Whoops ! The French administration got tangled up this weekend by massively blocking for several hours the addresses in “t.me” referring to content published on Telegram messaging. As several Internet users have noted, clicks on this type of link led to a page of the Ministry of the Interior. The redirection was then wrongly justified because of an attempt to connect “to a site containing images of child pornography”.
Block request “wider than necessary”
According to a spokesperson for the National Police, interviewed by Le Monde, this massive blocking of links to Telegram is due to an “individual error”. As the evening daily explains, the French police were indeed seeking to block child pornography sites relayed on this messaging service, after having unsuccessfully ordered the host to withdraw the content.
But instead of preventing access to only child pornography content, the blocking request made by the Pharos platform to internet service providers was “wider than necessary”. Specifically, the blocking request mentioned the URL shortener address “t.me”, which led to the general blocking of all links of this type pointing to the Durov brothers’ email…
392 requests in 2022
As Stéphane Bortzmeyer notes on his blog, this administrative blocking is based on the technique of the lying DNS (Domain Name System) resolver, this directory which matches web addresses and IP addresses. “Instead of faithfully relaying responses from authoritative DNS servers, the resolver lies and sends the address [IP] of the ministry’s web server,” explains the IT specialist.
The police have been able to request this kind of administrative blocking since 2015, a provision provided for in a 2014 anti-terrorist law. This text provided for the blocking, without going through the judge, of access to child pornography content, calling for an act terrorist or advocating terrorism. In 2022, 97% of the 392 administrative blocking requests concerned child pornography content.
This blunder falls badly for the government, which has just presented its new anti-scam filter to the Council of Ministers. This device provides precisely, after warnings to Internet users, the possibility of blocking phishing pages. A progressive procedure, “very well” supervised, supposed to “prevent the phenomena of overblocking”, then specified to the press the ministry of digital transition and telecommunications.