Friday, 10 February 2012

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Interpol defends voluntary filter

The list, currently in use or on its way to being used by Optus, Telstra and Vodafone, has been seen by some as ineffective due to the ability of child abusers to easily circumvent it, and because it's a preventative measure, not a cure that would see creators of child-abuse material arrested.
However, in an interview with ZDNet Australia at the Kaspersky Lab Cyber Conference 2012 in Cancun, Mexico, Moran said that this criticism only really applies if the filter list is the only measure. He acknowledged its limitations, but stated that the stop page presented when access is blocked is an important tool in Interpol's arsenal against child abuse.
"What it is, essentially, is a prevention tool. Of course it's easy to go around ... but that's not the point. It's not a silver bullet ...It's like a speed camera on a road — you can slow down when you come up to the speed camera, and you can speed up when you've driven past ... but the reality is that it's reminded you that what you're doing is illegal.
"To suggest that blocking the internet or filtering ... is our only answer is wrong. It's also very important to realise that the vast majority of this 'trade' doesn't happen on the web. It happens in off-web services — IRC, newsgroups, peer to peer; I could go on and on and on. That's where we do our big work."
One of the newer tools that Interpol is using as part of this work is an emerging policing discipline that it calls victim identification.
"Material that is found on the internet is analysed in real time by analysts around the world sharing through the ICSE [International Child Sexual Exploitation] database in Interpol."
In a recent case in Massachusetts, US, an image was distributed through the ICSE database, analysed and determined to be a Dutch child, and the victim was subsequently identified. From this information, local law enforcement was able to track the perpetrator down, who was found to be running a child-care centre and abusing 84 victims in total.
"If the system didn't exist at Interpol, and if the Dutch victim-identification officer wasn't doing her job, that man would still be abusing children," Moran said.
"That type of scenario has happened many times from Australia, where material found in Australia is fed into our systems."
Moran stressed that the ability to track victims greatly assisted in leading law enforcement to the perpetrator.
"Don't forget that 86 per cent plus of child sexual abuse takes place within the home, so if you find the victim, you find the perpetrator."
Moran also addressed criticism that there is a perceived lack of transparency with the Interpol filtering list, as it is difficult to determine what destinations have made their way onto it.
"If you feel that the site has been badly blocked for whatever reason, click that link [on the stop page] and make a complaint, and it will be answered," he said.
At the moment, complaints are handled either by Interpol or via the Australian Federal Police (AFP), but Moran clarified that the AFP has the ability to veto the content of the list.
"We're not some super-national police force that makes decisions for national countries. We make the list available to the national central bureau, which is run by the AFP, and the AFP are the ones who push it on out. The AFP themselves can go through the list and verify that all of this content is justifiable."
Even if the AFP was unwilling or unable to put the resources in place to check the list, Moran said that Interpol would still open the list to scrutiny, so long as the investigating party was from a government agency or similar.
"The list is not public for a very good reason. We would welcome independent verification if somebody wants to come in and look at what we put on the list," he said.
Michael Lee @'ZDNet'

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Michel Houellebecq, The Art of Fiction No. 206 (Paris Review)

“Do you like the Stooges?” Michel Houellebecq asked me on the second day of our interview. He put down his electric cigarette (it glowed red when he inhaled, producing steam instead of smoke) and rose slowly from his futon couch. “Iggy Pop wrote some songs based on my novel The Possibility of an Island,” he offered. “He told me it’s the only book he has liked in the last ten years.” France’s most famous living writer flipped open his MacBook and the gravelly voice of the punk legend filled the kitchenette, chanting: “It’s nice to be dead.”
Michel Houellebecq was born on the French island of La Réunion, near Madagascar, in 1958. As his official Web site states, his bohemian parents, an anesthesiologist and a mountain guide, “soon lost all interest in his existence.” He has no pictures of himself as a child. After a brief stay with his maternal grandparents in Algeria, he was raised from the age of six by his paternal grandmother in northern France. After a period of unemployment and depression, which led to several stays in psychiatric units, Houellebecq found a job working tech support at the French National Assembly. (The members of parliament were “very sweet,” he says.)
A poet since his university days, he wrote a well-regarded study of the American science-fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft in 1991. At the age of thirty-six, he published his first novel, Whatever (1994), about the crushingly boring lives of two computer programmers. The novel attracted a cult following and inspired a group of fans to start Perpendiculaire, a magazine based on a movement they called “depressionism.” (Houellebecq, who accepted an honorary place on the masthead, says he “didn’t really understand their theory and, frankly, didn’t care.”) His next novel, The Elementary Particles (1998), a mixture of social commentary and blunt descriptions of sex, sold three hundred thousand copies in France and made him an international star. So began the still fierce debate over whether Houellebecq should be hailed as a brilliant realist in the great tradition of Balzac or dismissed as an irresponsible nihilist. (One flummoxed New York Times reviewer called the novel “a deeply repugnant read.” Another described it as “lurch[ing] unpleasantly between the salacious and the psychotic.”) The Perpendiculaire staff was offended by what they saw as his reactionary denunciation of the sexual-liberation movement and booted him from the magazine.
Several years later, his mother, who felt she had been unfairly presented in certain autobiographical passages of the novel, published a four-hundred-page memoir. For the first and last time in his public life, Houellebecq received widespread sympathy from the French press, who were forced to concede that even the harsh portrait of the hippie mother in The Elementary Particles didn’t do justice to the self-involved character that emerged from her autobiography. During her book tour, she famously asked, “Who hasn’t called their son a sorry little prick?”...
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