Internet service providers will soon begin blocking access to hundreds of websites that are on a secret blacklist compiled by the Department of Internal Affairs, but critics say the system lacks transparency.
The department yesterday announced its new Digital Child Exploitation Filtering System, which it said would help fight child sex abuse.
The $150,000 software will be provided free of charge to ISPs in a couple of months and will reroute all site requests to government-owned servers.
The software, called Whitebox, compares users' site requests with a list of banned links. If a match is found, the request is denied.
It will not cover e-mail, file sharing or borderline material.
Internal Affairs secretary Keith Manch said the scheme was voluntary for internet service providers, but Telecom, TelstraClear and Vodafone -- representing over 93 percent of the market -- had all expressed interest in adopting it.
Internal Affairs first trialled the scheme in 2007 and 2008 with some ISPs, but IT Minister Steven Joyce told the National Business Review in March that the Government had no plans to introduce internet filtering technology in New Zealand.
The minister's office yesterday declined to comment.
Critics say the system has been introduced by stealth and lacks accountability.
The department will not disclose the 7000 objectionable websites for fear "inevitably some people would visit them in the interim", effectively facilitating further offending and making the department party to the further exploitation of children.
The blacklist is not compiled by the Censor's office and internet censorship is not covered under the Films, Videos And Publications Classification Act.
Internal Affairs censorship compliance head Steve O'Brien said the blacklist would be personally reviewed by staff each month and would be restricted to paedophilic content only.
But systems administrator and IT blogger Thomas Beagle said the system had been deliberately kept "under the radar" to avoid public debate.
Filtering systems in Australia, Denmark and the UK have been accused of serious flaws, with unexplained blacklistings of straight and gay pornography, Wikipedia articles and small businesses.
Mr Beagle said he favoured providing optional clean feeds for users, but believed governments would be tempted to expand the blacklist in reaction to events.
"No one minds when it's blocking child pornography, but what about when there's a media furore about anorexia and we add the pro-ana (pro-anorexia) sites?
"Okay, that might be harming people - but what about the euthanasia information sites? Or the holocaust deniers? If the blacklist was managed in an open manner people would be able to challenge what was being done to "protect" them, he said.
Internet NZ also questioned the system, saying it could be abused and anything that attempted to redirect internet traffic had the potential to "break" the internet.
"Who makes the decision on what is on the filtered list and who checks anything shouldn't be there?" said Internet NZ chief executive Richard Currey.
Internal Affairs had only spoken to Internet NZ once, and the group had not had the chance to see what its 300 members thought.
"While this filter might stop casual browsing it won't stop hard core offenders, and there are alternatives ways than web browsers to access content." Mr Manch said the system was not a silver bullet but another important tool in fighting the sexual abuse of children.
Anyone trying to access child sex abuse websites would receive a screen message saying the site has been blocked because it was illegal.
However, the department would not log who was trying to look at the images and it would not be used for law enforcement, he said.
The department was trying to stop people accessing the images, rather than trying to catch them.
The department was developing a publicly available code of practice to provide assurance that only targeted website pages containing images of child sexual abuse would be filtered and the privacy of ISP customers was maintained. An independent reference group would also be established to oversee the operation and further information would be provided to Internet NZ, he said.
