Stu

I am sure that many posters to come will continue to point out the severe deficiencies in your filtering plan, Mr Conroy. Along with almost every expert in the field, they have been telling you all year that this plan is dangerously ignorant and ill-advised. And just like those experts, these comments will undoubtedly be ignored.

It will be expensive, it will be ineffective, it will potentially be extremely damaging to IT infrastructure, it cannot be implemented without being draconian, oppressive, and a severe security risk, and so far it has been only poorly defined and amateurishly handled.

All these deficiencies will be demonstrated in due time, but for now, let's focus on how counterproductive the filter will be...since you have been so keen on accusing your opponents in this debate of supporting child pornography, have you considered how much worse off children will be under the plan?

At present, the ACMA blacklist is secret and not available to the public. In theory it is a list of some of the most offensive illegal material on the internet - since it is a secret we cannot confirm this, but if it is, the government would be sending the filter to the hundreds (possibly thousands) of Australians who will need to implement the filter. The risk of the filter leaking because of this is very high. If not, experience with British and Finnish filters shows that the filters can be reverse engineered to find the content. Whether the filter is leaked, or whether it is hacked, the government will in effect be providing the country with a list of the most dangerous material on the internet.

It is often said that the internet interprets censorship as network damage and attempts to route around it. While not only reinforcing the notion that effective internet censorship is theoretically impossible, this rerouting very frequently has unintended consequences.

Firstly, in something called the "Streisand effect", censored content can become much more widely available and widely accessed as news of censorship efforts is published. This is precisely what happened when the Internet Watch Foundation added a relatively obscure album cover on wikipedia to its blacklist - a page with at most a few hundred page views per day instantly became the most popular article for the online encyclopedia, with close a million page views in the space of a few days. Even the IWF backed down after it realised exactly how counterproductive its effort was:

"IWF's overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect."

Also, the "rerouted" traffic often uses technologies which make it harder to track people online. Technologies such as proxying and Onion routing not only defeat government censorship, they conceal the activities and identities of people who use them.

This is likely to complicate police efforts. Also, delicate undercover work, such as that which recently busted an international child pornography ring (none of which would be caught by the filter, incidentally), runs the risk of being exposed by an overzealous and ill-considered filtering approach. Some filtering technologies (such as the BT cleanfeed) even use proxying as a part of the filtering process, hiding the user's IP address and making it more difficult to identify users online.

The filters also offer only a false sense of security. We keep hearing from pro-censorship advocates that parents shouldn't need to supervise their children online 24/7, or that schools and libraries shouldn't need to perform filtering when the government can do it for them. In doing so, they are severely letting their guard down. The filter won't work, people have been screaming this from the rooftops, only to be ignored, but if people THINK it will work, they will no longer take the measures online which actually do help to protect children.

This is only a fraction of the idiocy of the filter - but if your very efforts go against everything you are trying to achieve, maybe it is time to save political face and quietly drop this nonsense.