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So what else is the Government doing to help protect children online?
As an IT security professional with over 15 years experience I would think that it would be better to direct funding at detection and enforcement rather than prohibition.
Posted by Andrew D / 10 Dec 2008 8:13pm / Permalink
Give up on the filtering idea. It is ill-conceived and bound to fail. Devote more resources to education on responsible internet use and to the police to target anyone using the internet for illegal purposes and prosecute them. Stop treating the rest of us like we can't be trusted.
Posted by Jason / 10 Dec 2008 6:26pm / Permalink
If the Government truly wants to stamp out illegal activity as it suggests, then it should be pouring its efforts into law enforcement and education and encouraging people to be responsible with their children and partake in teaching kids how to decipher information not just taking information away from them.
Posted by Anthony Voevodin / 10 Dec 2008 5:08pm / Permalink
With the amount of money this project is going to cost, would it not be better to put the money into child welfare services and the police to get to the root of the crimes?
Posted by Dave / 10 Dec 2008 10:33am / Permalink
The Government's $125.8 million Cyber-Safety policy includes programs aimed at improving education, research and law enforcement as well as ISP-level filtering.
It includes initiatives to:
- Expand the capacity of the Australian Federal Police Child Protection Operations team to detect and investigate online child abuse, adding an additional 91 AFP members to online child protection by 2011.
- Increase ACMA education activities delivered to parents, teachers, librarians and children—including 150 cyber-safety presentations from January to September in 2008 attended by over 14 900 people.
- Broaden the terms of reference for the Cyber-Safety Consultative Working Group to include all aspects of cyber-safety, such as cyber-bullying and the exposure of children to illegal and inappropriate content .
- Create a Youth Advisory Group to ensure programs remain relevant and on-target.
We understand that filtering alone will not protect our children online. However, we believe that it can play an important role as part of a comprehensive government effort to tackle this issue.
It is also increasingly becoming an international expectation that countries do something about stemming the tide of child sexual abuse material. To not act would fall short of international standards.
Stephen Conroy
Return to the Promoting a Civil and Confident Online Society blog topic or see other responses:
This is an attack on freedom of speech- Why aren’t PC-level filters sufficient?
- How will the blacklist be maintained?
- Why won’t the Government publish what is included in the ACMA blacklist?
- How does ACMA determine what sites will be included on the blacklist?
- Hasn’t the Government already undertaken a trial of the technical issues surrounding internet filtering? Didn’t this trial find that filtering was not effective?
- Won’t internet filtering reduce internet speeds?
- Internet filtering won’t stop peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic—so why bother?