As I have indicated in several blog posts, I am working to change the Internet filtering policy to better achieve the policy goals of protecting children through empowering and educating parents. I have spoken before about the two key amendments I am advocating, ie: a) protect in legislation the availability of an unfiltered, open Internet service, and b) require all Internet subscribers to make an active choice as to whether they want an unfiltered, RC filtered or additionally filtered Internet service (with the latter being personally customisable at any time).
Most people have been quite supportive of this approach, but there has been some contention about the second proposed amendment in regards to what the default option should be, should a user not actively select any option. Aka, whether it should be opt-in or opt-out.
My original blog post provided for parents (& all users) to exercise their option by allowing them to actively choose to ‘opt-out’ within a reasonable time frame and if they do not, they will received the filtered service. They can thereafter choose to opt-out at any time. This is ‘OPT-OUT’. This would still allow those with a genuine principled objection, or a business or other concern, to OPT-OUT and receive the open service.
However, it has become clear that the community has a preference for OPT-IN approach, rather than an OPT-OUT compromise.
So this blog post is to signal to the community that I now intend to present both an OPT-IN and OPT-OUT approach to the Labor caucus along with the merits and the level of community support for each when the legislation is brought forward.
From what I can see in the many community discussions happening all over the web, an OPT-IN would attract the endorsement of a wide range of community organisations. I believe the incorporation of the other amendment – the world’s first legislated protection of an unfiltered, open Internet service – would also be strongly supported.
I hope that these amendments would address the primary concerns of the community and would act to strengthen the ability to achieve the primary goals of the policy by empowering parents to make the best choice for children in their care.
Previous blog posts:
- My thoughts on the Safer Internet Group statement – 16th February 2010
- Q and A from my thoughts on the internet filter – 2nd February 2010
- Further thoughts on the filter – 21st December 2009
- My thoughts on the Filter – 17th December 2009
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Okay, just so we’re on the same page: I understand that I’m addressing someone who thinks a win is to pursue a modified version of the party policy, rather than abandon it like everyone is saying you should. As if the constituency you’re really playing to is the caucus, who’ll give you a pat on the back for getting legislation over the line; rather than the electorate, who’ll give your entire party kudos for blocking it.
Nothing personal. I know you’re trying, and I’m glad you are. Really very glad, thank you. But the process is messed up, and I have to call a spade a spade.
To your proposal:
As long as ISPs are free to say to people who choose to opt-in, “We can’t satisfy your needs, try these other ISPs instead…” then this might be the best way yet for the ALP to get itself out of this mess.
With that allowance for ISP choice, if it’s half as popular as your cretinous caucus colleagues seem to hope it’ll be, then Webshield will end up with millions of customers, and will be rolling in enough cash to amp-up their donations to the ACL. Conroy will be vindicated, and everyone can walk away happy.
Alternatively, if ISPs aren’t permitted to refuse to offer services to customers who desire features the ISP isn’t prepared to offer to the market, then censorware will need to be installed into all ISPs regardless of community sentiment, regardless of whether voters want it. And once that’s happened, there’s nothing to stop a future Government (including a future ALP Government) from later amending the law to remove the choice.
Make every assurance you like about whether or not that’ll happen, but deep down you know it will. Australian Governments have a long and distinguished history of being totally dominated by fabricated moral-panics, and not paying the slightest bit of attention to what the public actually thinks about content censorship issues (e.g., R18+ content availability on pay TV; R18+ games; Every amendment that’s ever been made to the definition of “refused classification.”). I simply don’t trust any elected official to show any maturity or self-restraint about this in future, you guys have systematically burned any reason that anyone could possibly have to have any faith in you about censorship.
It’s totally inevitable. Censorship in Australia is a ratchet, it only ever gets tighter. If we let you do this, your parliamentary colleagues and the offensively stupid blowhards in the ACL will just sit back, bide their time, and wait until the time is ripe to pull the lever again, harder. Just like they did in 1999 when Alston won his little compromise, which, foreseeably, laid the foundations for what your party is trying to do now
As your party is rapidly learning, promises need to mean something, and voters have long memories. Back in 1999 and on many occasions since you and many of your colleagues made speeches about how terrible the Alston thing was and how ridiculous the Libs were about content control. Then you all backstabbed everyone and turned yourselves into what’s sitting in front of us now. We voters would be idiots to take the ALP at their word about this — And that INCLUDES your assurances about legislating for an “open internet,” which, on the day of its royal assent, will be merely one amendment away from disappearing forever.
At the end of the day, if this Government had any guts or any drive for reform, it’d be reforming classification laws. Rather than extending the reach of Refused Classification like you’re doing, a Government worth its weight in citizens’ petitions would be reassessing whether the Refused Classification category needed to exist at all. Every other country on the planet seems to get by without it, but we have this permanently entrenched category of “legal but we really want you to think it’s illegal” content, whose sole purpose is to be an enabler for moralizing authoritarian crybabies who want to panic about other peoples’ media consumption choices.
It’s socially divisive, it’s unnecessary, and it should be abolished.
But it won’t be, will it? Reform is somebody else’s problem. We don’t do that around these parts.
PS: I’m trying to think of another area of business where companies are legally required to offer a service when there’s not a skerrick of evidence to suggest that customers have ever actually wanted it, and contrary to a considerable weight of evidence that shows they haven’t. I can’t think of any. If ISPs are mandated to supply censorship, this’ll be just another bit of messed-up crap that’s foisted uniquely on telcos, yet another completely predictable regulatory disaster in the long stream of regulatory disasters that both parties have imposed on the telecommunications industry over the last 25 years. It’s profoundly disappointing that the one person in the ALP who seems to “get it” isn’t howling from the rooftops in fury about that.
– mark
I have to say, I agree completely with Mark.
Any mandated censorship must be optional for ISPs as well as their customers. I am not opposed to requiring ISPs to specifically inform customers about what kind of service their offering at the time of sign up (although I think it is already pretty clear). ie Something along the lines of ‘this is an unfiltered service’. I am also not opposed to the government offering cost offsets to ISPs to help them afford and maintain filtering equipment allowing them to compete on quality and customer service without the higher price being a differentiator.
I also think it is well past time our Classification laws where overhauled. They may have been appropriate in a time when resource limitations meant that all material could only be produced by a few well funded companies, but in a time when anyone can be a content producer because affordable equipment is easily within our reach, it no longer makes sense. The Classification System should have a single purpose: Helping people decide what content they want themselves and family to enjoy. It should not be in the business of limiting what content citizens have access to. This is especially so when The Media Effects model still has no compelling evidence in the decades wowsers have been searching. (Although, certainly no one should be forced to watch content they don’t want to, and public spaces should be more ‘lowest common denominator’).
I never thought I’d see the day when Tony Abbott started looking attractive as a future Prime Minister. This issue, and a number of others have really put ‘brand Labor’ on the nose for me. As much as having the ‘Mad Monk’ as Prime Minister is appalling, another 3 years with Kevin Rudd is even more unpalatable. At this stage, I think the next election will go to whichever major party changes leaders first.
Agreed- Mark’s right, and I’ll take his criticism. While Kate’s position revision to a default of ‘unfiltered’ and the basis changed to ‘opt-in’ IS an improvement on her past positions, it’s not better than ‘no filtering’ i.e. status quo.
If filtering of any sort is desired by parents, doing it at the ISP is much more easily circumventable than a PC based filter under the control of parents.
Hear, hear!
While I agree with the substance of your criticisms of the policy at hand, and admire your work in bringing the flaws in Conroy’s horrible mess to light, it is factually incorrect to say that censorship in Australia has never loosened. Look up the kerfluffle over “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, for example; the good guys eventually won. It was, generally speaking, a largely gradual process of opening up that has reversed itself since about the mid-eighties, but we can still read and watch a hell of a lot more now than we could fifty years ago.
Whilst I would like to thank you for acknowledging the public outcry against this national filter I must say I completely and 100% agree with Mark Newton on this matter.
I agree with Mark. I think ultimately, your heart is in the right place, Senator, but your party is mis-guided and exhibiting totalitarian tendencies.
If you must save face, allow ISP’s to decide if they want to offer a version of a filtered internet.
Then the market will either embrace or reject the offer.
DING DING DING! A Labor politician gets it.
Well said, Kate. Thanks very much for this. I hope you are successful in persuading Caucus that the opt-in approach, with the levels of filtering or none as you describe, is adopted.
Given Labor’s recent polling figures, this change could make the difference between Labor being re-elected- or not.
The problem I’m seeing with Amendment B is that it still requires every single ISP in Australia to install network-level censorware. How does this reconcile with Amendment A?
Under Amendment B, if a user chooses a censored connection, will an ISP be permitted to say “we’re sorry, but we can’t provide you with the service you have chosen – here are a list of ISPs who can?”
Even Amendment A does not seem like protection enough, because legislation can be changed. You yourself are in that very business.
I thank you for the efforts you are making, but the only true way to fix this problem is for the ALP to drop the entire policy once and for all, and to leave the Internet alone. Nobody – NOBODY – has provided sufficient evidence that the current state of the Internet needs to change. So don’t change it.
Perhaps the right to (politically) unfiltered Internet access could be embedded in a bill of rights for all Australians – although I recognise that Federal politicians are predominantly against such a bill due to fears it would undermine the primacy of parliament.
I would wish to see this right provisioned in law before any moves to provide any form of government-mandated censorship regime – whether opt-in or opt-out.
Oher issues to address include the extent and transparency of the filtering process, which currently remains problematic, whether the government will mandate public sector use of the cleanfeed by public servants, which could limit the capability for the public service to provide frank and fearless advice on politically controversial topics (such as euthanasia) due to a lack of access to all community views, and whether the major political parties will permit individual members to vote according to their personal views – thereby helping to clarify to the individual electorates they represent what type of representative they elected.
I much prefer the US approach, with all of it’s flaws, of representative level voting to the approach in Australia where my electoral representatives must predominantly vote with their party and therefore do not represent their electorates in an authentic manner.
One thing that I’ve missed from the public pronouncements by politicians is a discussion about the strength of the filter. When I ‘told my mum’ (and aunt and grandmother) recently about the proposed filter, the point that brought up the most discussion was the strength of the current proposal. They wanted something to protect children, and they recognised, once it was made clear what was going on, that an RC-only filter wouldn’t do this.
People who are pro-filter generally want to protect kids from porn. Non-RC porn. But you can’t put a filter that strong on the net without allowing people out of it. But if you’re considering a voluntary filter it could be quite strong, and that would be a good thing. (or you could have multiple levels of strength – which you alude to above when talking about ‘customisable’)
On the other side of the debate, there is less stigma in opting out of a strong filter. I expect this would be a popular option. Given this, one could have an opt-out filter with fewer concerns.
This starts to look a lot like NetAlert of course. The one distinction being that it is run by the ISP, not installed on the end user’s device. This makes it OS independent and harder for the kids to work around.
Will, unfortunately, a filter which runs at the ISP level is much easier to circumvent than a local filtering app installed on a properly configured PC. Those wishing to circumvent an ISP level filter need only install Tor, use a proxy server or a VPN to go right around it.
If a filter application is installed on a PC which is correctly configured, that is, one where the filter has been installed via the Admin account and the kids’ access is via an account with limited rights, it’ll be pretty hard to beat for most kids.
Will, there are already ISP’s that offer this service, such as Webshield and iPrimus. Therefore it is not necessary to filter, sorry, censor, the internet for law abiding adults. People that are pro-filter should realise it is not the Governments responsibility to provide a safe internet experience for children, it is the parents responsibility, perhaps the Government should take note of this too.
Congratulations Kate on being apparently the first member of the Labor caucus to be listening to constituents. I – (as do many others) – wish you luck in convincing the stakeholders – (of course, in particular, Senator Conroy) – of the merits of your entirely workable proposal.
However, I do still have great concerns in regards to the perceived “safety” any connection subscribing to your “opt-in” solution – filters such as these have already been ably demonstrated to be trivially bypassed. Even if you are successful in getting your “amendments” adopted, I still see major issues with parents believing that their internet connections are “child safe”, and therefore seeing those parents “switch off” from being aware of the online activities of their children.
(I put the word “amendments” in quotes above, as I foresee that it is very difficult to “amend” legislation that is apparently not even in a completed draft form as yet!)
As an active communications and information technology professional, I – (along with many others in the industry and the wider community) – are terribly concerned about the apparent lack of knowledge and understanding Senator Conroy shows on the subject matter pertaining to his portfolio, and his complete inability to listen to opposing points of view. Surely it is the role of all government to listen to its constituents when formulating policy, particularly when that policy directly effects those constituents.
It is refreshing that there is finally a member of the current government who is willing to listen.
Mark Newton is right…If the mast majority of people were ‘on-board’ with Sen. Conroy’s proposal, then Webshield (the ISP which offers a filtered service) would be the biggest ISP in the country…It is not, not by a long shot.
To the Labour caucus a simple question: If the concept of filtering is so popular, why hasn’t Webshield secured a bigger (the biggest?) internet user customer base??
To me the answer to that question is simple: The ‘market’ has spoken.
Why will you not listen?
Thank you for your time.
Opy-in or not, the ISPs are required to install Filters.
Filters that will be ready for the next round of amendments, and that is mandatory.
No the previous Government took the compromise of optional PC filters and that actually does good job of protecting children and adults who cannot handle Porn and want protection.
Now lets see we had a nation wide vote on filtering a few years ago, “Netalert” and the results was majority by a country mile for NO FILTERS NEEDED.
For Labor’s sake Listen to the electorate and drop this plan and reinstate the free PC filters. BTW the PC filters have improved to the point that even teenagers can’t get around it quickly anymore if installed according to directions.
Wait, I thought you can’t opt-out to view child porn?
Dear Paul,
Although you are just a Conroy shill rolling out the usual lure of “only pedophiles object to censorship”, I’ll take the bait anyway.
The current legislation as it stands will not prevent pedophiles continuing to use the Internet the way they already do. The current legislation will not prevent people viewing articles about euthanasia, bomb making, illegal street racing, or men dressing in women’s clothing.
What the proposed legislation will do is prevent your children reading articles about safe sex, which means your children will become parents due to experimenting without any concept of contraception. The legislation will mean your children don’t have access to advice about drugs, so they’ll end up making the same mistakes as the other drug-accident corpses in the morgue.
You have to understand that Internet censorship will actually be a worse outcome for the Nation’s children than the status quo.
Won’t someone please think of the children?
On a wider note
GIVE US A BILL OF RIGHTS that actually put the PEOPLE FIRST and requires any government to consider the people and their RIGHTS. If we had such a bill placed into the constitution then this filtering proposal would fall foul of it, just like it falls foul of the UN charter of human rights that Australia is supposed to recognise.
The government is only there because the people of Australia decided to have a government and placed it into the constitution and we should have the right to have RIGHTS that transcend the government.
There is a fatal flaw with a Bill of Rights, which is that it defines rights, but does nothing to make government or the public to cause those rights to be available.
Further, a Bill of Rights encourages a litigious, victim oriented society, rather than a community of citizens who aspire to see the rights of all people upheld, not just the rights of themselves.
In my view, a better approach is a bill of responsibilities along the line of:
All people have the responsibility to foster the safety, and freedom of fear of all people.
All people have the responsibility to foster the health of all people.
All people have the responsibility to ensure that all people enjoy the dignity due to all people.
and so on.
It is the application of responsibilities, by parliament, and also inconveniently, by ourselves that creates rights, both for ourselves and others.
Consider the responsibility to ensure our own well being, compared with some nebulous right to well being.
In fact, a right in a vacuum is a selfish thing that all too often denies the rights of others, and thus is always a troubled thing.
Moreover, a Bill of Responsibilities is more consistent with sound government. It would not undermine the primacy of parliament, but rather codify what it is that a government is supposed to do, i.e., govern for the well being of the people. But, perhaps more importantly, it would codify what people are supposed to do for other people.
Yours idealistically,
Paul Gardner-Stephen.
Kate, I can understand your trying to make this more palatable to voters, but your party has back flipped on just about everything and I ask why not on this? Does the ALP seriously want to become a one term government? The vast majority of people don’t want this or any other form of it. As they say, “do the right thing, throw it in the bin” and bring back PC based filtering, but this time market it properly. Offer kits to ISP’s and IT solutions providers like myself. We’re at the front line and communicate with the end-users on a daily basis. People turn off to government advertising, let us handle it and explain it to our customers. In my household, there are four voters under 32 eligible to vote. From their indication, unless things seriously change on this matter and others, they are making sure neither major party gets their vote and are directing their preferences to reflect their sentiment. Please convey that to the caucus and if they don’t get it, then they can figure it out the hard way.
It’s a nice try Kate, but I’m with Mark on this one. Opt-in, Opt-out, or Opt-anything is just one step away from it being forced on to everyone. The only solution to this filter policy is to scrap it all together.
If you want to take anything back to the Labor caucus, Kate, then please inform them, that this will be the first election in 20+ years that I will not be voting for Labor and the filter is one of the main reasons.
