Inside Internet Filtering

One element that the ACMA ISP-Level Filtering Report touched on, was the different circumvention possibilities between PC and ISP based Internet Filtering solutions.  It presented a table of possible work-arounds to both systems, indicating a high, moderate, or low level of possibility to circumvention.

After looking at this table, you are left with the impression that ISP level filtering is nearly bullet proof.  This is not the case though.  They didn’t include in the table at least two methods that I am aware of for bypassing an ISP level Internet filter, and there are possibly more depending on the particular ISP’s deployment model.

It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to go into details about how to circumvent ISP level Internet filters here. But I will say that for at least one of the methods a PC based filter is actually able to filter when an ISP level filter would not.