Clean Feed ‘not technically possible’

I caught up with Matt Miller, Juniper Networks’ local systems engineering manager today and we got talking about the federal government’s bizarre proposal to vet Internet traffic coming into Australia.

We shared a common train of thought that it would be technically impossible to “clean feed” Internet traffic because there is so much data to screen and the data is always changing.

Miller said content regulations have been a major reason why Web sites are hosted offshore, outside state jurisdictions.

As for encryption, this is an area where the clean feed also falls over.

“I was in China recently and the ‘great firewall’ was preventing me from accessing Wikipedia content so I used SSL to go through Australia to get it,” Miller said.

That’s not to mention the problems a clean feed would face with file sharing and anonymity networks.

We also agreed that at the end of the day the government shouldn’t attempt to censor content, it’s as simple as that.

The Internet, good or bad, is the last medium of true free speech. Let’s urge the government to keep it that way – without artificial barriers.