I’m quite perplexed by the blinkers that the Labor caucus seems to be wearing when it comes to this issue. Phone polls, Newspaper polls, Talk back radio and TV shows have consistently shown that people are against it. In one case nearly 90,000 voted in a poll on the Sydney Morning Herald with 99% against censorship.
Mr Rudd, you have to ask yourself this. Is this an election winner? The public says no.
Mark Newton’s got it pretty much right, from the first to the last word in his comment to this post.
Mark pretty much summed up the entire argument.
This whole “RC” classification is a joke, and this government is nuts for trying to apply it to a new dynamic medium like the internet.
Come on kate, you must understand Marks comment, why can’t politicians understand this? WHY is this censorship being pushed so hard???
Hi Kate
Part a is admirable.
Part b can be achieved if filtering is done at the pc level, instead of the ISP level.
What you need to do is to have a massive advertising campaign and offer government paid for filters so people can install them on their own computers, and maybe give away some fridge magnets.
Oh that’s right. There was a scheme like this called “Netalert” and the Labor Government killed this off without a viable replacement.
Won’t somebody think of the children?
Dave
$128 million dollars plus the ongoing annual cost of $66 million to maintain the filter and it won’t arrest a single paedophile or rescue a single abused child. What good is it?
Opt -in/out is irrelevent people can already opt in/out via buying a clean feed from webshield or installing their own local filter.
How about directing the money to the AFP and deal with the root of the problem.
Here is a radical thought, publish the blacklist and shame the countries who host the stuff. Challenge the Internet community to seek out and bring down those sites.
Warwick, all of the secret list published so far, especially the European ones and ACMA’s blacklist, mostly contain pornography that is legal in just about every western country. For example internet activist Matti Nikki leaked Finland’s blacklist of 1047 sites (of which only nine could have been considered as containing child porn sites) the greater majority of sites are located in western Europe or the United States. Same for Denmark’s list; http://itpol.dk/censur/internetblokering
So this raises the question; if these sites are illegal, why haven’t the FBI or relevant European authority? The only answer is that the sites aren’t illegal at all. I mean why would governments who knew that these sites were out there in countries they had close ties to leave them up if they were indeed illegal?
The government will not name and shame countries by publishing the blacklist. Only because they’ll embarrass themselves by asking another country to take down some legal website that in reality is legal in both Australia and the country that hosts it. For example see our glorious communication minister’s hissy fits over Google in the past few weeks. It’s just because Google won’t play over removal legal videos on Youtube. And why should they? Those videos on Youtube are perfectly legal. What gives the government the right to ban Australian from viewing them? More importantly why do they need to bar Australians from seeing these videos when other countries government’s don’t see the need to ban them?
Yet again Mark Newton is right. We should be looking at reforming our absurd classification laws as well as getting rid of “Refused Classification”. If adults in Europe and the US can make their own decisions, why can’t adults here do the same? Why do small lobby groups that don’t represent the majority of Australians have such a large say in to what everyone else can read and watch?
Warwick said: “Here is a radical thought, publish the blacklist and shame the countries who host the stuff. Challenge the Internet community to seek out and bring down those sites.”
Warwick we can’t…because what successive Australian governments have decided was “indecent”, is by no means what the rest of the world thinks is indecent. Remembe, the filter isn’t about illegal material, it’s about filtering material that has been classified as Refused Classification.
Remember, in the Australia gov’s eyes, video’s of consenting adults engaging in “light spanking” is classified as RC. We would look like the Taliban if Australia decided to “name and shame” other countries because they hosted videos of “light spanking”.
The most insane thing for me is that the general public as a whole have no idea that this is a complaints based mechanism only, and Conroy glosses over this fact and rarely ever mentions it.
This censorship will not protect anyone from seeing anything that they dont want to because of the stupidity that something has to be found then complained about in order to be added to the censorship filter.
I dont agree at all with ANY of the options except Mark Newton’s idea of OPT-IN for users AND OPT-IN for ISP’s. Even that though is a bit ridiculous though as it would be far superior solution to use a PC filter or OpenDNS.
How many unique URL’s are there at the moment? 1 Trillion with a billion being added every day?
How on earth is a complaints based system that currently takes 2-3 months to have something added that is at most 10,000 URL’s long going to make a lick of difference?
The only tenable position is opt-in for both consumers AND ISPs.
Rudd and Conroy have been told that loud and clear by a lot of people, and they refuse to listen.
The only option we have left since they won’t listen is to vote the ALP out of Government, and if that includes Kate Lundy’s position, sadly, so be it.
I refuse to allow a Government follow the path of authoritarian regimes in starting the slippery slope of Internet censorship. It has to start somewhere, and if the Government’s proposal is mandatory in any way, shape or form, then I won’t support it and will do my best to ensure that never happens. I suspect a lot of people feel the same way.
I sincerely hope that Lundy convinces Rudd and Conroy to drop the mandatory proposal. Will they finally listen? Time will tell. BEFORE the election would be the best time to drop it, otherwise ALP goes to the bottom of my preference list.
Kate,
While your preparedness to stick your neck out in Caucus (a little) and try to convince the party Right that opt-in is preferable to opt-out is admirable, I have to agree with many of the others that this is still unacceptable. I’ll not go into detail as Mark Newton and others have more than adequately done so. I know you understand the issues here.
What you and your colleagues need to be doing is representing the voters in your electorates who have declared long and loud that filtering of the sort being proposed is unacceptable to us as Australians, rather than toeing the party line for fear of party room reprisals. Only then will you show you have the intestinal fortitude that deserves reelection. So too, reform of Australian censorship laws that continue to allow people like Senator Conroy and the ACL to perpetuate the myth that Refused Classification material is illegal. We all know it isn’t and the dishonesty Senator Conroy exhibits every time he tries to conflate this issue angers many.
I would have thought by now that someone with the integrity I believe you have would have declared herself honestly and taken the party lumps that go with it. It’s time to stop offering a lesser, still unacceptable, solution and toss this terrible policy where it belongs – on the scrap heap.
You know this policy (as well as Labor’s growing list of broken promises) is going to cause you electoral damage, and while it’s unlikely in the ACT to mean seat losses for Labor, it will certainly mean that in more marginal electorates. As someone who has always voted for you, there’s no way I can continue to do that in the face of Labor’s capriciousness and wilful acts against the will of the Australian people.
Disclosure – I am a board member of EFA, but commenting here in my capacity as a private citizen.
“availability of an unfiltered, open Internet service, and b) require all Internet subscribers to make an active choice as to whether they want an unfiltered, RC filtered or additionally filtered Internet service (with the latter being personally customisable at any time).”
This is what we already have, Kate,
Just leave out Internet alone!
The only explicit goal I can see Conroy actually state this ‘filter’ will actually achieve is to prevent inadvertent exposure to RC content.
Firstly, his department and several others have NOT produced any evidence that this is a problem at all. So much for “evidence based policy”. (refer to Senator Scott Ludlum’s questions on notice.)
Secondly, if its only to prevent accidental exposure to material then why isn’t it purely up to the individual ISP (RSP) and customer to opt-in if they are having a problem with accidental exposure to Child Pornography. /sarcasm.
Intellectually bankrupt policy. Scrap this nonsense and put the money towards something more effective and perhaps tell Conroy to actually sit down with a rational, cool-head and talk to the IT community like reasonable adults.
I don’t understand why we have to make any sort of compromise at all. Nobody wants this filtor/censor. Just dump the policy alltogether!!!
Kate by your own admission you’re bound to follow what caucus dictates and it is painfully obvious the Senator has the “Full Support” of the P.M. so I ask exactly what are you attempting to achieve with this blog?
Expert opinion has been given, the public through numerous polls have voiced the disenchantment with the proposal yet the A.L.P. continues to pursue this toxic policy that wasn’t a policy at the last election.
You have an incompetent minister lying to the Senates estimates committee and the Australian public as a whole advocating the tax payer waste another $128 + million under the pretext of protecting the children when in fact the filter will only provide a placebo for parents.
Accept some advise, drop this proposal, sack this minister or pay the price at the poll.
Mike
Opt in filters currently exist and the market for them doesn’t seem to be booming. What purpose would modifying the current policy of a mandatory filter for an opt-in filter serve if not as merely an incremental step toward implementing a mandatory filter in the not-so-distant future?
Kate,
really it has already all been said. Just represent your constituents not the caucus.
What this issue has shown me is that we should review whether Senators should be ministers. Unrepresentative swill as they were once described. The Senate is a house of review, not a place where policy is determined and managed. A minister should be representing her/his electorate and forced to face a judgment each election, not elected for 2 terms and then only because of the vagaries of an above-the-line sham.
Of course, given the predisposition of political parties to parachute party hacks into “safe” seats and a tendency to “manage” preselections maybe we will continue to have representatives who have loyalties to others than their constituents.
More Kilsyth experiments may give us candidates who really represent the local community views.
I understand now that the blacklist is kept secret not to hide it from perverts, but to save the government from embarrassment. (unless the Government thinks the general public are all perverts?)
I checked out the RC rules once you pointed them out, they are very convoluted and can basically ban anything.
So certain books that I can buy at the newsagent/book store I won’t be able to read on my iPad because they contain descriptions of a fetish or chemical formulas (ie for making gunpowder). There go my university text books.
This is not what Senator Conroy has repeadly said.
Hi Kate,
There are a few other laws that I’d like to opt out of as well. I appreciated some support with being able to make a choice about those too. Speeding for example .. paying fines for not following the law is just so annoying !
Censorship has always been a tough one, now even more so, as well appear to have “Internet Censorship” which is somehow different from other types of censorship, so good for you on just giving up on that because of a few whiny geeks.
Mr. Newton position is tht “Censorship in Australia is a ratchet, it only ever gets tighter.” .. any examples of this ? You can now say pretty much whatever you like on TV, except the C-word. That wasn’t the case 20 years ago. There is case after case of the censorship board reclassifying material that was previously refused classifiction. The exact opposite is happening to Mr.Newton’s hysterical claim.
If fact Mr.Newtons entire diabtribe is a series of hysterical claims for which he provides no evidence. Its all just about him. Just like 100% of people who are protesting about an internet filter. They don’t care about anyone else.
Good one, but noone listened, because we know the difference between “optting out of laws” and censorship.
Laws are there to define acceptable and unacceptable with penalties if you break the laws. Speeding is a good example, I can speed if I want, and suffer the consequences (eg death, fines, etc)
Censorship is trying to prevent me from seeing crime, hardly opting out of crime.
Yes, the internet is special. Notice how it is being used in Iran and other countries by freedom fighters.
And censorship is different to stopping something from broadcasting.
Instead of simply not showing some shows, it is like someone standing in front of your TV switching it off whenever something they don’t like comes on.
So you equate secret internet censorship with speeding fines, an obvious straw man:
Direct casue of speeding – injuries/deaths in road accidents due to excessive speed. Solution – implement a system by which penalties are levied for behaviour which may cause injury/death to yourself or others. All out in the open for everyone to see, direct quantifiable cause and effect.
Direct cause of an uncensored internet – public access to information the government might prefer the public didn’t see. Solution – introduce a secret mandatory internet censorship program, smoke screen the true purpose by crying “think of the children”. Number of cases of child abuse prevented by filter = 0, number of child abusers caught by filter = 0. Cost to end user in speed/latency degradation and added expense = unknow but definately greater than 0.
Hi PMX
Regarding your rubbishing of Mark Newtons comment “Censorship in Australia is a ratchet, it only ever gets tighter”, please check
http://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Censor/cens3.html#china
In September 1996, China reportedly banned access to an estimated 100 Web sites by using a filtering system to prevent delivery of offending information. The banned sites included Western news outlets, Taiwanese commentary sites, anti-China dissident sites and sexually explicit sites.
Yes thats right, China’s net censorship is still limited to 100 web sites”
Regards
Dave
PS. If it wasn’t obvious, the line “Yes thats right, China’s net censorship is still limited to 100 web sites” was supposed to be sarcastic.
pmx,
Typical straw-man argument. There is no law prohibiting me from looking at and owning nearly all RC material.
Funny coming from someone who is talking about the law.
“There are a few other laws that I’d like to opt out of as well.”
Whoa, let me pull you up there. Despite what Conroy and his cronies would have us believe, the majority of refused classification material is not illegal.
“Just like 100% of people who are protesting about an internet filter. They don’t care about anyone else.”
On the contrary my misguided friend. People protesting internet censorship are selflessly protecting the freedom of every Australian today and in generations to come. The pro-censorship camp only care about their OWN values and have no respect for their fellow Australian.
Filtering is censorship. It is never going to work to start with.
It never has, it never will.
Take the current long standing drug war as an example.
It is a government imposed ‘filter’ on drugs.
Yet I can still go talk to a mate of a mate and get whatever takes my fancy for a remarkably good price.
Ironically, it’s cheaper than the legal alternatives and there are plenty of examples of drug use in our prisons.
How is that?
People always find a way to get what they want.
Even if we check every single container that arrives into our country, crops and laboratories thrive locally.
Even if we stop every car, truck, train, boat and plane, corruption becomes rife.
Out Police have virtually given up prosecuting users, instead preferring to go after the producers.
Prices of drugs, which should go towards supporting this policy have not been impacted.
Since the 1970′s the dollar cost of Marijuana has stayed stagnant at roughly $25 for a small personal supply.
Taking into account inflation, lets conservatively say 3% per annum, and take 1980 as the baseline to give an easy 30 year time frame, the price should be ~$60 for that amount. It’s not. That means a real price reduction of 58%.
Show me another product that has dropped in price by nearly 60% in 30 years.
Drugs are physical. Their source can be detected by xray, dogs, helicopter, power companies, buyers, watching people on your local nightclub district, and multitudes of other ways.
Data is different.
Physically, the entire Internet was designed from day 1 to survive all but the most thorough attacks. It is the perfect logistical supply network. It was after all designed by the military who live and breathe logistics and have ingrained the importance of backup plans.
Peoples lives could well be at stake if the logistics were not up to scratch.
John Gilmore was quoted by Time magazine in 1993 saying “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
Its true.
Even without the physical re-routing, inside the very way data is transferred are multitudes of methods of disguising, encrypting, modularising, and smuggling data in plain sight without raising suspicion. Think of it as the carrier pigeon doing drug runs to your local prison.
I can state honestly right now that if I wanted to obtain Refused Classification material, I could search for, find contacts and obtain it freely and without suspicion through any filter.
I don’t. And I have never come across child pornography whilst browsing the internet. This was of course the original intent of the filter.
So, how do we marry the desire to protect our children, and children all over the world from these deviants?
Two ways.
A point first. This is an international issue. There is not one government on this planet, nor citizenry that will say that child pornography is ok. All people, police, and politicians will actively pursue and prosecute any individual involved in child pornography.
There is also the fact that the goal of this filter is actually to create a safe play ground for our children.
It is impossible to create a playground in a retired rubbish dump and assume it will be safe simply because we put tonnes of bark on top of it.
The first half; create the play ground.
* We create a white list of known safe reputable websites.
* We use international government ties to create this white list.
Each government’s classification team give their ‘age’ rating.
These obviously should be as transferable from one culture to another as possible. If not exactly, then there should be a framework on all sides that sets the standards that each age classification meets.
* We accept that due to the two way nature of the internet, there will be some bad content from time to time. Swearing, off colour content etc. This is normal. We should not get hysterical when it happens.
It will still quite likely be trivial to bypass with some knowledge.
The trick is to delay this realisation until the mid-teen years.
* We ask operating system software developers to create a user type called “child”. Preferably a month and year of birth would be entered into the user’s properties during creation.
“Child” users would by default be limited to Domain Name Servers that contain the white list.
The Child user’s access can be set automatically by age, or can be changed at administrator/parental discretion.
* White list submissions can be made by the public.
The second half; increase international police cooperation and funding.
No Ostrich has ever saved itself by burying its head in the sand.
No matter how idealistic this black list may be, it will not save one single child from being raped.
The net result is that we will create a worse society, but we wont be able to see it.
* We must liberate these children
* We must cooperate and prosecute the perpetrators.
-
On a more personal note, In the mid-late 90′s when I was a teenager, it was impossible to search for anything on the internet and not find 10 pages of porn as the immediate result.
I distinctly remember mastering the art of telling a search engine to look for say “Holden Commodore -xxx -slutz -hardcore -lolita -sex” in order to have the first page populated by results involving cars.
I was at TAFE at the time performing these searches. It was relatively common for people to be pulled aside and asked why they went to X off coloured page. It was very hard not to back then.
Then Google came along.
Kate, I know my post is lengthy, and if you actually read it, thanks.
I am glad there is someone in government with a clue.
Please don’t let this become the thin end of the wedge into a totalitarian censorship regime like our dear friends in China.
Anyone want proof that the blacklist will not contain “the worse of the worse” (S.Conroy’s words) illegal pages.
If its such a page then the police through international agreements and action will have those sites removed within hours and so they are useless to put on a list that takes a minimum of 5 days to be considered by the ACMA (Senate Estimates just finished).
Thus one is left with a list of legal material that no police can takedown.
I would have to say well put to Mr Mark Newton on your comment.
Kate, I have been following your blogs and appreciating your work.
But..
