yARN: Conroy’s cleverest move yet on the filter

Not voting labour ever again if the filter is back. Conroy needs to move away from his 19th century technological ideas and move australia into the 21st century

This is pure sophistry, delay the decision until after the election when Gillard will then claim a mandate to proceed. Labor is still lost, it has sold out to the religous racist right and the multi national mining companies. Gillard is too clever by far and with this announcement she moves from clever to dishonest.

W.Carter, how many times do we have to say that opponents of the filter do NOT want "kiddie porn" on the internet; that "kiddie porn" is mostly NOT available on the open internet but is exchanged via what is called the darknet - a place the filter won't reach; and that the filter will NOT stop more than a minute fraction of the things on the internet that we wouldn't want our kids to see (or wouldn't want to see ourselves). This proposal is more like a sieve than a filter: the amount it will hold back is trivial. It is not the way to go about protecting anyone, and it has too many adverse consequences. There are better ways to achieve what you and I want for our children and ourselves.

BTW it is "free rein" - the metaphor comes from horse-riding.

The problem is the definition of refused classification. Stuff like kiddie porn you just don't find on "web sites" and much of the rest of RC material is actually legal. The crime/terrorism part of the filter is one of the bizarre bits of nonsense that hasn't been widely covered to date. I am a member of the Australian Rocketry Association, hold a current explosives manufacture licence and restore antique "R-Licence" (muzzle loading)firearms. We have been told that instructions on the manufacture of black powder explosives would be blocked by the internet filter, even though I can LEGALLY manufacture black powder and other explosives and almost any book shop can legally order in books on the subject with the same instructions. This is the sheer stupidity of the system.

Hi Tom,

I've been accused of being both for and against the filter at various points, so I'm very comfortable in my lack of bias when it comes to what I write on the issue. I ask hard questions of the people I interview, regardless of if they're pro- or anti-filter, and I refuse to take sides on this topic.

Let's not forget that my story asking if people even care about the filter is one I pursued and wrote. You now know that claim because I reported it in the first place.

I have sources in all the major parties that are both for and against the filter. They remain sources because I report without bias.

Now onto your other point.

According to ABC expert, Antony Green, around 90 per cent of Australians do not know about the filter as an issue. This is undeniably a significant amount.

However, this still leaves 10 per cent of the electorate holding a good understanding of the proposal. As any politician will tell you, 10 per cent is a large amount in politics and can mean the difference between winning and losing a marginal seat.

That's why Conroy's move to divide and neutralise the issue in that 10 per cent is a smart one.

Thanks for your feedback,

David

Thankyou for your reply David.

We all need a little needling at times including the commentators.

P.S. I do not like the filter proposal nor want a filter but see it as an evil necessity. I am totally annoyed at the garbage on the net and blame a plethora of agents. It impacts on me with my customers and with all the rubbish I have to plough through to get the information I require. I do not use the net for personal use nor do I have a personal computer.

Hi Tom Brown

Thanks for replying.

If you see the internet as a horse without reins, that is OK by me. I am not sure that I see it any differently. What we are both talking about is control. With the internet control is a very complex issue (but I won't bore you with the contents of my degree in that field). This filter is a simplistic solution to a complex problem. It is a static solution to a dynamic problem. As the techie types keep saying, it won't work. It won't give the protection that is claimed. How can blocking a list of a few thousand fixed addresses possibly deal with the ever-changing content on billions of web pages, and on the deeper parts of the internet that it does not connect with?

Let's get back to talking about the horse analogy. Let's call unbridled horses the problem. The filter would work not by putting reins on anything, but by stopping some horses from getting out of a list of particular stables (and those stables might well be empty). Yet the internet is herds and herds of wild horses with no stables. Their location is constantly changing, at a stampeding pace. Do you see how the filter solution is a total mis-match for the problem?

As for what I would do: I have raised a net native. When he was very little he only had access to a limited area of the one computer that we had, via software that gave him things to play with and kept him out of my tax files. Later, his computer was in the lounge-room and so was mine. An adult was always there when he was online, and for good measure I checked his browser history and cache randomly. These days, if I thought a filter was needed I would install one on the home machines as these are much more useful. That's even if Conroy's filter was there - because it would be just about useless.

"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist"

How about we let Paul the octopus decide if a site should be blocked? He seems to have better judgement than Conroy, ACMA or the ACL!

Quoting Tom Brown:
"I feel you are wrong, we have always had censorship we have no rights except those we fight for but sometimes we have to draw a line albeit a dotted one."

Tom, I find your statement that we have no rights quite disturbing. I don't know where you live, but here in Australia we have the right to do anything we want, as long as it does not break any laws. We should be fighting to stop losing the rights that we already have.

