Mark G

The government has not addressed a number of issues related to the filter in a convincing way. To re-iterate: 1. The filter is not wanted. No proper poll has been done (we can discount push-polls conducted by interest groups who rely on moral panic as a funding source) - but luckily we have a better indicator available. Not just the ratio of comments here, but also the fact that a filter was already offered with a massive marketing campaign to make people aware, and only about 2% of households are using it. The assertion that households are too technically illiterate is patronising and unsubstantiated. The technical knowhow needed to install a filter is negligable and the marketing leaflets and helplines made it even easier. 2. The filter won't work. On the subject of child porn, the head of Taskforce Argos said: "the chances of stumbling across this material… are minimal as it isn’t really distributed on web pages." You can't just stumble on this stuff with casual searches. In the rare instances where the filter might block someone, it can be bypassed in 30 seconds using website services already commonplace in China. Sickos use peer-to-peer software and there's no capacity to filter that—the technology referred to in the previous blog entry is experimental alpha technology that is yet to be employed even in individual firms, let alone for a whole country. And if it were employed, the impact in terms of cost and slowdown would be enormous since each individual packet would need to be routed and decoded—not even the two nations with mandatory filters (Saudi Arabia and China) have intimated doing it. 3. The filter is a waste of money. Funds being spent here are not being spent on policing and detection of child abuse which have yielded such effective results in recent months. In a time when family support services are in such tight straits the idea of spending a hundred million dollars on censorship instead is bizarre. 4. The filter is open to abuse. It can't do much about child porn, but it can stop political content that governments want to hush up. The government says it won't use the filter that way (in which case why even introduce it?) - but any promises won't bind future governments who might feel pressure in the senate to expand the blacklist. 5. The filter will slow down the internet. It can't not. We keep getting disingenuous comparisons with places that don't have a mandatory filter but this is mandatory and theremore much more largescale and heavy-handed. 6. The filter will overblock and underblock content. This has been acknowledged, but the government is still treating internet filter as equivalent to censoring traditional media. What Senator Conroy doesn't understand is that the internet is not just another form of media. The censorship rules applied to other media do not overblock or underblock, and they have some chance of working because you are blocking supply of a physical commodity, like DVDs or VCR tapes. The internet is different. 7. The filter policy will enable child abuse. To implement this filter, the government is sending its blacklist to 700 ISPs, most of whom oppose the policy outright. When the list leaks, as it inevitably must, it will prove a useful tool for the most unsavoury internet users. And if the filter somehow has some success in driving child porn further underground, that will actually make it harder for law enforcement to do its job. 8. The filter is opposed by the Liberal party, the greens, child support agencies (such as Save the Children), ISPs, technical experts everywhere... and quite a lot of voters who remember the government's broken election promise to allow full opt-out. The filter's failure is not just a technical certainty but also a political one. It fails on levels. And the pro-filter case is awful. Seriously. The reason they have to use lies (see: http://libertus.net/censor/resources/statistics-laundering.html#controv) and slander their opponents is that they have no case. They have openly refused to address the filter's feasability, because they know they cannot. The arguments that result are worthy of Sir Humphry ("I know it won't work in practice, but what about in theory?"). The choice the government has is to use the filter trials as a way to bail out of this toxic policy on their own terms... or deny political and technical reality and add to the ignominy with failure in the senate. It falls to us to remember which choice the government makes when the next election rolls around.