Over the past 6-9 months I have lost complete faith in the ALP. Conroy’s stubborn refusal to listen to anyone besides pontificating wowzers is infuriating. This person needs to start listening to industry leaders and the Australian people. This policy will impact on the ALP many years into the future, your colleagues need to stop blowing this off as a storm in a tea cup and start listening.
Maybe in the past I would have supported an opt-in policy. But no more, I have absolutely zero faith in our elected officials to behave in a honorable and cool-headed fashion. Once the hardware is in place, it will not go anywhere and will only be increased through amendments to RC definitions according to whatever is the moral panic flavor of the day.
Kate, it seems obvious that you do not like the idea of filtering either. So how does it feel when your boss and Prime Minister calls you an “extremist civil libertarian”?
Conroy’s stubborn refusal to listen to anyone besides pontificating wowzers is infuriating. This person needs to start listening to industry leaders and the Australian people.
It’s too late for that, he has single-handedly alienated the entire industry that is covered by his portfolio. No one in the industry respects or trusts him. That relationship is beyond repair, the only solution is to sack him as Minister.
Having said that, the problem would still not be solved. Never forget, this is Rudd’s baby.
- Justin
PMX said: “There are a few other laws that I’d like to opt out of as well. I appreciated some support with being able to make a choice about those too. Speeding for example .. paying fines for not following the law is just so annoying !”
Stawman argument. First, there is no law saying you can’t own or look at or share 99% of RC material. RC laws only exist to cover that material being SOLD in Australia. Second…what is RC on the net is not be definition RC on TV. TV and the Internet are not treated the same in this regard.
PMX said: “Mr. Newton position is tht “Censorship in Australia is a ratchet, it only ever gets tighter.” .. any examples of this ?”
Yep…the every expending definition of “refused classification”. For example, when the refused Classification was originally fomulated, “fetish” videos were not covered by RC. The Howard gov then moved to have RC include ‘fetish porn’. Light spanking between consenting adults is now RC…why??
Now PMX, fetishes may or may not be your ‘thing’ (and I wouldn’t care either way)…but it is a clear cut example of the ratchet getting tighter. Would you like more examples, or are you happy with that?
@ pmx
First, Hi Conroy…
“There are a few other laws that I’d like to opt out of as well. I appreciated some support with being able to make a choice about those too. Speeding for example .. paying fines for not following the law is just so annoying !”
Yay well done you just made another sensationalist comment designed to elicit a emotional response instead of a rational reasoned response…. also called “fear-mongering” or good old “Propaganda”.
We have laws that punish the people that do wrong on the internet… We don’t need laws that punish everyone under the guise of “protecting the children” which this filter will not/cannot do.
As mark said the only filter that is needed is PC based ones.
“Censorship has always been a tough one, now even more so, as well appear to have “Internet Censorship” which is somehow different from other types of censorship, so good for you on just giving up on that because of a few whiny geeks.”
First.. “Whiny geeks” yes insult the opposition… Why because your logic/argument is flawed!
Second… That is half the point the current proposal IS NOT like other forms of censorship we have on other types of media…. It is broader more obtuse and biggest thing… SECRET!
“Mr. Newton position is tht “Censorship in Australia is a ratchet, it only ever gets tighter.” .. any examples of this ? You can now say pretty much whatever you like on TV, except the C-word. That wasn’t the case 20 years ago. There is case after case of the censorship board reclassifying material that was previously refused classifiction. The exact opposite is happening to Mr.Newton’s hysterical claim.”
RC classification was broadened only this year!
RC Classification was added in the lat 90s
Two examples ^^
Also the restrictions proposed for the internet are tighter than that of TV so your point is null or actually just reinforces the argument against a filter… For example… If the Internet proposal were to be applied to TV… Underbelly etc should be classified as RC!
“If fact Mr.Newtons entire diabtribe is a series of hysterical claims for which he provides no evidence. Its all just about him. Just like 100% of people who are protesting about an internet filter. They don’t care about anyone else.”
Actually Mark Newton is a well respected person within the IT industry, that knows the score a lot better than you, I and especially a government that calls the internet “portals”.
There is plenty of evidence for his claims….. How many people used the PC filter the last government developed ?? Only like 50 000… Yer that is a huge demand for filtering.
“They don’t care about anyone else.”
Good and that’s one of my main oppositions to the filter… Don’t bugger with me and i wont bugger with you.. That includes my internet. If you are incapable of protecting your kids online without crying to the government to RAISE YOUR KIDS FOR YOU.. You don’t deserve children!
Simple fact of the matter. Don’t force your views on others… You have the choice. Don’t like it turn it off. No-one is force you to use the internet!
I repeat… NO ONE IS FORCING YOU TO USE THE INTERNET. IF YOU DON’T LIKE SOMETHING ABOUT IT, TURN IT OF DON’T FORCE OTHERS TO CHANGE JUST BECAUSE YOU DON’T LIKE IT! AS LONG AS WHAT YOU ARE DOING DOES NOT FORCIBLY AFFECT OTHERS IT SHOULD BE NO ONE ELSE’S BUSINESS!
“First, Hi Conroy”
That’s Sentator Conroy, thank you very much!
+1 to Mark Newton’s comments.
Labor have lost my vote (and as many other peoples’ as I can convince) if they keep pushing this appalling censorship. You may, Kate, of course tell this to your precious caucus, which you hold above any guiding principles you may have once had.
Opt in already exists. People are free to choose webshield if they wish and receive a filtered internet service.
Kate’s suggestion is merely an attempt to make stupid and bad policy palatable enough to get it across the line. Once the infrastructure is in place, the first moral panic pushed on the public to sell newspaper advertising space will see opt in/opt out changed to mandatory for all in 1/70th the blink of an eye.
And how well is it all going to work?
Scenario:
Facebook msg : “Hey check out this link ”
“?? – doesn’t work 4 me”
“Ur parents haven’t opted out of the filter?”
“opt out?”
“UR ISP is name isn’t it? Go to and click opt out of filter”
“Says I need password. Hang on – its written on lid of router box.. Oh wow. I didn’t know it was possible to bend that far.”
Or
Facebook msg : “Hey check out this link ”
“?? – doesn’t work 4 me”
“Ur parents haven’t opted out of the filter?”
“opt out?”
“Never mind, I run an open proxy 4 friends. Put this in the proxy settings under internet connections and restart the browser and you can use my unfiltered feed.”
“OK, hang on for 1/70th the blink of an eye. Oh wow. I didn’t know it was possible to bend that far.”
“Just be thankful ur parents didn’t set up the parental controls that came with the PC”
“yeah.. idiots… i disabled my dads iphone when I was 3 years old and he couldn’t even fix that.”
ISP filtering in ANY form is a stupid and BAD idea with potential misuse written all over it. I don’t know exactly WHO its supposed to help but it certainly isn’t about providing better environment online for kids.
“i disabled my dads iphone when I was 3 years old and he couldn’t even fix that”
Absolute. Classic.
Thank you all for the comments. I appreciate that some of you would prefer to have the policy removed completely.
I felt that requiring people as part of their relationship with their ISP to make an active choice about whether they want a filtered service or not would be a good compromise, one that many Australians would probably opt-in to.
Keep in mind that although the RC filter has many limitations, many people *do* like the idea of blocking gambling, violent or other content they may personally object to. Although it would have to be personally customisable, this is a service that many people would choose even knowing that there would be some speed issues that accompany such rigourous filtering.
I hear the point about ISPs not wanting to have to put in place any filter infrastructure, but many large players in the industry are apparently saying that if one of them should do it, then they should all do it. It is an ongoing debate and I presume part of the Minister’s consultation with the industry.
As the legislation hasn’t even been presented to the Labor Caucus yet, we are yet to formally consider it. You should be aware that through the many letters, emails and other correspondence sent to my colleagues, there is a growing awareness about the controvesy surrounding the policy, and as you know I will be working to turn the policy around.
On a related note, if you have ideas around cybersafety, for creating a genuinely safer experience and environment for children online, I would encourage you to contribute to the Joint Select Committee on Cybersafety (http://aph.gov.au/jscc) before the 25th June 2010.
Kate
You mention the Ministers consultation with the industry, what consultation. The ACL are no part of the industry, Webshield is a minority ISP with a failing business model, who exactly is the Minister consulting with?
The ALP is ignoring the massive public outcry on this issue, the Minister has lied repeatedly and knowingly, throwing up smoke screens and misdirection whilst accusing his opponents of being child porn supporters and more.
The ALP has lost my vote unless something drastic is done, not just dropping this policy, but publicly forcing Mr Conroy to retract his lies and false accusations.
Let’s take brief look at the Ministers latest tirade against Google for collecting banking details from unsecured wireless netowrks. Whilst I’m surely not as knowledgable as the Great Minister for Internet Censorship and Moral Righteousness I do seem to recall somewhere that banking sites use HTTPS. So even if you were doing your internet banking in the fraction of a second Google (or anyone else with a wireless network device in the area) collected data from your unsecured wireless network, the data fragments would be encrypted, not to mention random and out of context. Seems the good minister is tilting at windmills and Chariman Krudd is cheering him on.
“Keep in mind that although the RC filter has many limitations, many people *do* like the idea of blocking gambling, violent or other content they may personally object to. Although it would have to be personally customisable”
Kate…this already exists as stand in every operating system currently on the market. Why spend $100′s of Millions over the next few years when EVERY PC already has this feature?
“Keep in mind that although the RC filter has many limitations, many people *do* like the idea of blocking gambling, violent or other content they may personally object to.”
Gambling…legal…Violent…legal.
“I hear the point about ISPs not wanting to have to put in place any filter infrastructure, but many large players in the industry are apparently saying that if one of them should do it, then they should all do it.”
I do not believe this for one second…2 ISP’s already have done this, Webshield and iPrimus. If these “large players” are saying what you claim, should they already be following Webshields and IPrimus’s lead..? No one else has, have they Kate? In fact the opposite is try…I believe that iPrimus don’t offer it anymore because of the low takeup of the option.
There are 24.4 million messages on Whirlpool. Three (3) (that is 3 units not 3 million) are returned when you search for Webshield. Does that tell government members something about the level of community interest?
Senator Lundy,
Fortunately we have actual evidence we can use to consider whether people would choose to sign-up to a non-mandatory filter on internet content.
This includes sales of PC filters in Australia, take-up of ISP filters at the various ISPs who already offer this service through the Family Friendly ISP scheme, launched in 2002 (http://www.iia.net.au/index.php/component/content/416.html?task=view%20#ff_seal) and take-up of the previous government’s filtering product.
It also includes the number of Australian households that have chosen to not access the internet due to concerns over the nature of online content they might be exposed to.
I trust that the government has sourced and considered this evidence in depth – and is able to make it available in an aggregate and anonymised form to the Australian people.
My belief is that the overall evidence points to a low level of interest in the use of either PC or ISP-based filtering products. This lack of market demand is probably why many ISPs do not provide filter options.
My believe is that there has been a negligible number of households that have chosen to not accessed the internet due to concerns over inadvertent exposure to illegal or Refused Classification material.
My questions leading from this, to validate or invalidate these beliefs, are as follows:
1) Where is the evidence of Australian electoral demand for a mandatory or opt-in internet filter?
2) What is the evidence that the majority of Australian citizens would prefer a government-operated mandatory, or optional, internet filtering scheme over market forces?
3) Will ISPs be subsidied to provide a filter – whether mandatory or opt-in?
4) If so, how much public money will the government be allocating to the filter subsidy?
5) If not, what will be the average increase in individual internet connections resulting from (a) a mandatory filter (b) an opt-in filter?
5a) How will Australia’s relative international ranking as to internet connection costs change due to the additional cost in individual internet connections?
5b) What is the projected decline in internet usage in Australia, or decline in the growth of internet usage in Australia, based on the additional cost of internet connections?
5c) What actions will the government take to offset any increase in the digital divide caused by its filter approach?
6) What consultation has been undertaken with the internet industry and its representative bodies on the matter of the filter over the last two years? Please outline the number of meetings, which bodies were represented and the outcomes of those meetings.
Growing awareness amongst your colleagues? Right…
You only have to look at the performance from the likes of Tania Plibersek and Maxine McKew on programs like Qanda to know that they have no significant clue about what it is really about and are simply content to show up and parrot the Conroy spin for that particular week. I’m stunned that they don’t show more of an interest, as their future in office may well depend on the outcome of this.
Subsidise the and promote ISP’s that want to offer the service. Anthony and Ravi would love the extra cash. Reinstate Netalert. Give it another name if you don’t want association with something the coalition did before. These things would be seen as something positive towards the outcome. Anything beyond that is over-reaching and making dangerous changes to the IT infrastructure of Australia.
Kate.
The only answer is a PC based filter for a number of reasons.
1. It allows ALL Australians the CHOICE, when i say choice it allows parents to make the decision to filter their kids Internet connection and also their own, or just the kids. Were as a ISP filter just filters the whole houses connection.
2. It allows parents much more control over what is filtered. More than a ISP filter could ever and with much less hassle. Bypassing a home filter is also harder.
3. A PC based filter can also log and report on children’s Internet activities, be used to lock down web cams etc.
I could list more reasons but the above should be enough.
Kate i will close with this,
I voted for Labour in the last election for a number of reasons, NBN was one of them but i did not like the idea of even optional ISP filtering but i said hey i can live OPT-IN (I know ALOT felt the same)…..
Labour wins, i am happy.
Next thing i know, it is mandatory filtering (Censorship) so you can forgive me and the rest of the people in opposition to the filter are quite angry at ANY sort of filter now and very wary of any “compromise”.
To me the only compromise at this point is a PC based filter, and my vote will reflect that view.
Kane.
—– Original message —–
> who will pay for the infrastructure for a mandatory option?
> It won’t come out of the ISP’s bottom line so it’ll either be the
internet subscribers, or the taxpayers who happen to be the exact same
person. All for an ISP filter that will be less effective and easier to
bypass than PC based filters.
a better and cheaper solution would be to require ISPs to provide
information on a filtered connection on their homepage and in their
newsletters and direct users to a govt based sight with ISPs that provide
filtered connections and PC based filters. If the user wishes to churn
then so be it.
Let people vote with their wallets, if they feel it is important to have
a filtered connection in their household they can subscribe to webshield
or purchase a home PC filter.
Kate,
Then let those people sign up with ISPs who provide filtering services like Webshield.
Products and services exist for those who wish to use them in their homes. The resounding lack of usage of the Howard era Net Alert system and the obvious fact that ISPs like Webshield aren’t drowning in customers is ample evidence that average Australians do NOT want this policy in any way, shape or form.
Let me repeat that. Average Aussies do NOT want any form of internet censorship. Not opt-in. Not opt-out. Not mandatory. NONE.
This is a blatant waste of tax payer funds on a policy which has zero chance of actually impacting on any of the stated goals.
Please use the funding earmarked for this white elephant on education for parents/children and to boost law enforcement resourcing.
Stopping the problem at the source has an exponentially greater positive impact.
Yours
James
Actually Kate there is no need for any changes to legislation. We already, yes already have a opt-in system. Anyone can use WebShield or iPrimus if they wish to have filtering. OR they can install a PC filter.
You know if anyone (kid or adult) can bypass a PC filter then they can bypass an ISP filter 10 times quicker, yes 10 times quicker. So PC filters are not a problem and actually afford the parent greater control over their internet connection than any old ISP filter that is bypassed using any number of privacy systems that your government promotes on a protecting your privacy web page.
Perhaps. I think you’re wrong about what “many Australians” would do, but there’s room to differ here.
See, here’s the thing:
People in your party say things like that, but I reckon you all know they aren’t true.
If they were true, WebShield would have more than 6000 customers — Or, at the very least, it’d have shown significant growth due to the the two and a half years worth of free publicity that Anthony Pillion has been able to arrange by making himself part of this debate.
I also know that Optus used to provide such services, but withdrew them due to lack of demand. And, in the most hilariously spectacular failure of all, you probably remember Senator Alston holding up Clairview Internet Sheriff in Queensland as a brilliant example of Australian technological innovation right up until EFA pointed out that it blocked the Liberal Party’s own website. Where’s Clairview now? Oh, right, they underwent commercial implosion too.
This country’s online history is replete with examples of companies linked to the Christian right springing into existence and claiming enormous untapped demand for censorship, followed by their inevitable bankruptcies. There is almost no public interest in these services whatsoever — Australians have overwhelmingly decided that the kind of Internet access they want is exactly the same kind of Internet access that their friends in the USA have, and they’ve comprehensively rejected any and all “offers” to control their internet viewing experience.
Again: You know what I’m saying is true. You can’t not know. So it’s difficult to assume that you’re carrying out this conversation with us in good faith — especially when this conversation is occurring after your party has spent two and a half years making stuff up about the internet.
I don’t think that’s true either. I’ve seen some ISPs say that Conroy has made “negotiation” so industry-hostile that they have no intention of doing anything about this until he either drops it or passes legislation. That’s very different from what you’ve just said.
You should also note that “industry” happens to be the only group that the illustrious Conroy is consulting with. Where’s the public engagement from your party to confirm that any of this stuff is needed at all? Y’know, the evidence for your evidence-based policy?
