Analysis of the Government's technical testing framework for the upcoming censorship pilot

The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) has published a paper outlining the technical testing framework for the upcoming live trials of its ISP-level censorship scheme.

The purpose of the test is to see how various filtering products and schemes work when given URLs to censor in a live ISP driven situation, using the ACMA blacklist of URLs as a minimum list. It also provides the option for ISPs to test the proposed second tier filter on their networks. The document does not provide any details or guidelines as to how this second tier filter should be configured or what it should be filtering.

The tests are voluntary, and require ISPs to choose a commercially available hardware filter from an internet content filter (ICF) vendor and add it to their networks. They will then load their chosen filter with the ACMA's blacklist that comprises the first tier of mandatory blocking.