Election 2010: Q&A with the Australian Christian Lobby's Jim Wallace on filters and classification

Two points Shamus:

1. Where do you come up with the 10 seconds browsing delay? What are you using, McFartfinger's Special Proxy for Knuckleheads?

2. Which hand has the FartFinger? If it is your right hand then please refrain from shaking people's hands mate...

As much as I respect Jim Wallace's view, I think he has been miss informed about the isp filter. If a 12 year old can by pass the filter, and doing so isn't illigal, then so can many others. This makes the filter a waste of time and money.
This money would be better spent on educating users how to use the internet properly AND safely. You can't change peoples habits through prohibition, USA and booze in the 1920/30's showed us that. Education is the best way to build a safer internet and society.

Jim is quite correct about one thing - there has certainly been a propaganda campaign run on misinformation and lies, but his organisation and Senator Conroy have been the ones running it!

Clutching at straws! LOL

This guy does know that the FBI did an investigation into snuff films and has yet to find any that are real.

Most are.... wait for it............... pretend!

Just like Go........ oops better not go there or the ACL might censor me.

Almost none of the submissions to the cyber safety committee called for a filter. That includes from the likes of the federal police.

In 2008 acting federal police commissioner called ISP filters completely ineffective (while being interviewed about a huge international child porn bust).

Opponents include: network engineers, Google, Yahoo, ALIA (peak body for librarians), US government, Choice Magazine, Just about every tech journal, Reporters without borders, Australian Youth Law Centre, Justice Michael Kirby ret., the National Party, Derryn Hinch, Anglican minister Will Briggs, etc etc

Are all of these people and groups misinformed or extreme libertarians?

Senator Conroy admitted to being shown several methods to bypass the filter in the space of an hour (more than 2 years after pushing for the policy... he should have looked at that sooner).

Mr Wallace, you are a head in the sand power hungry ultra conservative who wants to force the nation to be like you. The policy is a complete farce.

i want to point out that JW does not speak for all christians or churches. As a minister I am opposed to the filtering list and would rather see the money spent in education. The last thing I want is the government taking away the responsibility of parents in raising kids. It is simple really, if you are concerned what your kids are up to on the net then simply be a parent and take some responsibility and educate and supervise..

'Gratuitous violence' eh? Pretty good coming from an ex trained killer. Every film ever made based on the bible would therefore be bannd.

Self appointed ex military popinjay with delusions of grandeur, what the hell is this site doing giving him a forum to spew his rubbish?

You people are what's wrong with this debate. Where Jim is able to come up with coherent arguments against the filter, most opponents produce pithy responses that couldn't impress a primary school debate judge.

Get a grip - if you can come up with usefull counters, then by all means do it! The speed argument was proven to be wrong - according to IT managers and those in the know. Sure, the filter may do too much, but that can be reduced! Just get something in place first.

@Tony..

Yes because IT Managers are always the ones with the tech know-how.

IT Managers know how to manage and budget, and that is usually about it. As always there are exceptions.

Everyone in favour of the mandatory filtering legislation has determinedly decided that there is no longer any room for personal responsibility.

My friends, the road the hell is paved with good intentions.

I love how that if you're against the filter, you must obviously have something wrong with you (you're being deceptive or you're an extreme liberal). Basically Wallace thinks that no reasoning person could have a problem with the filter.

To which I respond with something which is equally vacuous and offensive...

http://i85.servimg.com/u/f85/11/45/02/64/think-10.jpg

Jim Wallace Lovejoy, take a bow...

I just hope we can get this sort of stuff filtered;

http://www.godblock.com/

The only church that enlightens is the one on fire.

I find it funny that what Jim is proposing goes against the principles of the faith he says he is a part of. While the various christian denominations have their different rules and rituals, one common thing in the new testament material was the concept of free will and teaching by example instead of forcing people to do the right thing. I find it disgusting that so many people take the bible which can be a valuable moral lesson and use it as a leash to lead their more ignorant followers around.
The internet filter may be used initially for what Jim proposes, however it is tantamount to whitewash and the crimes that it is designed to cover up will still happen, pervs will still be able to see it and normal people will be less aware of the real problems. Add to this that we can be GUARANTEED that the scope will expand until we are left with an internet that resembles our MSM. No thanks Jim, I would rather know what's really going on in other parts of the world
Instead of wasting millions of dollars of OUR money Jim, why don't we give it to the heroes in our federal police that catch the scum that make CP, and you can spend YOUR money on filtering software or a filtering ISP which already exhists.

I love it how Jim Wallace talks about mistruths... when he is the one spreading them.

Why cant these idiots have a look at both sides and make an informed decision... wait that would be the smart thing to do.

If this filter comes in... your not leaving the so called misinformed much choice.. we know it wont work, we know many different ways to get around it and its the children that will be the teachers of how to avoid the filter... not the IT Techs/Managers, we can sit back and watch while the filter is ripped apart by our youth without any influence on our part.

We don't need to do anything.. and this filter WILL fail.

Now If lets say the bible and all religions were blocked as most have contained extreme violence at some point in time would he be ok with that? I personally think all religions should be placed under RC. As in my opinion they can't be given a classification as I can't see how they can be.

But I do believe people who go on and on about becoming the next China or North Korea are nut bags.

Any government even states can censor anything they want. In Queensland in the 80's a lot of stuff was censored in the media even if it was given a ma15+ R18+ etc rating. That was done by the national party.
You can go around the world one example is Japan have so called censorship under our laws its fine under there law it isn't?

They might not agree with it now but in 5, 10, 20 years time any party that disagrees with censoring something may change there mind or decides to become a China or whatever.
It is never going to go away. But people seem to think it will go away...
Besides tv and print is censored where are the people saying there should be adult movies at 4pm on weekdays??

I am absolutely horrified that people like him (who also appear to have the ear of the Government) put themselves forward as experts on things they know nothing about. They base this so-called expertise on a select amount of information provided to them. This from someone who would also put himself forward as an expert on religion and God, a figment of someone's fertile imagination that has thus created the biggest scam in history. So many losers in the world like him that have their lives ruled by a mere belief totaly void of any real scientific fact or evidence.
He therefore lives in a dreamworld on more than one level.

@meninga

1) A human managed blacklist for the Internet can only cover an infinitesimal percentage of content on the Internet that could be considered harmful to children. Yes, yes you can say we need to start somewhere, but when you put in a secretive manual blacklist up against almost 2 trillion web pages and growing while ignoring all protocols except http (2/3 of all traffic passes via methods other than web pages) you aren't actually doing anything at all for child protection with this. Not a single thing. Not even before you take circumvention into account.

The chances of anyone's child hitting a page that is on a government controlled blacklist built on user complaints is almost impossibly small, unless we're facing much larger scope banning than has already been promised.

Your doors and locks analogy is faulty. What is being proposed is more like training a single attack Chihuahua to be the sole mechanism for Australian border protection. ISP filtering as put up by Labor and the ACL is about as effective as that at child protection. You can see why motives are being questioned here.

2) You are probably already aware that the McNair Ingenuity poll had 80% in favour of some sort of filtering without much information provided on how it would be done, but also something like 90% against the government controlling secret content blacklists. So the McNair Ingenuity had the vast majority of respondents against the sort of solution Labor has proposed.