But let’s assume what you’ve said is true, and that “many” industry participants don’t want to move until everyone else does: So what?
Let them sit on their hands. Who cares?
These services are so resoundingly unpopular that it doesn’t matter whether “many large players” turn their backs on them, because the small handful of customers who actually want this stuff can be adequately serviced as long as at least a couple of acceptable filtered options exist in the marketplace.
We have those options right now: Just about everyone in Australia who is capable of connecting to broadband can acquire filtered broadband services from WebShield and iPrimus. Literally everyone who uses dialup internet access is only a local call away from filtered dialup from the same pair of providers. Literally everyone who uses any internet service whatsoever can use OpenDNS.
So what problem is the Government trying to solve? What policy vacuum are you trying to fill? The outcome your party wants is already ubiquitous.
By all means, if you feel like it’s important for ISPs to ask the question, then fine, say they have to ask the question.
But don’t say that they’re absolutely mandated to supply provably defective censored access to people who say they want it, when you’d get 100% exactly the same outcome if ISPs said, “Sorry, can’t help you, go to Webshield or iPrimus instead.”
At the very least, ISPs should be able to point out that Internet users can set up OpenDNS on their broadband routers to get free filtering if they wish. Perhaps ISP helpdesks should be legally required to support/assist customers with that where required (they already do, but your entire party is so pig-ignorant about the Internet that literally none of your fellow caucus members know that, and Conroy has convinced them that ISPs are recalcitrant bastards who do nothing. But, like, whatever.)
What policy outcome is neglected by allowing that option? What perceived problem are you actually solving by making the whole deal mandatory? I’ve been asking that question for three years and haven’t received a satisfactory answer yet.
I feel like I’m making a significant concession here by accepting that perhaps a mandatory question could be an acceptable come-down. It’s a big deal for me after I’ve spent so much time highlighting the benefits and mass public acceptance of the status quo.
But I don’t feel like you’re putting the same amount of skin in the game. Given that we both know that Jim Wallace’s band of happy clappers will engineer another moral panic in five years time, at which point your parliamentary colleagues will just fall over themselves to remove any remaining optionality, your current proposal smells exactly the same as Conroy’s, just with a built-in time-delay.
… unless ISPs can opt-out too. That changes things. That makes the compromise “adequate.” Not brilliant, and I’d still hold my nose whenever I talked about it. But “adequate.”
You know that a great many people are up in arms about the mandatory aspect. The Federal Government can end that social discord right now by following my advice, problem solved, everyone walks away happy.
Or you can keep spinning it out.
What do you want to achieve here? Compromise, or a different flavour of Conroy’s belligerence?
So here’s the other thing: Your legislation is now highly unlikely to make it to caucus before the next election. If Conroy had this as one of the KPIs Rudd said his front bench had in 2007, he’ll be sacked, right?
(right?)
Your party is travelling so badly in the polls that it’s almost inconceivable that you’ll end up with control of the senate. You’ll be lucky to keep the lower house if things keep trending the way they are. I know an increasing number of lifelong Labor voters who’d vote for a potplant if it promised to never join Labor, and I’m betting that you do too. And that’s without even considering WA and Qld, where the ALP is about as electable as Gonorrea.
Do you seriously expect that you’ll be able to get a legislative package through the Senate after the election if you don’t do something to quell the uproar that I highlighted above?
On this planet?
Or is what we’re doing here and now just an exercise in going through the motions?
I’m glad it’s starting to seep in. The fact that it’s taken nearly three years is, sadly, what most of us have come to expect. Perhaps they’ve all soundproofed their offices with pink batts to keep the voters out or something, I don’t know.
What I do know is that if your party treated, say, pensioners the way it treats Internet users, you’d have a greypower revolt on your hands.
There are more of us than there are of them, and we have longer memories, and we’re going to live through more elections than they will. Just sayin’.
Bank on it.
Thanks again. And please consider.
– mark
Hi Kate,
I’ve read a lot of the comment on this page with Interest. I’m actually surprised that after 3 years of peddling this policy and being asked direct questions, this impromptu forum seems to be the only place the issue is now being (belatedly) discussed with the policy makers with any kind of intelligence.
To your point below:
“I hear the point about ISPs not wanting to have to put in place any filter infrastructure, but many large players in the industry are apparently saying that if one of them should do it, then they should all do it. It is an ongoing debate and I presume part of the Minister’s consultation with the industry.”
I have two simple, yet logical responses.
1. The reason industry players are saying if one should have to do it they all should, is because they know there is absolutely no commercial justification for setting up the infrastructure. If anyone is exempt from being forced to set it up, that player has an unfair cost advantage. The fact that this is ‘apparently’ what players are saying demonstrates Conroy’s total lack of understanding of the ISP industry.
2. There clearly hasn’t been any fruitful consultation with the industry. That’s why we’re all here, screaming at the top of our lungs in the hope that someone will actually listen. Conroy has told so many lies and stumbled so badly on the fundamentals of Internet technology that no-one here trusts him to participate in any further discussion on this issue anyway.
I find Mark Newton’s posts insightful and at times hilarious (if not understandably exasperated), able to strike the exact chord with the Internet Industry as a whole, as we forever find the need to explain to politicians *again* how everything works and why their latest populist hare-brained scheme won’t work this time, either.
There’s no point trying to find a compromise with Caucus on this – as if they’d listen anyway. There is absolutely no part of this gormless policy that is defensible no matter what rose-coloured glasses you view it through. This issue, particularly Rudd and Conroy’s marginalised, hysterical, bigoted intransigence in the face of near total opposition is going to cost your party this election.
Take this to your meeting, instead: either they kill the policy dead and never bring it up again, or we’ll vote you back to the stone age from whence you came, and all the other good things you wanted to do while in power will be history as well. Yes, that’s how divisive this issue is for us. Some folks are even willing to try on that maniacal wingnut in preference to a party that’s gone deaf to its constituents.
As for you, Kate, you’re wasted in the company of Rudd and Conroy. Have you talked to Bob Brown lately?
Anthony,
There are 82 threads, each of many pages, on Whirlpool.net.au discussing this issue.
>Thank you all for the comments. I appreciate that some of you would prefer to have the policy removed completely.
While I understand that you believe that legislating the availability of an unfiltered, open internet service should quell some concerns, I have to agree with Mark Newton that I don’t see legislation as any kind of guarantee. Only a Bill of Rights or some such instrument that cannot be later amended by politicians at a whim might provide such a guarantee in perpetuity.
>I felt that requiring people as part of their relationship with their ISP to make an active choice about whether they want a filtered service or not would be a good compromise, one that many Australians would probably opt-in to.
Some Australians may opt-in to such a solution, based on their initial expectations more so than the reality of a filtered service, but I still don’t quite follow why such a solution would need to implemented at the ISP-level. Surely a PC-based filter would be better technology for an opt-in solution?
Stephen Conroy’s argument that dismisses PC-based filters because a teenager was able to disable one is no reason to go with an ISP-level filter as they are even easier for kids to bypass (just ask administrators in schools). A PC-based filter can be made more difficult for kids to disable if parents are shown how to setup separate user accounts (very easy to do with modern operating systems) with greater restrictions on what kids can actually change with their accounts. A PC-based filter is also considerably more configurable in what it will block, including access to peripherals such as web-cams which parents may want to disable until occasions when they can explicitly allow them to be used. In contrast, an ISP-level filter can be circumvented with any number of techniques (I think the Enex trials tested about 37 of them) that are just a search engine away, as such a filter is limited by not having control over the user’s PC.
If you are thinking that an ISP-level solution is an easier option for most people since they won’t need to install anything and can simply set and forget, then to me that seems like no solution at all. An ISP-level solution can’t filter https sites, and what happens if a parent wants access to a page that is blocked and temporarily changes or opts-out of the filtered access, then forgets to re-enable the filtered access? This will affect *ALL* PCs in the household that share the same internet access.
However, as has already been pointed out, there are existing ISPs that already offer an opt-in ISP-level filtered service. There is also the option of OpenDNS (filtering via DNS lookup) which will work on all ISPs and requires minimal changes to settings either on a home router or individual PCs.
>Keep in mind that although the RC filter has many limitations, many people *do* like the idea of blocking gambling, violent or other content they may personally object to. Although it would have to be personally customisable, this is a service that many people would choose even knowing that there would be some speed issues that accompany such rigourous filtering.
This is where I think you will have the most problems arguing your point of view with that of Stephen Conroy and also Kevin Rudd. Stephen Conroy has been arguing that the filter should be mandatory because Australians should not have access to RC material (a debate in itself that has raised awareness at just how bad our classification system has become), but at the same time acknowledges that the filter can be circumvented. He argues that, even though the filter will be useless in preventing access to RC material, that it should go ahead anyway because we have other laws that are subject to varying degrees of success but that that is no argument for not having those laws. You, on the other hand, seem to have the commonsense to realise that a mandatory filter is a fruitless policy far distorted from the original policy intent. Thanks for (implicitly) acknowledging that and good luck with persuading your colleagues who seem to have been on a power trip and have become deaf to many of us.
>I hear the point about ISPs not wanting to have to put in place any filter infrastructure, but many large players in the industry are apparently saying that if one of them should do it, then they should all do it. It is an ongoing debate and I presume part of the Minister’s consultation with the industry.
I don’t understand your point here. Until it is mandatory for ISPs to supply such a service, why should any one (or group of) ISP be made to do it? If you are talking about an opt-in filter, surely ISPs will opt-in to provide such a service if there is sufficient demand to make it commercially viable? iPrimus already offers such a service I believe. If they have lost money on their investment, then I can understand why their management would be arguing for their competitors to be similarly disadvantaged by the cost impost of the required infrastructure.
Just on this issue, if it is mandated that ISPs provide a filtered service, perhaps you can explain to me why the industry (and ultimately its customers) should be made to fund such a service (particularly if the service is optional to use) rather than the Australian tax payer? It will be like a hidden tax on internet users when I believe it should be a general tax, as I have absolutely no need whatsoever for a filtered service. I have been an internet user for close to twenty years now and I have never been accidentally exposed to anything that would warrant a filtered service.
>As the legislation hasn’t even been presented to the Labor Caucus yet, we are yet to formally consider it. You should be aware that through the many letters, emails and other correspondence sent to my colleagues, there is a growing awareness about the controvesy surrounding the policy, and as you know I will be working to turn the policy around.
You should probably let your colleagues know that, I for one have decided to vote for the Greens (and voting below the line to place Labor last) in the senate based on this issue alone. I’m still deciding whether or not I can risk voting for Labor in the lower house (I did in 2007), which is a pity because your party does have some other policies that I support and would like to see come to fruition.
As others have mentioned, the opt-in option is already available in Webshield, netnanny and other means that have been around for years. NOTHING needs to be done by you, if that is really your belief.
The compulsory ISP version is just a legislation change away from being compulsory for all, at some time in the future.
The sooner the ALP see this policy as a vote loser the better.
The sooner the Libs see it as a vote winner the better.
Hopefully someone in either party will catch on sooner or later.
Having said that, anyone with any sense would think that the government has had enough with losing their popularity be now.
All this for a promise that Jim Wallace said was made to the ACL before the Rudd government was even elected.
That’s not what I call a government for all Australians.
“Keep in mind that although the RC filter has many limitations, many people *do* like the idea of blocking gambling, violent or other content they may personally object to. Although it would have to be personally customisable, this is a service that many people would choose even knowing that there would be some speed issues that accompany such rigourous filtering.”
As has been stated, if all these mythical people want to choose that, let them.
Send them to Webshield. I’m sure they’ll be overjoyed with millions of new customers.
Hi Kate
I refer to your comment:
‘Keep in mind that although the RC filter has many limitations, many people *do* like the idea of blocking gambling, violent or other content they may personally object to.’
Here is a link to a suggestion to Conroy and the Joint Select Committee on Cybersafety:
http://www.hhgproject.org/entries/perilsensitivesunglasses.html
I have it on good authority that it will be more useful than a panic button or internet filter and better value for money.
A home filter is a pretty innovative idea though, I mean its not like it has been thought of before (and dumped prematurely due to low take up).
http://www.news.com.au/technology/netalert-web-filters-dumped-over-holidays/story-e6frfro0-1111118667453
['"Only about 2 per cent of households with dependent age children and an internet connection (were) using the filter," he said.']
Pretty similar to all recent polls in the newspapers showing 98% against the internet filter.
Kate: The ALP garnered up a lot of goodwill from progressives for not being as socially regressive as the Howard regime.
This has all been spent by Conroy who appears to spend more time with his ACL cronies rather than industry experts.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/349271/conroy_yet_meet_google-backed_anti-isp_filter_group/
I doubt this will be an election changing issue, but its no surprise that the Greens are polling about 16% of the vote nowadays. Hear that sound Kate? Its the sound of progressives abandoning both major parties.
Kate: I personally think you would make a great Broadband and Communications minister and the ALP can’t make that move soon enough. At least you have a better grasp of ‘the portal’.
Hi Kate,
Thank you for still being willing to communicate with the people of Australia, if only there were more polititians like you. I truly admire your efforts to engage with us.
I fully endorse Mark Newton’s statements however and can assure you and your colleagues that while Labor has this total dog of a policy on, under, or anywhere near the table it *will* not have my vote and I will do everything in my power to encourage my friends and family to likewise register their dismay and disgust by voting against Labor.
This mandatory filter, if forced upon the nation WILL be abused by future governments. There is no doubt in my mind of this and any attempt to enact it must be and will be resisted.
Hi Kate.
While agreeing with Mark Newton’s comments I also acknowledge your political bravery in opposing your party’s misguided position regarding net censorship.
One thing I would like to point out. Apart from its inherent insult to a democratic society, the minister seems to have difficulty realising how politically poisonous this policy is. The recent polls on mainstream media outlets, when framed in unbiased terms, consistently and unanimously show almost total opposition to the filter. The numbers are in the tens of thousands, on media ranging from Sunrise to the SMH and show that even the general public are gradually being woken up by Conroy’s public statements which seem increasingly vague, imprecise and vindictive to opponents. Obvious desperation is never a good look.
When a mainstream retiree like me can consider switching his lifelong vote based solely on this issue it should tell you something.
ps: Have a word with the AG while you are at it, the border control “have you got any porn?” declaration question is up there with the filter as an international ridicule magnet, an insult to our national maturity and a sop to that opposition clown from Tasmania.
I admire your position Kate, and i hope that you really do manage to change the Labor party policy on this issue to something more reasonable.
But do you honestly think you have any hope of succeeding? I mean with the recent comments by Conroy on Google “hoovering data”, and Kevin Rudd’s backing of his statements, will it be possible to change their opinions when they are so clearly technically illiterate and yet think they know their stuff?
–
Asside: The comments by Conroy on Google are wrong because your sensitive data should be encrypted by SSL (https). If you were using unsecure websites, and unsecure wifi connection is the least of your concerns. Also, if you have an unsecured wifi connection, Google having a tiny portion of probably encrypted data is the least of your concerns. You should probably pay more attention to the kids down the street using your internet connection or “hoovering” your data, or the secret paedophile down the road using your connection for illegal pruposes.
–
I really DO hope you succeed however, so all the best to you. Unfortunately, if this isn’t resolved by the time the election comes around, i’ll be voting Liberals in the house of Reps and the Greens in the senate. Today’s comments about Google from Rudd were the last straw for me and labour. Unless some IT policies get changed, i won’t vote for Labor again until Rudd and Conroy are gone.
–
Phil
Gen Y
The real shame about the Internet Filter is that it is hiding some real issues associated with privacy. Its very hard to take Senator Conroy seriously about anything even when he does raise valid issues.
We need less discussion on filtering and more on privacy.
If your not concerned about what the Google’s are collecting then you are blissfully unaware. Much information available but see the following for some starters:
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/10mar/slides/plenaryt-5.pdf
http://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf
“many large players in the industry are apparently saying that if one of them should do it, then they should all do it”
Does this mean that no large ISP is putting up their hand to piss their money against a wall by introducing ISP level filters unnecessarily? Maybe they believe there is little demand for such services? Why dont you believe them?
I did not pick up on that bit.
Kate by “should” i assume you imply that if it is legislated yes if 1 MUST they all MUST but we dont want that i am sure the ISP dont want to HAVE to do that.
Let them chose to do it under no compulsion from the government (Choice!), maybe give a incentive but dont force!
Also as mentioned why cant or why haven’t more people joined Webshield a Australian ISP servicing all of Australia ??
Kane
I’ve a question.
In the UK, over 98% of residential broadband connections are filtered by UK ISPs against a list of known child sexual abuse URLs.
One UK ISP, BT, blocks 40,000 access attempts to known child sexual abuse URLS every day. In Australia, that would amount to 40,000 unique preventions of a criminal act occurring.
This activity is undertaken voluntarily and is paid for by UK ISPs. What’s more, the UK ISP industry funds the ‘hotline’ that investigates complaints and administers the filtering scheme.