@Greenie - I believe that Tom is referring to the fact that we have no rights guaranteed by law (i.e. no Bill of Rights like in the US).

@Tom - "I do not like the filter proposal nor want a filter but see it as an evil necessity. I am totally annoyed at the garbage on the net and blame a plethora of agents"
If the filter stood any chance of actually cleaning up that garbage, then I MIGHT agree with you...but
1. that is NOT what it's designed to do
2. It couldn't possibly do that, even if that was what it was designed to do. It's physically impossible to filter billions of websites if you have to check your work, and if you don't check your work then you run the risk of inadvertently putting some poor battler out of work with every mistake.

Can anyone here point to a website openly containing child porn? Didn't think so. That stuff is in the darknet, far out of the reach of any filter or web police. I don't think anyone is arguing kiddy porn is not the most evil stuff on the plannet but people have to understand the reality of it all and that what Labour is proposing will not by any means fix the supposed 'target'. Given that the filter list is hidden and secret means anything can end up on it and there is not much you can do when it is. I've witnessed first hand websites completely void of anything remotely criminal ending up on filter lists in the UK and there isnt a licken thing you can do about it. You can scream all you like at your ISP and they will happily tell you thier list has nothing to do with them. Wait until one of your favourite sites accidently ends up on the list and then see how you feel.

Tom,

Your comment below is an interesting one,

"Would you put a child or anyone on a horse with no reins, that is what the internet is today!"

I can see how the uninformed could view the Internet as such. But before I go any further you do understand that the Internet doesn't have a mind of it's own right? You don't need reins for the Internet. It already does what you tell it to. You request information and it’s sent to you.

On the surface I can understand, especially when such emotive terms like "Child Porn" and "Paedophiles" are used to justify filtering and attack opponents that filtering seems like a good idea. And if you ignore how the Internet works and treat it as some sort of living being with a gutter mind of it's own then yeah filtering might help you sleep at night, but it still won't stop people from accessing blacklisted material and won't make any child safer online.

Since it takes more effort to wipe your bottom after you go #2 than it will to bypass the filters it won't stop anyone who wants to access the material one bit. The only impact the filters will have is stopping people who aren't trying to access the material from doing so.

Much like anti-piracy methods over the year that tend to only hurt and hinder the legitimate paying customers while the pirates just bypass those measures completely, the only difference being anti-piracy measures won't put children in danger like the mandatory ISP filters might.

To stop the filters from giving parents a false sense of security and less vigilant of their children online it's going to need to be well publicised that the filters won't achieve the policy objective and parents will still need to monitor their children online and purchase and install home based filters if they don't trust their children when they’re not around.

What are the chances of the Department of Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy admitting to that?

Slim and None. So there is a very real chance that parents, the same that bought the "letting your children use the internet is like letting them ride a horse without reins" comment will let their guard down because their children aren't riding a horse without reins any more.

So if the filters won't stop anyone who wants to access the material from getting to it, and it has the chance of putting more children at risk than it will protect AND will cost many millions of dollars to implement then why throw all that money down the drain?

<End Part 1>

I don't understand why people keep saying "cleaning up the trash/filth on the internet", nobody is forcing you to see this stuff unless you deem the information posted on everyday websites as undesirable?

I would absolutely hate to see the internet in Australia turned into something like television (or a cinema as Gillard puts it) , which is what some of you seem to want. Get of the internet, it doesn't belong to you!

1. It is not intended to stop kiddie porn. Everyone knows that.
2. Politicians on both sides are in support of it.
3. The average Australian is too stupid to think it through, and too docile to put up a fight about something they don't understand.
Therefore:
4. It will happen.
5. The filtering scheme proposed will be the tip of the iceberg.
6. There will be no transparency.
7. An Internet tax will follow.

Morons!!!any filter will be easy to bypass now.If they build a better filter(GOVERNMENT CENSORSHIP TOOL)it will only be a short time before it is cracked.I cant wait until these old outdated,backward pollies are out of the picture,as they have no idea of what the new world will be like.Bring on gen X and Y.

some have said,easy to bypass.that is part of a solution however when you google topic x,your results will not show that certain results have been withdrawn.you wont even know the "address' of those sites.how can you bypass a filter when you dont know its been censored??

If this censorship comes in im moving to the uk or america, we already have slow enough internet access in this country. with this pathetic 'save the children' notion is their only justification for going ahead with this ill informed ill designed peice of crap they call a filter.
p.s im not for child porn or anythign like that, i personally think it is disgusting.
im just annoyed that we are suppose to live in a 'free' country and the gov't is going to say what we can and can't see. more like china and iran in my opinion.