Independent Reference Group Briefing - December 2013

Digital Child Exploitation Filtering System

Independent Reference Group Briefing December 2013

View this information as a PDF (100KB)*

Network flow

Report

At the time of writing this report the access attempts reported by the system is over 38 million^*.

There has been a noticeable increase since the similar period last year. Since the last report, 17 appeals have been received from users who were attempting to access a blocked URL. This is a decrease of 29 on the same period in the previous year. In all instances the appeals were processed by the review team and found to contain child abuse material thus the site remained on the list. Below are examples of the text that was contained in some of the appeals

• Fora wank
• no kids in this house..... its save to use any sites......
• i m adult.
• i like it

*This number is not related to unique users or unique requests, rather the total amount of requests filtered during the particular period. For example 1 user could be responsible for a large number of filtered requests in 1 day and accessing a gallery page with links to multiple blocked sites will result in several filtered requests being recorded. Additionally this number also includes requests as a result of website pop-ups, pop-unders and spam content that a user may not be aware of.

Continuing on from the previous reports we compared statistical data of the period November 2012 – December 2012 and November 2013 - December 2013 and noticed a decrease in mobile device use, this includes tablet device.

System Maintenance

This quarter we began the upgrading of the system following the upcoming expiration of hardware warranties, all service providers are being notified and it is planned as a staggered rollout.

System Health

The system is currently filtering 2.5 million ISP clients, based on numbers supplied to the unit from the providers connected.

At present we are using approximately 1% of the resources being the filter system itself and processing 1GB+ of traffic per day.

System Updates

With the rollout of the new hardware we are planning to update the system software provided by Netclean. This will be completed in a staggered rollout as with the hardware rollout to ensure our support systems are updated in parallel.

Planned Information Updates

We have asked the mental health providers to provide us with information on the amount of click throughs as a result of the informational on the landing page, this is ongoing and we are hoping to get this by the next meeting.

We are establishing a more comprehensive FAQ system to enable people to find information about the filter system for New Zealand, this will be built under the domain whatis.dce.net.nz and will include all the public whitepapers as well as more interactive information this should be available by July 2013

Filter Statistics to Date

Number of Providers:	9
Number of ISP clients filtered:	2 2.5 million
Requests Blocked:	38 million (+7m)
Filter List Size:	585
Entries Added Since last Quarter:	2
Entries Removed:	0
Unique Sites:	477 (+2)
Sites containing drawings only (CGI or Hentai):	20
Traffic:	1GB - 1.5 GB p/d
Appeals:	17