Contrast this with Australia. Under the current scheme, AU ISPs make money from censorship by charging filter software providers for the privilege of having their products ‘accredited’ – even if those products are subsequently proved to be inadequate. AU ISPs refuse to take any reasonable, voluntary steps to prevent the dissemination of child sexual abuse material on the world wide web seemingly because it will cost them some money.
Here’s my question – is the UK ISP industry more or less socially responsible than the AU ISP industry?
“Contrast this with Australia. Under the current scheme, AU ISPs make money from censorship by charging filter software providers for the privilege of having their products ‘accredited’ – even if those products are subsequently proved to be inadequate.”
Ummm Care to backup that statement with some evidence.
Whats the ‘accredited’ bit, i know of now AUS-ISP Approved Filter Accreditation that ISP charge for ?? (Maybe Telstra do this, wouldn’t surprise me).
The only ISP’s i deal with dont have filtering software they offer because… there is no demand
Do AUS Post offer a filtered postal service that prevents “accidental” access to child porn ?
Does Telstra or other phone companies offer phone connections that are filtered to stop “illegal information” ??? (IE Dialup connection to private computer in the US hosting Child porn) ???
No because that is stupid!
Happy for you to provide any evidence to back up what you have said though!
Kane
Your post is incorrect.
Please see –
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1452589&r=24187109#r24187109
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1452589&r=24231531#r24231531
Your question is pointless as evidenced in the above posts from Mark.
Social responsibility was not the driving factor behind UK internet filtering.
Yours
James
I very much doubt that any ISPs see any profits from the accreditation process – if anything, all the profits would go to Enex Testlab, the company who performs the assessment.
As to which is more “socially responsible,” that would be the Australian ISP industry.
1) Australian ISPs are bound by the Telecommunications Interception Act to NOT evesdrop on what their customers are doing, unless ordered to by law enforcement (it’s called a warrant).
2) If someone in the UK has a list of “known child abuse URLs,” they should do the “socially responsible” thing and forward that list to the police, so that the material can be traced and deleted.
40,000 wow this has grown from the 30,000 reported and retracted when challenged. See how stats feed of themselves.
Tell me where are the 40,000 arrests that occurred after this info was turned over to the police as required.
Nowhere. The figures were a misrepresentation, and the police proved it by nil arrests from that info.
Really? You’ll have to take IWF’s word for that. As it happens, they’ve already blown their trust on that count by blacklisting The “Virgin Killers” album cover on Wikipedia, and when their list leaks like all the others have I’m pretty sure that we’ll find that it’s every bit as dreck-laden as Australia’s is.
Do you seriously believe that stat, Kingsley? That equates to 14.6 million attempts per annum out of a country with a population of 51 million, meaning that if you aren’t a pedophile then one of your next door neighbours probably is — All happening in an environment where anyone who seriously wants to access that kind of material knows how to do it without being blocked, logged, or detected in any way at all.
I have this vision of a nation that’s chock-full of incredibly stupid pedophiles who sit in their room clicking, “Refresh,” all day. “Nope, still blocked. What about now…?”
BT certainly doesn’t believe the stat. After the little brain-explosion which lead to its publication, they “clarified” it in response to incredulous questioning from The Register by saying that they were actually counting attempts to access the same IP addresses as blacklisted URLs, rather than the blacklisted URLs themselves, and were unable to determine how many of those “access attempts” were caused by real humans, and how many were caused by malware doing IP address scans.
With that explanation I’m kinda surprised that the 40,000 number is so low.
Exetel found the same kind of ratio when they tested the Watchdog Whitebox, claiming tens of thousands of log hits in a fortnight, which either means that the stats are counting something different to what you think they’re counting, or that Exetel has been spectacularly successful at marketing themselves to the dirty-old-man-in-a-raincoat demographic.
I know which alternative I believe.
No, they don’t. The IIA charges fee-for-service for an accreditation which verifies that they’re capable of using ACMA’s dodgy blacklist. But if participants selling products they claim will protect children take shortcuts, shouldn’t they bear the responsibility for cleaning up their own mess?
Far less.
Do you know why they implemented their system?
It isn’t due to their belief in sweetness and rainbows like Senator Conroy implies.
They implemented it because a drafting quirk in the UK’s child protection laws potentially makes all intermediaries involved in accessing child abuse material criminally liable. In the late 1990′s UK ISPs were absolutely terrified that if any of their customers ever accessed a single item of child porn, ISP staff would be facing criminal charges.
Their legal advice strongly suggested that they should show that they’d taken best-effort steps to prevent access, so they created the IWF and a bunch of prophylactic ISP censorware systems to protect themselves from lawsuits.
It was not, is not, and never has been about child protection. It’s about saving their own skin from criminal liability under UK censorship law by hiding under a blanket and hoping the problem will go away.
Our laws are significantly more progressive in this area than theirs ever were, and our system understands the notion that carriers and ISPs are unwitting participants in customers’ data transfers. There’s never been any suggestion that Australian ISPs would wear liability.
So we’re not under the same legal conditions that UK ISPs have been under. The things that drove them to do it don’t exist here. (or in the USA. Or in Germany. Or in Sweden. Or in Tanzania. Or in Vietnam. Or in Norway. Or in pretty much everywhere else on the planet except the UAE, Iran and China)
Turning your question around a bit: The UK doesn’t have a Refused Classification category, and films like Baise Moi, The 70K Krew and Ken Park have been freely available to adults ever since they were published.
Is there something about people in the UK that makes them stronger, more resilient, less stupid, less likely to turn into rapists and axe-murderers in response to private choices about popular entertainment than us feeble, terrified nannied Australians who need the Government to restrict RC content for our own protection?
Maybe it’s something in their water.
It must be the water, because as far as our saintly Australian Government is concerned, those strapping virile specimens of strong-minded human perfection turn into quivering hopeless fearful bedwetting vassals as soon as they get off the plane in Sydney, needing every bit as much “protection” from RC as the rest of us weaklings. I bet they’re glad the Government is here to help, imagine how awful it’d be for them if they had as much access to RC content here as they have at home.
Yes. It’s definitely the water.
– mark
@kane
try reading the Internet Industry’s Code of Practice. You’ll see that under the code, all AU ISPs have to offer filter products ‘accredited’ by the AU ISP industry. Accreditation costs $20K. AU ISPs are then required to offer those products to their customers at cost price or less. They also have to regularly advertise those products. If the ISPs you deal with don’t follow the code – this is a reason to change the system. Care to name names? I know my ISP doesn’t follow it (I’node)
The government spends millions every year filtering the post for illegal material? Similarly they spend millions intercepting voice traffic. In any case we’re talking about the www – not the post. Why does everyone use these analogies to make their points? Aren’t we intelligent enough to simply agree that ISPs are able to effectively block a list of known child sex abuse URLs as they do in Canada, US, UK, Scandinavia, Italy etc.
btw – you didn’t answer my question.
Mark has the detail for you again here -
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1452589&r=24190198#r24190198
But you are diverting from the issue. It can be done. Many things can be done. It still won’t remove a single child abuse image from the web, stop a single act of child abuse from occuring or catch a single child abuser.
The aims of the Labor Cyber Safety policy can easily be met by discarding ISP level filtering, providing education for parents/children/teachers, increading funding for law enforcement efforts against child abuse and so on.
Yours
James
The answer to your question is half the part of the debate is it not.
Who decides what is socially acceptable ??
Some closed doors government office where you dont actually know what is being blocked as do with other censored material.
Also how can you compare filtering RC which includes legal material with other countries targeting child porn ?
“Aren’t we intelligent enough to simply agree that ISPs are able to effectively block a list of known child sex abuse URLs as they do in Canada, US, UK, Scandinavia, Italy etc.”
Well that is debatable. They dont “block” anything they place a easily by passable “wall” if you can even call it that between a user and content.
Which hardly flawless, and does nothing to actually STOP child porn.
Also, you comment about BT blocking 40k URL’s a day, that comment was retracted
(I cant find the article, but if you pop over to Whirlpool forums someone will find it quick smart i am sure)
To use a patronizing comment like you and Conroy both seam to like to use.
Aren’t we intelligent enough to rely on the laws we have in place already. You do bad you get punished.
If it is about filtering morally objectionable/socially objectionable content then that is a matter for people/families to decide for themselves not you, not the government!
If it is about stopping crime… Well that is just absurd, it wont, cant stop anyone from doing anything.
As to the code of practice business, i will have to do a bit more reading as i am lacking in knowledge in that area, but i will say this as you said your ISP does not adhere to it (Which is not a legal requirement if i am correct?) have you spoke to them about that, after all you are “socially” responsible person ??
What was thier response ?
To the fee part. ISP are not profiting as you said then, the IIA are. Are there not other industry associations that do very similar if not the same thing.
Same you don’t know the facts. If you have factual references then I would be happy to read them. But under Australian law it is illegal for Australia Post to open mail. (except in dead letter office)
It is illegal for anyone (incl govn) to intercept phone calls. The only exception is the police (not govn) after obtaining a warrant. No warrant no interception. They do not monitor every phone call which is what the www filter does.
If a Child sex abuse URL is known then it will not be put on any blacklist, but will be dealt with by AFP or international police. CSA material is illegal everywhere in the world and the poorer a nation the more the people protect their young/future, and the poorer the internet infrastructure (ie no hosting services to host the crap)
Fund the AFP to track down the crims rather than pretend it is not there using a filter that would never have a CSA URL on it as the police will have it removed in hours and the crims arrested.
Oh wait I see now the filter is to replace the CSA unit of the AFP and save lots of money.
“Aren’t we intelligent enough to simply agree that ISPs are able to effectively block a list of known child sex abuse URLs as they do in Canada, US, UK, Scandinavia, Italy etc.”
As they do in the US??
@ Kingsley A
in all countries you mentioned there is no, i repeat NO MANDATORY internet filtering. Check your fact before posting. Blocking Child pornography does not stop a child being abused, but simply hiding the fact…. Let me put in prospective.
You’re walking down the street and in the side alleyway you notice a rape is going on. You want to call the police, but what senator Conroy proposes is to put blanket over it, policeman (internet filter) saying move on there is nothing to see here… But the rape is still going on.
It would be only matter of time until the scope of filtering is made wider, broader to including political speech or perhaps something government may find offensive to their election campaign…
Think about it…..
I oppose The Filter, WITH OR WITHOUT opt-in or opt-out amendments.
The Filter as proposed does NOT achieve its stated aims, or is way too easily circumvented (same result), worthy as some of those aims may be.
“…legislated protection of an unfiltered, open Internet service…” (whether opt-in or opt-out) is a short-term voter-grabbing &/or pro-filter-lobbyist-placating carrot. A future government, likely Liberal, won’t hesitate to change that if they consider it politically expedient.
Once that filter infrastructure goes in, it’s merely a stroke of the pen to change its application to become mandatory.
Voting for Liberal at the next election is out of the question for me. But nor will I vote for Labor directly, because of The Filter & that clueless git pushing that shit up hill; because of the abandoned ETS; & because you both so willingly resurrected the ‘boat people’ issue to become a political football _again_.
It’s been said in these words, but that it is real is just unbelievable to me: Labor is on the brink of “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory”. And I’m taking this message to my friends via every social networking tool at my disposal.
Kate I hope you get the job back as it spokesperson or shadow minister when the alp is ousted at the next election. Conroy should never have got the job. I appreciate your stance but as Mark points out it is only adequate as long as the ISPs are not compelled to offer an opt in service.
I can’t believe you said people want protection from gambling online. You agreed on air with me in 1999 that the gambling bans were pointless. We block Australian businesses setting up online gambling so now we just gamble at a us or european casino. However we can gamble on horses and the footy. It’s a nonsense and you know it. Both alston and conroy are peas in a pod. Making noises to the public about protecting them from online nasties whilst doing nothing except wasting tax $.
I thought this issue would be a deal breaker for you. I honestly thought you would resign from the party over this. My cynicism in politicians is stronger than ever. Why on earth would i contribute to any other government forum? It is clear this government has nothing but contempt for the industry. Even though we have been marching on the street, spent countless hours fighting this filter, the govt refuses to listen. There is no way I am going to waste another second given feedback to any online govt initiative. The govt purely wants our involvement in gov2.0 etc for a press release.
Referendum. Surely an open and transparent vote by all eligble citizens would solve this once and for all? Rudd was prepared to put the Health reform to a vote on the basis that the states were in disagreement so why not this? Otherwise you could wait until the election, you’ve lost my vote.
I find it laughable the only 2 posts pro-filter have been debunked straight away. This happens continuously, everywhere.
I hope every one of you that are against the censorship have signed http://efa.org.au/petition
I don’t really have a right to be posting on this sort of forum. I don’t know fancy politics lingo or ways to convince people who voluntarily put blindfolds on themselves. But I just want to let the Labour party know that I told everyone not to vote for the ALP. I told everyone before the election that something like this would happen. John Howard may have been a tiny weasel but atleast he could actually run a country.
The ALP has done nothing but waste money and then giggle at themselves like 12 year old girls. Nodding at each other to signify what a great job they were doing and how proud they were of each other.
I read the paper every morning and think “What have we done to this country?”. Idiot move after idiot move has been made by this government until the choices have lead them here. For centuries the Australian public will remember the ALP with disgust.
Would you like to know the reason why?
Because you did it. You have sent this country to a place that it can never come back from. You hugged yourselves with delight when you came up with the plan that would put ANY government body in complete control of everything we watched, listened to or read. YOU did this.
There is no way back from here. It is a slow descent into nothingness from here. No matter who comes into power next election this plan will never go away. What government would possibly give up that kind of power and control?
In 50 years when the whole of our country exists in chains and you think to yourselves. How did this happen? How did we get here? I hope that you remember these words. Because its your fault.
It took me about ten minutes to reformat the ACMA Block List for AdBlock Plus and protect my daughter from what the government regards as the worst content on the web. Ironically, I had to get the list from Wikileaks.
All the government need do is to publish a list. Those that want to “opt in” can use it, using whatever technology suits them. Those that want to “opt out” need do nothing. ISPs need not be involved at all.
I want Mark Newton for P.M!
Seconded – mark for PM!
1. Do Australian’s want this?
No, if that were the case. Webshield would be the largest ISP in Australia. Clearly it isnt.
2. This will protect children.
Not one single child will be protected by this. You’re drawing a curtain across the problem and pretending it doesnt exist rather than pursuing those criminally responsible.
3. Above RC will be blocked.
Let me ask this, which is faster? A public servant within ACMA reviewing a website, making a decision then potentially adding to a list or reconfiguring a webpage to appear at a new URL or IP address? I can tell you, it takes less than 5 minutes to change website location. ACMA’s turnaround has been measured in months.
4. A retired ‘judge’ will be in charge of vetting the list
For starters, if something were on the list that shouldnt be, how long is it on that list before it is detected and what penalties apply for any government if there is something on there that should not have been? Then we’ve got the Rudd government showing that it will sidestep its own rules to get what it needs (mining advertising). What guarantee could the government ever possibly give that the retired judge will be removed from the location or a future coalition or labor government will do the same? You can’t guarantee what a future government does. Conroy said he would be among those that stand up and say “Wait a minute.” Well the whole industry has been standing up and saying “Wait a minute.” It has fallen on deaf ears.
5. The filter will stop facebook bullying and myspace suicides.
The filter will do no such thing, it is irresponsible of Minister Conroy to insinuate that it can or will.
It has become obvious over the last two years that Labor’s proposal to censor the internet at ISP level is about censoring adults and has little to do with children. There is no hard evidence to support this proposal. Labor seems to have an obsession with pornography and sex. Where on earth did this come from? Labor of 20 years ago did not have such an obsession.
In fact, Labor was far more progressive in 2003, a mere seven years ago, than now. The pressure is certainly not coming from the general population. Until Kim Beazley mentioned censoring the internet in one of his races to the bottom in the Howard (Harridine) era, this level of obsession with interfering with adults was not part of party policy. Most people are quite happy with the status quo. There is no demand in support of this. Is it so hard to accept that the Australian Christian Lobby represents a tiny group of people. In all of Victoria, Family First received less than 6,000 primary votes in the Senate. Since when was Australia managed on the basis of the views of such a tiny group of socially conservative voters. The other 17 million adults in Australia are being ignored.
With the world full of real, serious issues is an obsession with preventing adults accessing pornography a major priority? How on earth did Labor dig themselves into this hole? Did Labor really believe that the vast majority of Australian adults felt strongly enough to make this a priority. The very low take up of NetAlert should have indicated that Australian internet users were competent to determine their own parameters of internet usage. ACMA’s own reports of internet usage in Australia clearly indicates that the majority of Australians, including parents, are happy and comfortable with the way they manage the internet. The biggest area of dissatisfaction relates to costs and service provider attitudes to customers. Why have Labor stepped so far outside the general population on this one issue? Why no public consultation whatever on this issue when almost all other policies have accepted public comment?
The introduction of generic “children” in almost every comment about the internet reeks of propaganda techniques. As do Senator Conroy’s attempts to induce moral panics and defame and vilify the internet industry and internet users at every opportunity. We need better than this. Would the Health Minister treat health providers and patients with the level of contempt that the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy treats his providers and users?
