Freegate: A defence against the pending censorship of Australia?

Authors

C Bolan, Edith Cowan University
P Hannay, Edith Cowan University

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Keywords

Censorship, Content Filtering, Encryption, Freegate

Publisher

University of Plymouth

Faculty

Faculty of Computing, Health and Science

School

School of Computer and Security Science / Centre for Security Research

RAS ID

9316

Comments

Bolan, C., & Hannay, P. (2009). Freegate: A Defence against the Pending Censorship of Australia?. In HAISA (pp. 133-140). Available here

Abstract

The commencement of a trial of Internet Service Provider (ISP) level content filtering as a precursor to nation-wide mandatory content filters in Australia has generated a large amount of publicity. Despite remaining low on details, figures released show that the laboratory testing of the filtering solutions caused significant slow-down in Internet speeds as well as the unintentional censorship of allowable content. This paper investigates the currently available information on the trials and provides evidence that a freely available privacy tool such as Freegate could be used to bypass all of the likely filtering methods.