day by day,” said Peter Rasmussen, of visual novel developer Lupiesoft, in an email. “If Valve gave us clear guidelines to follow, then we would, as we much prefer the security to what we have now. My biggest fear is that Valve washes its hands of the entire [visual novel] genre because of a few who are abusing it to pump out cheap achievement games.”

Again, adult-themed visual novels were supposed to be the shoe-in for inclusion after the policy was announced.

Honestly, whatever you think of Steam's new policy, it's clear at this point that it screwed up the rollout. This has become enough of a clusterfuck at this point that I'm not sure how it gets cleaned up, unless Steam decides to impliment the policy now and rollout the filtering features later. And it will be much later, as Valve recently admitted that the filtering tools are still months away.

Filed Under: content moderation, curation, games, porn, steam, trolling, video games, violence
Companies: valve