It is almost as though the last 20 years of computer and internet use didn’t happen and it was something new in the last two or three years. It is quite obvious that very few politicians are technically minded and even more obvious that very few of our elected representatives have any real idea of how most people use computers and the internet. How is it that politicians become so detached and closeted? Do they hold driving licences or are they waiting for man with the flag? Even the use of the prefix “cyber” is quaint and not current usage. I can almost see Labor leading the charge to protect the buggy whip makers from those new fangled motor cars.
I’ve been using computers and on line services since the days of 300 baud modems. I’m now a grandmother. I’m not interested in pornography and frankly, over the last 25 years, I’ve rarely come across it and there is an off button if I don’t like what is happening. The internet is not a broadcast medium. Users choose what and where they’d like to interact. Broadcast media are static and serve a single offering. The internet doesn’t work like television. This is basic knowledge out here in the normal world.
The secret proceedings of the Working Group on Cyber-Safety, with no member of the legal profession, no civil liberties groups and no major user groups is clear evidence that Labor has only consulted those that already agree with the proposal: a handpicked group of toadies most of whom have a direct financial relationship of some kind with the government. Public consultation my foot!
The fact that ACMA and DBCDE are refusing access to many documents under Freedom of Information is indicative of the contempt that vast majority of Australian are being treated.
You will never see most ordinary constituents in your office. The silent majority don’t approach their MPs or Senators because they have no reason to do so. Do you all seriously believe that lobby groups represent most voters? You are now finding out that this particular lobby group doesn’t and it’s reflecting in opinion polls. If you can’t see an orchestrated letter writing campaign for what it really is, you shouldn’t be in politics.
Mark Newton has made several commonsense suggestions as to how the government can assist fearful people. All modern operating systems have built-in parental controls and I use these with my grandchildren to limit them to usage suitable for their age level on the computer and the internet.
How about subsidising home visits from suitable technicians to help families set up system controls and software if they are interested. I’ll bet hard money that it will far cheaper than any proposal to introduce censorship for the entire adult population.
Labor is losing the progressive AND youth vote by pursuing policies that belong in the conservative play book. I will not be voting Labor in the next election and this policy is the main reason. I did not vote Labor in the last state election. I’d love to see an NBN, but the hamfisted, unprofessional management of communications policies does not inspire confidence.
Kate,
If you’d like to propose a win-win-win exit strategy to your party: Simply offer a monthly rebate for families using a family-friendly isp service. Win for Labor because you’d regain some morsel of credibility. Win for families because it would _actually_ help protect kids. And win for the rest of us so we can ease up on the (well-placed) nerdrage all the time.
I’d rather the Liberals put forward this strategy to wipe the floor with Conroy, but this debate is distracting and I need to get back to work. Not to mention that it can’t be good for my ol’ ticker.
Ralph.
There are a number of factors that I find repugnant about the whole filter. These include;
The filter is being backed by the Australian Christian Lobby who have said they would like to see websites on abortion, gay rights, safe sex, euthanasia and non christian religions blocked. So much for freedom of speech or information!
Conroy has tried to stifle debate on the issue by claiming anyone against the filter is a paedophile or a criminal. What next? Speak out about the filter and Conroy makes sure you end up in a camp?
The fact that polls show 99% of 70,000+ people on the SMH site (as one example) are against the filter, and yet the ALP continues to push ahead with it. Obviously your collegues are not listening to the electorate – visions of John Howard!
Sorry Kate, I know you are trying to get the mandatory filter reviewed but as long as Labor continues to push this, I will not be voting for your party.
(continued)
Or, if you want to get fancy: How about instead funding an Australian branch of the OpenDNS servers? There’s no sense telling computers where (via DNS lookup) to find a nasty website only to block it! Australian ISPs would happily recommend the settings to families.
I have to agree with Mark Newton’s comments above. But I would add a few of points.
Firstly, the fact that the ALP is persisting in this plan, despite the overwhelming rejection of it (for the reasons given) by virtually everyone who actually understands the internet and the plan, strongly suggests that the ALP has an ulterior motive. It may not, but neither Senator Conroy, nor anyone in ACMA could possibly be so ignorant as to really believe that it would work – could they? Given this, you have to assume that there is an ulterior motive, the only question is what this motive is.
The obvious one is to make the filter available for political censorship, as this is the only practical use for it – to hide from naive users (voters) information the government of the day would prefer not to have made public, at least until the secret list is published by which time it won’t matter (hopefully).
Another possibility is that it is to set in place a filter that can be expanded to try and control copyright piracy, with either direct payment or promised editorial support offered to the ALP in return.
A third possibility is to follow the money trail – who stands to make a lot of money out of the policy? Filterware vendors – no doubt with part of the proceeds promised to the ALP.
Now it is quite possible none of these or other unsavoury implications are correct – but the more the ALP continues to push the filter in the face of all the evidence, and engages in secrecy about it, the more likely does one or more of these appear to be the real reason. And any of them blackens the ALP.
There are four questions that need to be answered “yes” before proceeding with the plan -
1. Should we censor the internet? You won’t get an agreed answer to this, as it is a matter of opinion.
2. Can the internet be censored effectively? All the evidence says NO.
3. Will the “Conroy” plan, in any of its incarnations work? NO (size of the internet vs size of blacklist, static list vs dynamic web, complaints based system, ease of bypoassing etc etc).
4. Will the advantages of the plan outweight the drawbacks? NO.
Opt-in should mean for both the users and the ISP’s. Requiring all ISP’s to install censorship equipment will create extra costs for the ISP’s and you can be sure they will take te cheapest option if they are forced to do this against their wishes.
As others have said, if there was a market for filtered internet connections, Webshiled would have a lot more customers than they do. It honestly wouldn’t even bother me if the government subsidised the ISP’s that do CHOOSE to offer a filtered service.
I prefer the status quo, but I would except an Opt-in system as long as the opt-in applied to both the customer and the ISP
Kate,
This sounds like common sense to me. I would be quite happy with the Opt-Out option, although I would certainly choose to opt out.
Regards,
Allan
The only “website” list longer than the RC/ban website “black list” will be the list of Proxy servers available to circumvent it. I fully expect my ISP will run their own, of course i expect it will be Opt-in and automaticly configured by my ISP brower setup kit.
Your filter is a small country town somewhere with a National Highway running thru the middle of it. The small town bypass has already been built. Nothing left to do but put up the sign… “bypass this way ->”.
My tax $ at work. /sigh.
Bravo Kate – you must be the only Labor politician that understands what’s going on.
I hope for all our sake’s the rest of cabinet sees the sanity in your proposal.
Mark Newton is right, Senator Lundy’s proposals are fundamentally flawed (which is unfortunate, since her heart’s in the right place and she’s actually prepared to speak out on the matter. I like her – how often to you get to say that about a politician?).
Nothing’s changed, I’m still going to vote against the ALP (even if I haven’t committed to a particular party or candidate yet. I know that the ALP doesn’t deserve my vote).
Kate,
It’s clear from both your demonstrated understanding of the issues and your attempts (however constrained by party discipline) to mitigate the worst aspects of Conroy’s policy, that our nation’s communications policy and infrastructure would be far better in your hands than in those of a man who can’t work his own iPhone. Sadly, it seems for now the powers that be in the ALP prefer Conroy’s bungling, belligerent portal-plugging. However, you could step into the role after it is vacated due to an electoral upset, couldn’t you?
I realise you won’t be voting in Victoria, but please feel free to recommend http://filter-conroy.org to anyone who will be – the ALP’s credibility on Communications policy is going to need all the help it can get after the election!
I really have very little new to add to this topic which has not been said so far. While I appluad Kate’s bravery in standing up to the stupidity in her own party, an opt in/out option to the legislation does not go far enough. Either would be the thin end of the wedge for freedom of informatoin in this country.
What new thing I do have ti add is I’m a permament resident, but the proposal of this filter has prompted me to apply for citizenship for the soel reason of voting against the ALP in the next election and Conroy in the next senate elections.
While we may not be able to make Conroy learn about his portfolio we can do our best to take it away from him.
Thank you for trying, Kate.
Good job!
A policy like this is required to secure the IT vote. At the moment we have a choice between Conroy’s clean feed and Abbott’s abolition of the NBN (and probably inevitbable clean feed).
Ms Lundy,
Thank you for having the courage to allow comments on your blog.
The only thing worse than disabling comments, would be if you removed comments that were against internet filtering / censorship.
The significance of this should not be understated.
-Conroy shut down the Future Directions Blog when it was swamped with comments critical of internet censorship.
-Conroy censored filtering terms from his own website’s tag cloud.
-Conroy runs a secret, ISP only censorship discussion forum, which he only admitted to the existence of after he was caught out.
Those are just three examples of appalling and unethical behaviour online. We shouldn’t take ethical behaviour for granted.
Dear Mark Newton
Do you have any evidence to prove what you said about the UK situation? You indicated that UK ISPs only started blocking a known list of child sexual abuse sites because of a fear of legislation drafted in the 1990s? Yet UK ISPs implemented ISP filtering in 2004?
Do you have the text of this legislation you’re referring to? Because I’ve read the relevant current legislation and there’s no way that ISPs carry the liability you’ve claimed they do. Which begs the question – why do all UK ISPs still filter a list of known child sexual abuse URLs?
Also, why does the Chair of your industry association (the IIA) refer to the UK ISP filtering model as world’s best practice? Do you disagree with him? Why doesn’t Internode comply with the existing self-regulatory industry code of practice?
The Exetel stats come from network engineers at a mid-tier/tier 3 ISP just like the one you’re lobbying for yet they managed to put their commercial interests to one side. Are they wrong…. along with BT….but you’re right?
Mark – do you have any evidence to prove what you said about the UK situation? You indicated that UK ISPs only started blocking a known list of child sexual abuse sites because of a fear of legislation drafted in the 1990s? Yet UK ISPs implemented ISP filtering in 2004?
Do you have the text of this legislation you’re referring to? Because I’ve read the relevant current legislation and there’s no way that ISP carry the liability you’ve claimed they do. Which begs the question – why do all UK ISPs still filter a list of known child sexual abuse URLs?
Also, why does the Chair of your industry association (the IIA) refer to the UK ISP filtering model as world’s best practice? Do you disagree with him? WHy doesn;t Internode comply with the existing self-regulatory industry code of practice?
The Exetel stats come from network engineers at a mid-tier ISP just like the one you’re lobbying for yet they managed to put their commercial interests to one side. Are they wrong…. along with BT….but you’re right?
You work for an ISP that stands to lose money by implementing systems to block access to known child sexual abuse material. Why is your opinion any more valid on this issue than a salesperson that works for a company that sells ISP filter hardware?
Phillipa,
If the UK’s system is so great, then why did it accidentally block access to all of Wikipedia in 2008?
You speak of ISPs blocking access to known child sexual abuse material: there are two problems here.
1. As everyone here should be well aware, the proposed filter will fail to block deliberate access in any meaningful sense thanks to the extreme ease with which it will be able to be bypassed. It may serve to block inadvertent access, granted, but is there any evidence that this is an issue that requires such a drastic censorship apparatus be installed? That is, are Australian internet users really stumbling across CSA material on a regular basis? They are most certainly stumbling across other Refused Classification material (at least I am), but that’s because the definition of RC is so wide.
2. What known child sexual abuse material?
Senator Conroy has made some noises in the past regarding using a list supplied by the Internet Watch Foundation, though he hasn’t said anything about that recently. That list probably genuinely does contain URLs pointing to child pornography. It quite possibly contains material that isn’t illegal, but that cannot be verified thanks to a lack of oversight (which is why importing the list for use in Australia wholesale is probably a bad idea).
As for our homegrown ACMA-compiled list: by the time it was leaked (three times) to Wikileaks, there simply was no child sexual abuse material on it. A lot of legal websites, yes. Several suspicious-looking URLs, yes. But no CSA material. Was there at some point? Perhaps. But ACMA takes on average at least 2 months to respond to a single complaint from the public – even if someone is stupid enough to host child pornography on the open web when they rightly risk severe legal penalties no matter what country they are in, it’s hard to imagine that that content would survive online for the time it takes for ACMA to classify it (or refer it to the CB) and place it on the blacklist.
Senator Conroy’s proposal is terrible for a great number of reasons, but even reducing its scope from RC to CSA material would not save it: http://www.cleanternet.org/ illustrates why nicely.
Phillipa,
A few seconds of online research would have told you that not all UK ISPs censor content. You’d have also found out that connection speeds from the censoring ISPs in the UK rarely come close to those advertised.
ISPs here won’t lose money as this is bound to end up with either users paying for a censorship system they don’t want or it being paid for out of general taxation. In the latter case even non-internet users will be paying for a system that no one wants as part of a service they don’t even use.
That’d be a fail for 99% of citizens and a win for a tiny minority that think they know best.
Phillipa said…
You are wrong here, ISPs will simply pass the costs on not absorb them. It is an industry that operates on razor thin margins and will not be able to absorb the cost increase.
The ongoing suppport costs will also need to be factored in as well. Support lines being swamped with “my blog has been censored” calls when in fact the website was unavailable for other reasons. Support costs are significant, they must be otherwise large companies wouldn’t be seeking to reduce these cost by outsourcing to OS call centres.
The public will be paying for this policy, through our taxes, our ISP subscriptions and with our freedom of expression. Yet there is no benefit for what we are being asked to pay for.
Also, why does the Chair of your industry association (the IIA) refer to the UK ISP filtering model as world’s best practice?…
Do you have a reference for that..?? And more importantly, a context?
Why doesn’t Internode comply with the existing self-regulatory industry code of practice?…
What part of the IIA code of practice do you believe Internode are not complying to?
Hi Phillipa.
I’m not Mark, but you asked the question “You work for an ISP that stands to lose money by implementing systems to block access to known child sexual abuse material. Why is your opinion any more valid on this issue than a salesperson that works for a company that sells ISP filter hardware?”
1. Firstly why not work with Law enforcement to get the pages taken down and the perpetrators arrested?
2. The list does not JUST contain Child Abuse material. Conroy wants to block Refused Classification. Which contains MOSTLY Legal to own and view material. Anything declared illegal (by a judge) should be referred to Law Enforcement.
3. The scope of Refused Classification is too large. Look up more information here. http://libertus.net/censor/isp-blocking/au-govplan-refusedclassif.html#RCoutline
4. Even Conroy said that the filter was limited to 10000 urls before performance issues occurred. The web is a trillion urls (1,000,000,000,000) in size and growing at a billion (1,000,000,000) urls a day.
5. The blacklist is secret. When it was leaked the second or third time, it showed sites that were incorrectly classified eg dentist, and anti abortion page, a tuck shop and tour operator. Most of the other sites were legal adult sites.
6. internet Censorship is easily bypassed using a proxy or VPN.
7. Web pages can change at a click of a mouse. What was once a legal fetish page could with a click of a mouse be politcal speech. And Conroy said that political speech would not be banned (yeah right).
I notice that you have not provided names, and I notice that you have not stated what this hypothetical Filter salesperson has said? Anyway, I’ll take a stab at this question.
It’s about choice. If I am unhappy with Mark Newton and Internode. I can change ISP’s. If I am unhappy with the Rudd government’s plan to Censor the internet, no matter which ISP I choose, I am still still have the “Filter” forced on me.
Based on their past behaviour, I’d trust Mark Newton over your Senator Conroy any day.
Regards
Dave
Hi Kate, Great work. If you are successful in getting the policy changed our household will be voting ALP. Cheers, Sam
I personally believe that one of the reasons Labor won last time around is that people of my generation saw them as being progressive in matters of technology and the internet. How wrong we were. I think Labor are greatly underestimating that factor as they stumble towards the next election. You are just incredibly lucky that Abbott is in opposition, not Turnbull.
The fact is as everyone is pointing out opt-in filters exist. But the fact is the religious right aren’t happy unless they are imposing their nonsensical and unworkable mandates on everyone else. This is a power struggle for them and that is why it won’t end easily.
Obviously once the filter is in place they will up the ante and want all manner of seemingly innocuous sites added to this mysterious list. Of course we won’t know when a site is added to the list or why, this will remain a secret known only to a secret committee. Weird huh?
Dear Kate,
As a mum wanting her children to have the best all rounded view of world societies, the very idea of mandatory censorship of the internet in Australia is appalling.I believe it impacts against the very ideal of what my ancestors fought for – freedom to share information, speech and ideas without fear of reprisal.
I am also very concerned that a mandatory censorship of the Australian internet users will impact negatively on our medical, art and science students in regards to their internet research , this will put Australian students at a disadvantage to other jobseekers who will have had the benefit of a wider scope of available information.
I also believe the manadory censorship of the internet will impact on our overseas image of the lucky free country – affecting badly both internet sales and tourism.
I would also like to say that in regards to Labor as a political party , Senator Conroy with his obvious lack of internet knowledge and his belief that the web is a big bad nasty place to go , backed by Rudd when he deliberately spreads misrepresentation about the internet and its users , has done more harm to your party than anyone .
Also no to an opt in or opt out filter – the fact is once its in place – its there for misuse.
