I agree with everything you say. I expect that Sen Conroy knows that everything you say is correct. What, then are his motives?

To win an argument, you need to consider not only what he says, but what are his goals? As an example, can his goals be achieved by a superior approach, or must his goals be replaced by alternative means? And, can that be done? Or, should his goals, as well as his approach be scrapped?

Robert

Recent findings now prove that pedophiles can exploit virus-ridden computers to view child pornography without the fear of getting caught. In fact, pranksters can use the virus to download hundreds of illegal child porn images and videos onto an infected computer.

Most people who are victims of this virus do not realize they have child porn downloaded on their PC until police officials knock on their door. In fact, journalists from the Associated Press investigated this matter and found cases in which innocent people were labeled as pedophiles after their co-workers or family members found the illegal content on their PCs.

It is extremely difficult and costly for a victim to prove his or her innocence. One case involved a Massachusetts man by the name of Michael Fiola.

His boss became suspicious when he came across Fiola’s internet bill for a state-issued laptop. The bill revealed that Fiola had used 4 1/2 times more data than his colleagues. When a technician took a look at the laptop, he found child porn in the PC folder that stores images viewed online. Officials were immediately contacted and Fiola was arrested.

Fiola and his wife liquidated their savings, took a second mortgage, and sold their car to fight the charges. After spending a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees, Fiola was able to prove his innocence. But the ordeal ruined his life.

According to The Huffington Post:

“An inspection for his defense revealed that the laptop was severely infected. It was programmed to visit as many as 40 child porn sites per minute. While Fiola and his wife were out to dinner one night, someone logged on to the computer and porn flowed in for an hour and a half.”

Prosecutors were able to confirm the findings and dropped charges against Fiola. However, by the time the trial was over, he had most of his friends and his life savings.

“It ruined my life, my wife’s life and my family’s life,” he says.

Although it was beyond difficult for Fiola to prove his innocence, cases like this are not rare. According to security software maker F-Secure Corp. about 20 million of the estimated 1 billion internet-connected PCs worldwide are infected with viruses that could give hackers full control to utilize the computer from a remote location.

Where do these viruses come from? There are some adult porn sites that are saturated with harmful bugs. For instance, if a person downloads images and videos from a legal adult site, he or she may also unknowingly download a virus along with them. Computers are also easily infected when a person opens a suspicious email attachment.

The only real way to protect yourself is to be cautious and avoid opening email attachments that seem suspicious. Another good strategy is to have updated anti-virus software on your computer. Also, avid porn consumers should not depend on the internet for their racy content. Take a trip to your local sex shop and purchase a DVD or magazine! It beats taking a risk that can ruin your reputation and your life.

Sometimes these invasive programs convince the protective software that they are “permitted”, and sometimes they disable the protective software.

An example is the Play Sushi software which infects computers, and
installs regenerative software, and also escapes protective software sweeps, and requires manual effort and “insider” knowledge to dislodge.

A basic problem with any filter is that the rogue sites can change their parameters, including urls, faster than the filter lists can be updated. The best defence against this is to configure your computer to only receive traffic from specified urls and email addresses, or even only specified Media Access Control (M,A.C.) addresses. Most general purpose users would find these limitations too constricting.

As I said above, I am not aware of where these sites are hosted (I accept you obviously have better info), so to some extent I assumed that any sites that COULD have been easily removed WOULD have been easily removed. If you are right and that is not the case, WHY is it not the case, presuming most law enforcement officers are pretty keen to crack down on pedophilia?

I still believe that publishing the list is worse than leaking it, because I think more people will see a published list than a leaked one (I note from some of your published letters that you may not agree), so ultimately I feel it will lead to more accesses to the criminal sites, and ultimately more demand and therefore supply of pedophilia. In addition, published lists encourage other national governments to assume that publishing lists is a good idea, which exacerbates the problem.

However, lest it get lost in the wash, let me make it clear I think ANY internet censorship list is a foolish and unworkable idea … I posted to this discussion to point out that publishing is not the solution some people think it is, even were the government to countenance it.

it has been shown what a joke the “study” done by Conroys office was. He states it is 100% effective, but then doesn’t define what effective is. The technical limitations/hurdles of a filter still exist. Additionally his statement on it only slowing down things by “2 tenth of the blinks of an eye” are idiotic at best (is that his technical terminology?)

Whether the govenrment has “deniability” goes back to whether or not it’s credible. Whether kiddyporn URL is leaked or published by the government makes no difference at all to the abused child. By arguing that leaking is different to publication you appear to be making a statement about the superiority of spin over substance (which, I’m certain, is what underlies the Government’s entire proposal right about now).

As for “countries where law enforcement is not up to the job”: Poppycock. The Danish and Norwegian lists have been exhaustively examined, and almost all of the URLs on them were hosted in Western Europe and the USA. The problem here is that the INHOPE system used for reporting URLs to blacklisting agencies is so mired in its own bureaucracy that it effectively isolates the blacklist maintenance process from law enforcement.

i.e., reporting a URL to ACMA makes it less likely that it’ll be actioned than, say, picking up the phone and calling the police in the country hosting the URL, or the webhost itself. Why doesn’t ACMA make that phone call? Because it’s following INHOPE processes instead, and INHOPE processes instruct it to do otherwise.

I’m quite confident that you could go to literally any ISP or web hosting company on the planet and say, “I’m not sure if you’re aware, but you have child abuse content at this URL…” and they’d nuke it in a New York minute. Saying that law enforcement isn’t up to the job is a bureaucratic copout which is only entertained by unimaginative dolts who can’t think outside the box enough to work differently to the status quo, and anyone interested in this debate should be made angry every time they hear it.

The USA tried to ban the making, distribution, and use of alcohol, but gave up as the ban was much worse than regulating it.

The USA currently bans growing, possession, and use of marijuana, but it is legal in some states. (How that works is interesting).

The USA kept some of its most sensitive secrets: the detailed design of strategic and tactical thermonuclear weapons under ARMED GUARD, with access restricted to a very limited number of US citizens (NOFORN Caveat), and it is now known that the Chinese government has full knowledge of this material.

The message is that restriction of interesting information and materials is difficult.

However user computers in homes, libraries. and businesses can be successfully blocked if they are kept under supervision. The government could provide a service to (automatically) update the list are available today, eg from Microsoft. But, the list won’t be secret for long.

Robert

Perhaps I should state what I actually WANT in this filtering idea. I want:
- Access to criminal websites tracked and reported to the police.
- No publishing of criminal websites
- No slowdown of access to NON-criminal websites.
- No tracking of access to NON-criminal websites.
- Users given the opportunity to filter their own content.
- Minimised cost of implementation.

The above points can all be delivered; and in fact, the cost mentioned in the last point is zero. Because the above is what we currently already have (users can get filtering by using a filtering ISP like WebShield), and it can be implemented by the Labor party simply dropping Stephen Conroy’s massively unpopular internet censorship scheme entirely.