Australian Government Internet Censorship

The learned citizens of Australia are going to war. This time it's personal. The Australian government appears hell bent on forcing *EVERY* Internet connection to be subject to a mandatory filter. (props to the Spoonman for that opening)

This filter, as stated by the Labor government, has the aim of blocking *ALL* Child Pornography and other *UNWANTED* content. Don't get me and my fellow citizens wrong, despite what Senator Conroy would have you believe by disagreeing with him, WE ARE NOT CHILD PORN CONNOISSEURS. We abhor it just as much as the next person. It's the definition of *OTHER UNWANTED* content that has the concerned citizens of this country worried.

Why? Because the list of sites that will be blocked is to be kept secret. No one will know what is on this list. What's worse, this list is exempt from Freedom of Information requests. Yes, you read correctly, the list that tells the ISPs of this country what to block is *EXEMPT* from FOI requests. Thus, there is no accountability in what goes on the list and no one will know what is on it and why. This is censorship at its worst.

The wildcard that this government is using to push this dismal failure of a solution, is the guise of protecting the children by filtering out Child Pornography. This is a noble goal. I'm all for protecting the children, as are all parents. The problems with the proposal include:

1. Slow net access speeds down by up to 80% (Source: ACMA Filtering trials June/July 2008)
2. It only covers HTTP traffic (HTTPS traffic is a different argument). Most, if not ALL Child Pornography is distributed via encrypted traffic as well as through Peer to Peer applications
3. Will not prevent *ANYONE* from accessing child pornography if they are looking for it
4. Blocking this content will *NOT* stop these sick individuals from exploiting children and producing Child Pornography

This money is better spent helping the Australian Federal Police, who are already doing an excellent job (my hat goes off to them) of arresting these people responsible for Child Pornography. Although encryption cannot be filtered, this is no obstacle to good old-fashioned police detective work. Where there is a human element, there will always be a weakness that the Police can use to crack these networks and shut them down, encryption or not.

I for one, do NOT want my Internet access affected by a filter that has a 0% chance of stopping Child Pornography and *WILL* be used to prevent access to other content that remains legal in this country. Sites such as Euthanasia-related sites, normal run-of-the-mill Porn that is able to be legally purchased in Australia and Gambling sites such as Poker sites.

I also do not want the government to jump on the Peer to Peer bandwagon either, believing that it's only use is distributing pirated software and music/movies as well as enabling Child Pornography distribution. There are many legitimate uses for Peer to Peer technology such as Bit Torrent. Bit Torrent itself is currently used to legally distribute large files today such as Linux distributions, movies (Via Vuze and Bittorrent.com) as well as efficiently distributing game patches that are hundreds of megabytes in size to millions of gamers around the world in a short period of time (Blizzard's World of Warcraft Background Downloader).

Don't forget the government wants to spend $5 billion on a high speed broadband network (which, funnily enough, is already here for the most part), and then is hell bent on crippling it by spending $44 million on filtering it out. Give that money, and the rest already budgeted, to the AFP so they can continue to do the excellent work of bringing these people to justice and these children home safely.

Further reading:

1. GetUp - Save The Net
2. Overclockers AU Wiki - Australian Internet Filtering
3. Whirlpool Wiki - Clean Feed
4. Electronic Frontiers Australia
5. NoCleanFeed.com
6. NoCensorship.Info

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