An internet filter and now this
http://apcmag.com/govt-may-record-users-web-history-email-data.htm
Makes the google privacy issue look trivial.
The ALP Taking Australia forward … to become China.
Any talk of an open government is just farcical when the ALP keep coming up with mindless ideas
If nothing else, can you please just stop him from spouting the 1/70th-of-a-blink-of-an-eye nonsense? They were results from an informal Telstra test, with only a single participant involved. Even they didn’t take it seriously, and the Enex report was wrong to include it. This clearly has no relevance to what he is proposing. How is he allowed to continually mislead the public like that?
By the way, any chance of getting your hands on the original Enex report and accidentally leak it? The report as published seemed deliberately light on details.
It’s not even related to speed, at least not in the way the minister is using it. It’s latency and 1/70th the blink of an eye could be significant depending on the application. The Telstra report refused to even guess at the possible speed reductions as it isn’t a constant and could vary from 0-100% depending on what urls are on the list.
- Justin
if this is a start to the Labour Government’s backflip towards implementing the great wall of Australia thanks to a more sane voice. There was no way I was planning to vote Labour in the next election perhaps there’s a glimmer of hope that Conroy will end up on the scrapheap of history where he belongs.
“Do you have any evidence to prove what you said about the UK situation? You indicated that UK ISPs only started blocking a known list of child sexual abuse sites because of a fear of legislation drafted in the 1990s? Yet UK ISPs implemented ISP filtering in 2004?
Do you have the text of this legislation you’re referring to? Because I’ve read the relevant current legislation and there’s no way that ISPs carry the liability you’ve claimed they do. Which begs the question – why do all UK ISPs still filter a list of known child sexual abuse URLs?”
The History of IWF is common knowledge, just read the HISTORY section in wikipedia, it includes related references you request.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation
http://bit.ly/d8Mn6b
OMFG Kate, are you guys for real? First this toxic censorship policy and now THIS!
Sure it may not actually be policy yet but the fact that it’s even being discussed is ridiculous. Individually, the nanny state policies coming out of this government are scary but when looking at it all as a whole I’m just appalled.
- Justin
So your party is now considering recording every website visit and all emails of Australians for 10 years?!?!? You’d better have some very good spin to get out of this PR mess.
Is this the idea of the same Senator Conroy who has referred Google’s recording small snippets of the small number of unprotected WiFi networks to the AFP?
This story will be right around the world by the time I get up in the morning and all your good work at the Gov 2.0 Expo will be undone.
With colleagues like this you will need lots of friends.
Yes and all this within 7 days of Conroy calling Google “creepy”, now the ALP wants to do the same and more.
It is becoming increasingly obvious to me that one of the biggest threats to safety on the internet is (bad) government (both here and elsewhere, given the jurisdiction spanning nature of the web). It is time to add politician to the list of people that are undesirables on the internet, they’ve earned their place with the scammers, spammers, trolls, malware and virus authors. They are just another threat to be filtered out.
Governments use ISPs as a vector for their attacks, so the most logical solution is to implement end to end encryption, thereby rendering the ISP (and by extension, the government) blind to the nature of the traffic. Let them keep 10 years of data that is useless to them.
If the Government wants to spy on me (or anyone else), they can do it the traditional way, with a warrant, not a fishing net.
Could this possibly be the explanation for this government’s push to control the internet? http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/ifpis-child-porn-strategy/
Andy.
@Andy,
Yes, it occurred to me a long time ago that The Filter is the perfect technology to also do the bidding of Copyright holders; not in the first strike, but in the 2nd or 3rd ‘adjustment’ to its regulation & application – the “scope creep” which is often referred to in this debate.
The challenge is to ‘follow the money’ between the ACL or other Filter proponents, & the Usual Suspects in the Copyright lobby. I wonder if any of the Plaintiffs in the “Hollywood vs. iiNet” case might fit that description?
Naive people look at me like I’m a paranoid loony when I say things like what you’ve pointed out in that link, but that’s been how business is done in many areas, particularly the last decade.
What is the point of having an Office of the Privacy Commissioner and then snooping on citizens’ internet usage, apart from keeping two lots of public servants at their desks? Is this part of the Stimulus Program to be finance by the Super Profits Tax?
And how valid are any records when ISP accounts are shared in households and elsewhere and WiFi is available at MacDonalds and elsewhere including public libraries?
there’s plenty of identifying info in (some) URLs alone, let alone ‘metadata’ (cookies, authentication credentials, browser info…) which combined can go a long way, often far enough, to id you, which may not necessarily fall under the excluded ‘payload’. details at this stage are of course unknown.
I will never again support the ALP. These are lies, everyone. All lies trying to salvage your vote. Never vote for the ALP again in your life and teach everyone you know to do the same.
A further comment occurs to me after reading all 138 comments. All the objections regarding the planned filter apply pretty much equally to your proposed “opt out” filter.
It cannot work to give the stated desired result.
As a result it will be a waste of money and resources.
It will inevitably be abused.
The only advantage of the “opt out” filter will be that the abuse will tend to be delayed by a few years.
There is no evidence given by you or the government that there is a real problem to be solved or that either your or the government’s plan would have any measurable impact on the problem even if it exists. This is in accordance with the secrecy with which the government has progressed the whole plan – from announcing it during the Copenhagen summit, to refusing to specify any criteria beforehand for the “live trials”, to publishing a meaningless report with no hard data, which had the metadata removed from it as soon as it was shown to have originated in ACMA not Enex, to refusing to release under FOI ANY of the data or material leading to this report.
All of this pushes any observer to the conclusion that the government is up to no good. This may not be the case, but if not, it takes a fair bit of explaining, instead of which we have blustering and attack from the responsible minister.
In imposing a filter upon the us and snooping, probably imperfectly, on our conversations and media consumption, Senator Conroy expects the nation to trust him and his successors when he clearly does not trust the nation. And we don’t know who the successors are.
We used to trust and rely on many worthy bodies, but it is dawning by the day that the institutions we trusted the most have let us down the most. I’ll list some:
the members of the Mother of Parliaments who had their snouts well and truly in the public trough beyond their own rules;
there were bankers who lent our money to people with little hope of repaying it, sold the debts to unsuspecting investors, then expected their respective countries to rescue them;
there were our political leaders who, more then once, took us to war on false pretexts, then when there were not enough volunteers, for the first time conscripted 20 year olds some of whom died on overseas service;
there were child welfare offers responsible for caring for young women in “moral danger” and then abused them when in their enforced care;
there were charities which were part of a scheme to bring orphans to Australia and Canada when those children had parents alive;
there were teachers who abused children in their care;
there were catholic priests who railed again sin while abusing young people under their influence and care.
And now a government, which proposes to restrict access to a secret list of evils while snooping through our communications and keeping the data for years. Then we are expect to thank the architect of all this for his attention to our welfare and vote him (and his colleagues) back into power.
Meanwhile, partly as a result of intense lobbying and public information campaigns by the tech savvy community, UK’s ID cards are to be scrapped. Damien Green writing in the Guardian says: “People do not want the state keeping information on its citizens for some ill-defined and unproven benefit. Fewer than 15,000 people have bought an ID card since last November – and around 3,000 of those were issued free to workers at Manchester and London City airports.” http://is.gd/cMwgx.
Just as with the NSW government’s expensive and aborted railway to Rozelle, vast amounts of public money have been wasted for no result, and in the face of consistent community opposition. It is to be hoped Senator Conroy does not plan on making it a trifecta.
Please tell Senator Conroy, he only governs with the consent of the governed. He is dreaming. And if there are any plans for longer parliamentary terms, he has made the best case possible to lose the support he needs for any constitutional amendment. Bullying his parliamentary colleagues might get him what he wants, but does it work with the electorate?
“The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”.
A classic quote. Why is it true? Because the Internet has what is called an “end-to-end architecture”.
I doubt that Senator Conroy knows what that means.
He certainly doesn’t know how fundamental it is, because it is a key design principle of the Internet and it causes his filter to be doomed to total failure.
No, the real agenda seems to be:
* To score votes off the ignorant, and
* To build interception infrastructure for the AG’s wacky new proposal to intercept everyone’s web traffic without a warrant.
The ALP had my support at the last federal election. But by playing fast and loose with my civil liberties this administration has lost my vote.
Also embarrassing us in the eyes of a technically competent world that knows it can’t work.
Kate, your proposal might play will in the party room but out here in the world, we the electorate aren’t actually that stupid.
- K
Senator Lundy,
I personally find car drivers who tailgate offensive. They endanger the lives of children as well as adults and property.
The technology now exists to detect when a car is too close to the car ahead and permanently disable its engine, rendering it safe and harmless. It would also be possible to detect the driver’s identity through biometric scanning and take away their license for life.
While we have laws against tailgating and fund the police to enforce them, taxpayer money would be far better spent on employing a range of measures to prevent this unsafe practice. After all arresting and fining offenders when caught is not a silver bullet – our society needs to ensure that all drivers, no matter how safe, are prevented from engaging in this vile and illegal act.
The cost of the sensors, biometric scanners and engine disabled would only be a few thousand dollars per vehicle and legislation could be passed to make it compulsory to install these devices on every new and used car before sale or transfer.
An annual recalibration of the settings during reregistration could ensure compliance and potentially add new features over time as Australians get accustomed to having their driving behaviours limited – such as speed limitors to protect them from inadvertant and illegal speeding, playing music that was not purchased in a manner consistent with copyrights of our most honourable corporate citizens, the music publishers.
The government could restrict who got to sit in which cars and eventually, with an upgrade including GPS, who could travel to which locations based on a secret list of allowed travel destinations – plus monitor the locations of all cars at all times and store a history of peoples’ travel destinations and routes (even in-car calls and conversations) for any potential legal needs.
I am sure the government and police will find some use for this information that outweighs the risk of this information finding its way into the public domain inadvertently.
This is all achievable with today’s technology and would support the government’s goal to protect our children, just as the Internet filter does. Anyone who opposes mandatory tailgate monitoring is clearly out to harm our most vulnerable citizens and should be ridiculed by Labor Ministers in public (under parliamentary privilege in order to prevent our fine upstanding Ministers from any risk of being charged with defamation should they, in their righteous passion, not always speak the gospel truth).
Of course if there is sufficient opposition to these necessary steps, a less involved MP could be used to test the idea of non-mandatory tailgate monitoring. This approach would be buffered by having car yards keep a lost of those who opt-out that could be accessed by police as needed. After a few high profile arrests through covert surveillance of drivers who opted-out who are caught tailgating (whether inadvertant or not and regardless of whether anyone is hurt) it would be simple to create and manipulate public outrage into making monitoring mandatory, then introducing new features over time.
Of course a few civil libertarians might complain and public opinion might be swayed by claims that responsible adults should be allowed to drive as they see fit, within the current road rule regime, but if the government stays on message, ignores public sentiment, conducts phony public consultations to give the veneer of authenticity, allows a junior MP to take a weaker of contrary position (just to demonstrate that real debate is going on inside caucus) and claims all opponents are evil people who wish to harm children Labor should be able to successfully pass the ltailgate monitoring law before Australians recognise how much of their democratic freedoms have been lost.
Australians would, of course, have to foot the bill for this in car
I want to see Labor impl
I would like to know Kate’s opinion of the gov’s investigation into keeping our browsing records and email details for 10 years..
Any comments or thoughts..??
I am a member of the Internet Society of Australia, and I oppose the internet filtering mechanism as currently proposed.
I posted the following yesterday as my response to the debate.
“I have thought long and hard about the matter, watched the media debates, listened to all the arguments on both sides.
All my research to date has indicated that the proposed solution will not deliver the outcome that the lobbyists for filtering are expecting – in fact a very long way from the mark.
- it will only restrict a limited amount of content.
- it will be a significant impediment to quality of service for the majority of users, and a burden on ISPs with regard to legal compliance and industry best practice for network design.
- there are significant moral and social implications restricting freedom of speech and freedom of information.
The current proposal seems to be an attempt to appease both sides but in reality it has already alienated the greater part of the internet population and, if finally implemented, will alienate the rest, especially those lobbying for it when it doesn’t deliver what is promised because it can’t.
From a technical viewpoint, while a “clean sweep” style of solution may appear attractive on the surface, such a mechanism will impose a BGP hell far worse than IPv4 to achieve its misguided goal. Even contemplating the same to IPv6 would be like sending the internet back to the dark ages where every host needed to have the entire routing table of the internet world as it was known back then – perhaps an exaggeration, but you get my point I hope.
I believe the only fair and appropriate solution for internet filtering is an “assisted opt-in” system in which the filtering infrastructure is moved right to the edges in the form of suitably designed edge router/firewall. The technology exists to make such a beast secure and yet under limited user control. By assisted, I am suggesting that govt/ISPs maintain some PKI style of infrastructure to deliver the access lists to said black boxes. Given the right techno dollars a much better outcome could be delivered.
If the only real agenda is for the govt to tightly control the RC content coming into the country then they should come clean on their motive for this instead of stringing along the lobbyists on a falsehood since what is proposed will definitely not deliver what they are expecting.
What is proposed is very UN-Australian. What IS in the true Australian spirit is for us technical folks to come up with a solution that CAN please most of the parties… so what about it folks?”
My comments were made to a technical audience who understand the existing limitations of the current IPv4 internet (what we currently use). IPv6 (the next version of the internet) attempts to solve one of those limitations (unmanageable core router table size) by an improved model of strong aggregation. Internet filtering of the type proposed would completely negate the performance gains that IPv6 will bring.
In the context of the NBN where network speeds are likely to be 10-100 times greater than what exists now, any meddling with the internet framework by installing blanket filters will only spell disaster.
I am not opposed to filtering for those who want or need it, I just feel there has got to be a better solution to the problem.
Peter – the only viable solution grounded in the Internet’s architecture (i.e. end-to-end protocols) is to filter at the endpoint i.e. the consumer PC.
I don’t understand why Senator Lundy would suggest a central opt-in filter when a personal opt-in filter is more effective, cheaper, and completely palatable to all but the most strident libertarian.
The key advantages being:
* It actually works
* It puts parents in control
* It’s simpler to implement
This has been tried before but half-heartedly. In particular, there was no requirement that retailers must offer it.
So how? Legislate that any PC offered to the consumer market includes onboard filtering software that:
* Is off by default
* Can be set by parents to restrict content according to a published blacklist
* Can be password locked
This satisfies everybody. Oh, except ASIO.
In contrast, this centralised opt-in notion is just another expensive travesty.
The problem with what you suggest is the same problem with virtually every solution suggested – circumvention. The router has no understanding of encrypted traffic (say, like a VPN set up on a client machine) therefore it either has to trust the user (which immediately breaks the filter) or block the traffic (breaking the internet). You cannot trust the user and have your censorship too, if you trusted the users why would you even need censorship?
So, excluding the fact that the idea is inherently flawed for a moment, you are suggesting that I allow a Government that wants to censor my access for political capital and heavily monitor and record everything I do with the internet for 10 years (without warrant), that I let that Government put a hardware spybox with a permanent 24hr connection back to base in my house? Really, could you be any more naive? You cannot trust these people – what in their behaviour suggests to you that ever you could?
If you want to work towards a technical solution (and this is the direction I’ve been looking in) I suggest you advocate for end to end encryption to become a requirement of every protocol on the net. When it ‘just works’ out of the box, when *all* traffic is utterly private by default, that’s when stupid governments like the current one will move on to softer targets (the good old fall backs: tough on crime, more money for schools and hospitals. The traditional play book that none of us expect them to do squat with, beyond yammering about) and we can get on with our lives without having to deal with rubbish like this. I want stupid government out of my internet and encrypting the whole thing would do just that, with the added bonus that end to end encryption would not only permanently put the Government’s Orwellian fantasies to rest, it would break censoring everywhere – including China, Iran and the UAE (and the thought of those governments being forced to accept reality puts a big smile on my face).
just briefly as I don’t want to debate issues that have been done to death already.
Just to clarify – I am proposing an opt-in filter at the edge of the network – i.e. either your broadband router or a box between you and your router. It should scale better than centralized filtering at the core of the network. Opt-in so people have a choice – after all we are supposed to live in a democracy. it is effectively an end-point filtering solution that should function better than existing software based ones. tamper proof as the enemy can often be from within in a family situation.
re software on consumer computers. It doesn’t work really well in reality and that has been proven time and time again, and i’m sure the govt doesn’t need reminding of that It isn’t secure and the total cost of ownership for the average consumer is too high so it doesn’t always work as expected
Just remember that a consumer computer is an extremely hostile environment for software. Consumer level software also does not secure your home LAN from incognito access – for e.g mobiles and laptops. Securing the software is much better done with unhackable hardware – this is doable. Whitelist or blacklist – take your pick for the level of control and usability you want or need.
re encryption. you can already do this now if you need to in many ways, so what is your point? BTW, encrypting everything is not necessary, and inadvisable because end-end encryption would require much greater PKI (public key infrastructure) = greater control by authorities, and is also compute intensive for key exchange – fine if you are only one end point, not fine if you are running a huge server farm (and not green house gas friendly either).
re orwellian, you must have missed that I said opt-in. i.e. only those customers who want a degree of filtering that will assist them in making the internet a safer place for their families would subscribe to such a service. Many a parent has crumbled in despair at trying to manage internet for the the complex social environment they are forced to maintain. the overwhelming cry i hear from parents is that if there is anything that would make their job easier it would be appreciated. If it can be done without loss of civil liberty then why not?
I don’t wish to comment any further on the non-technical aspects of the filter as that is a debate that has a million points of view.
If you are going to introduce ideological and ethical arguments from the debate into your reply, you don’t get to sandwich them between two disclaimers saying you don’t wish to discuss it. Sorry, but debate doesn’t work that way. We hold significantly different views on what is acceptable and appropriate, and I’m happy to leave it at that as much as possible (because we’ve both already made our minds up, haven’t we?).
Your point seems to be to use a hardware edge of network solution, and you go so far as to suggest a whitelist approach. This would very likely break the functionality of the internet for any device attached to it. If at any point your solution allows unclassified traffic, then it has a vulnerability to carrying encrypted traffic and it is rendered useless as a censorship device. Your proposal is inherently technically flawed – broken internet, or broken censorship, pick one.
The idea of unhackable hardware is utterly laughable. The idea of either the Australian Government or censorware ISVs being able to make it is even more so. If you look at all the big hardware vendors that have billion dollar investments in lock in, they can’t do it – all they end up doing is getting in an arms race with hackers. How long did it take to jailbreak the iPhone? How long to find the Bluray encryption keys? This is a losing proposition for players with way more cash and smarts than Australia could ever muster. We do not want to get into this fight.
I get that people like yourself want a magic box that will perfectly censor the users (in this case, children) that you don’t trust. The ‘parent in a box’ that is so simple that even a negligent parent can set it up. Such a device isn’t possible, even if the significant technical hurdles in its implementation could be effectively surmounted, it is simply too vulnerable to attack to stay functional for more than a few days at best – then someone will release a crack and you’ll be back where you started (minus the time and money invested, of course). I understand that people (particularly the technically ignorant and scared) want this to be an easy problem with a simple solution – it is neither.
As for PKI being equal to greater control by ‘authorities’, the difference is that I get to choose who I trust – not Conroy, not the Government, and not any other nanny that thinks they know best. If Google came out tomorrow with a full encryption solution that relied on their infrastructure, I’d use it – they are far more trustworthy than Conroy or the ALP is. The Australian Government is not trustworthy – we need encryption to defend against *them*.
Fundamentally, this all boils down to who is in control. I don’t want anyone but me making the decisions about what I can see. I don’t support censorship in any form, but I’m a realist – if people must censor, then it should be at their end. This is probably the only point we agree on.
Okay, this is surely be the best argument of all against the filter:
* We already have it. Guys, stop building.
Phew.
Wait, what?
If someone raises that in public with the right wording then Senator Conroy is going to look rather foolish.
I’m serious. If you have Firefox or a recent Internet Explorer, visit the following URL:
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/its-a-trap.html
We all already have software that protects our browsing from a centralised list.
Why spend millions on centrally administered infrastructure that everybody who understands it thinks is a Bad Idea – when a couple of tweaks to software almost everyone has is sufficient?
So the implementation is simple. Just default for Australians to point at a different list, and issue a different message. Maybe a parent mode that hides the “Ignore This Warning” button.
We can then legislate that all broadband-capable PCs offered to the consumer must have this capability, and no-one will mind. There are no civil liberties concerns and since it’s at the endpoint, it will actually work! It might even protect children! Unlike any of the current proposals.
It’s enough for parents. It’s enough to stop an adult. Much like that big “CLASSIFIED R” on content.
Your suggestion allows for full end user control, and that is something that the Government won’t stand for.
Centralising a blocklist isn’t going to give the Government what they want if users are allowed any choice in the matter. If you log on to the web and are asked the question “Would you like to use the Freedom_Hating_Christian_Fundamentalist blocklist?” how many people do you think would answer in the affirmative? The Government wishes to remove your choices, and they don’t really care as to the specifics of the implementation.
This has nothing to do with protecting children, or assisting parents. I wish people would stop acting like there’s any truth the Government’s claims to that effect. This is about buying votes from the fringe, nothing more.
Well I agree (see other posts).
But as I have already said, this *is* about something more than buying fringe votes. It is also about building national-scale total interception infrastructure (see the current Attorney General proposal for warrantless intercepts).
As a Victorian voter, the Conroy has earned itself a place at the bottom of my preference list. Playing so fast and loose with civil liberties earns my emnity.
@Joshua Goodall
Those motivations are certainly feasible. Either way, these proposals aren’t being put forward for the benefit of Australians as claimed.
Ok. So I can’t keep my mouth shut on ideological grounds. Thank goodness for some level of free speech, just that we can publicly discuss this is a good thing, no?
re hackable hardware, most instances you cite relate to back doors or flaws in applications (eg Xbox software mod), except for the blu ray hack which I believe was a seriously hard core attempt using electronic monitoring of the hardware if I remember correctly. What I actually said was tamper proof. I agree that nothing can be made 100% unhackable, but one can build it in such a way that it is tamper proof. By that I mean if it is hacked one can detect as it won’t return the correct signature, no private keys in the hardware. The algorithms and technology exist, they just need to be implemented correctly.
Please try not to use the terms censorship and filtering interchangeably, they have different meanings. All ISPs implement various filtering lists to reduce the incidence of denial of service and other distributed network attacks as a service to their customers. The customers do not ask for this, nor are they even aware in 99% of the cases. Had they not done this, their networks would have melted down and their customers deserted them in droves. I know, as I operated an ISP once.
I try my best to keep the ideological issues out of the argument, but you can’t avoid one of the core issues which is that there is a ground swell of dissatisfaction from the non-techno part of our society. They are crying out to us techno folks to come up with a solution that will improve the safety of the internet. Those who claim existing solutions work are probably ill informed. A techno solution only is not an answer, neither is an education only answer.
I too am opposed to any form of mandatory censorship, but if people are asking for it (for themselves), then can we deliver it in a way which is going to have the least impact for those that do not wish to be encumbered by it?
Regarding trust, just who do you trust? We rely on trust within our society for many things. There is a very long trust chain when using a computer on the internet. Do you trust the company that made your PC, the company that built the operating system, the company that provides your anti-virus software, the various companies or individuals that develop every piece of software you use on your computer, and lastly do you trust your ISP who can do whatever they like with your traffic. I would challenge you to approach each of these parties and get firm answers on trust, openness and privacy. We trust our government for many things but apparently we are not prepared to trust them for the internet. We form judgments about trust in various ways based on our experiences. I personally have a much lower level of trust for corporates than for government based on my experience, but your mileage may vary.
The issues of trust, openness and privacy are fundamental to this debate. Getting the balance right is an impossible task as you can never please everyone.
Peter T. said:
“Please try not to use the terms censorship and filtering interchangeably, they have different meanings. All ISPs implement various filtering lists to reduce the incidence of denial of service and other distributed network attacks as a service to their customers.”
But in this instance censorship and filtering ARE interchangeable.
The example you gave is one of an ISP implementing security measures…which they don’t have to do if they don’t want to.
Conroy’s filter on the other hand is MANDATORY (censorship). There is no choice for the ISP. Unlike the implemented security measures, the ISP has NO CHOICE in what is censored. Unlike the security measures, the ISP will be fined and unlitmately shutdown by authorties if they do not comply with the censoring laws.
If they want to stay in business they have to implement some form of filtering.
And they already have a degree of compliance with authorities on a range of issues ranging from assisting the federal police in gathering evidence on illegal network activity to having to contend with the jungle of corporate litigation with regard to copyrighted material.
I do agree that government is making an onerous obligation on ISPs with the current bill.
As an aside, I thought of the following this morning. My guess is that the black list will be impossible to keep secret. It will probably be trivial matter to take a snapshot of the BGP table from a router within the ISP’s network which would contain enough information to reconstruct the black list. The onus is on the ISP to keep this information secure, and that is an exceedingly difficult task to do considering that these tables can possibly leak throughout the ISPs entire network. One would need to have to run the ISP company in a far different manner than currently, ultimately at great cost to the customer. But at the end of the day, it would just take one single disgruntled, unscrupulous, careless or misguided employee to leak this black list in one form or another. Also accidents can and will happen. No amount of legal or regulatory sledgehammering will prevent the inevitable from happening.
As for the other stuff relating to the need for filtering. There are quite vocal lobby groups for both sides of the argument and both are likely to skew the facts in their own favour. Anecdotally, I do think there is a ground swell of opinion that says, “yes, we the public are not happy with the existing solutions for managing what internet content we receive.”
Of course if a service doesn’t work it won’t be popular, so in a way it is probably proof that customer managed software filters don’t really work as well as required. There are good technical reasons why such a mechanism is not ideal, the primary one being that typical machines in the home are likely to be severely underpowered for the job.
Pete T, said: “If they want to stay in business they have to implement some form of filtering.”
That’s a COMMERICAL consideration, not a legislative one, so it’s a moot point.
Pete T, said: “And they already have a degree of compliance with authorities on a range of issues ranging from assisting the federal police in gathering evidence on illegal network activity to having to contend with the jungle of corporate litigation with regard to copyrighted material.”
Another moot point. This debate is focusing on MANDATORY censorship of material that is largely legal to view and own.
Pete T, said: “Anecdotally, I do think there is a ground swell of opinion that says, “yes, we the public are not happy with the existing solutions for managing what internet content we receive.”
Where??…point to it for me. I can very easily point to MULTIPLE public polls consisting of 10′s of thousands of respondants, with the “NO filter” vote constatly hovering arounf 97% or higher.
Pete T, said: “Of course if a service doesn’t work it won’t be popular, so in a way it is probably proof that customer managed software filters don’t really work as well as required.”
Or…it shows that Webshield’s and iPrimus’s filtered services are not wanted by the VAST MAJORITY of Australian’s.
Pete T, said: There are good technical reasons why such a mechanism is not ideal, the primary one being that typical machines in the home are likely to be severely underpowered for the job.”
Rubbish. A filter isn’t at all CPU intensive. Even if it were, are we to censor the entire country simply because a % of Australia’s haven’t upgraded in the past 4 yrs? These “slow PC” owners are welcome to Webshirld’s services, are they not?
Peter T. said:
“I too am opposed to any form of mandatory censorship, but if people are asking for it (for themselves)”
Thats just it…who is asking for it? Serioulsy, apart from the ACL and a couple of Groups seeking to rid Australia of porn, where is the outcry of support?
The AFP..?? No.
Save The Children..?? No.
The question has been asked on this forum at least 5 times…”if there was great public support for this filter, why is Webshirld not 10 times bigger than it is..?
Where is the evidence that there is in fact a problem, as per Conroy’s “evidence based policy”?
I do not share your optimism at the prospect of ‘tamper proof’ hardware. You claim that “The algorithms and technology exist, they just need to be implemented correctly” – so where’s the evidence for that? My counter claim is that there are hundreds of (if not more) examples of hardware and software protections being broken, often swiftly and trivially. Are you really arguing that the Australian Government (or their contractors) can get it right where the cream of the world’s computer scientists and billions of dollars of investment can’t? It is wishful thinking.
As stated by Leigh, filtering and censorship are synonyms in this debate. What’s the difference between mandatory filtering and censorship? There isn’t one.
Once again, as stated by Leigh, it is a matter of choice – if an ISP ‘over’-filters or censors, that would rapidly become apparent and I could take my custom elsewhere. I can hardly do the same with mandatory government censorship. Also, the Government’s goals and the checks and balances on them are vastly different to that on commercial entities – an ISP won’t screw me because it’s not in their interest, and if they do they’ll lose money. Those conditions act to ensure that ISPs do the right thing. Meanwhile, the Government can pimp my rights out to the fringe, ultraconservatives and fundamentalists, at little or no risk to themselves – where’s the pressure on them to do the right thing?
On the subject of need, and once again, courtesy of Leigh (and about a million other posters here) the core issue is that some (including yourself) claim a dire and urgent need for censorship. There is absolutely no evidence that this is either needed or wanted by the majority of Australians. None. Zero. This ‘groundswell of support’ idea is a fiction.
I used to work in support, and I have many ‘non-technical’ friends still, and never have I been asked by an end user to implement censoring for use on themselves (other than censoring their kids – which I laugh at. I tell them, if you don’t trust your kids, and you aren’t prepared to supervise them, then you are better off throwing your computer away. Your kids are smarter than you, they know the technology better, and you won’t beat them. Unfortunately, so many parents decline to practice basic discipline these days – the web has become the babysitter that the TV used to be). What I get asked all the time is how to defeat or circumvent hardware and software locks (including the Government’s proposed censorship regime. I’ll be the one going around setting up all the VPNs if this comes in). So it would appear that your practical experience and mine are markedly different.
You claim it is up to us ‘techno-folks’ to give people better censorship, I believe it is up to us to stop it happening in the first place. I won’t betray the people that trust me to steer them right – and that’s exactly what you are asking people like me to do. I won’t do it. It’s wrong.
Regarding trust, it’s quite simple. Everyone you mentioned I trust more than the Government.
In this day and age, if you screw up it’s going to be all over the web in about a day, so I don’t need to go and individually chase down each and every link in the chain – the network will tell me (usually before I even notice the problem). How did we all first hear about the Government’s censorship plans? The web says it first, more accurately, and faster than any other source I can think of. That’s the real virtue of an uncensored channel.
Where a choice exists, there is likely to be more trustworthy behaviour, because there are real consequences to any of those parties betraying that trust. In the case of the government, there is no choice – we are stuck with them, and whatever inane things they choose to do. Under the system we have, I can’t choose another government in a way that results in good behaviour – the feedback loop is far too long (and in practical terms, it is impossible to choose another government – Pepsi or Coke. That’s what two party preferred is in reality). In my mind, government is like a natural disaster – too big to stop, so one must focus on mitigating the damage they can cause.
Kate,
The US seems to be upping the ante on censorship and foreign policy.
http://bit.ly/9EJZoS
Do Rudd and Conroy really believe there’ll be no reprecussions globally?
- Justin
Kate, are you and/or Pia going to be responding to any of the points raised above? I’d also love to hear what you have to say about the plan to record everyone’s internet/e-mail traffic.
Thanks
Hi Ian (and all),
It is a sitting fortnight at the moment and thus we are flat out, but we will be looking into and responding after then.
Cheers, Pia
Office of Senator Lundy
Just wanted to give my support to Kate. I think it’s fantastic that she’s encouraging the Government to actually look at alternatives to the current mandatory policy, considering how so far Senator Conroy has refused to even negotiate with the substantial number of people, community groups and industry representatives that have opposed the filter.
Great work Kate! If you were my representative, I would happily return to voting Labor at the next election!
Thank you – AGAIN – Kate or providing a sane and rational perspective on this issue.
If only you were Minister for Communications etc, we might think someone who has a clue is in charge of this vital portfolio.
Hi Kate, whilst I applaud you for trying to make a sow’s ear into a silk purse, Conroy and his arrogant attitude that somehow he know’s what’s good for us has really riled myself and many voters out there.
Really, any attempt to filter the internet is against my wishes and against most people’s wishes. Please encourage your party and cabinet to not just shelve this policy but get rid of it for good.
I have voted Labor all my life, was even in the party many years ago.
But for the first time in my life I will not vote Labor at the next election (and I live in a very marginal seat) nor ever again unless I can be assured that this policy will never be brought back in any shape or form. As far as I am concerned there are already many ways for parents who are concerned to censor what their children have access to now. Freedom of information in our so called democracy is vital. Any thing that could potential stop that flow of information is to be fought for , tooth and nail. I don’t think the gov realises just how upset people are about this. I will be voting Green at the next election both in the Senate and the Reps and directing my preferecnes away from both of the major parties if this policy is not shelved permanentely. And Conroy needs to be sacked. To say it in my son’s manner “Conroy is a tool.”
Kate, thank you for being a voice of reason and logic in this area. You have my support, and the support of all those I have spoken with.
There is a swell of discontent regarding the current handling of future internet filtering policy and I thank you for standing up for a very intelligent, practical and democratic outcome.
Hello Kate,
I am another who is adamantly opposed to the censorship scheme, along with other proposals such as recording everyone’s internet activity.
If the framework for these types of schemes ever get established, in any guise, there will be no way to put the genie back in the bottle. Inevitably it will be used more and more extensively, depending on the government of the day.
I have always voted Labor over Liberal, but for the first time I have become a single issue voter, and Labor will be at the bottom of my ballots until this entire attitude toward the internet disappears.
For me, this is much more important than mining taxes, boat people, parental leave, etc..
Agreed Rick…once introduced, this will never, ever be repealed.
Thanks Kate,
I am pleased to see that at least you have the ability and will to listen to what the Australian public have to say about this disastrous internet filter.
I don’t agree with filtering the internet period and will not vote for a Party or Government that is proposing to do this. I could live with an opt-out ability but I can assure you that the Government will not be getting my vote if this legislation is still on the table in its current form come election day.
Keep up the good work.
Paul.