Doug

Hi, Thanks for the opportunity to provide feedback. It is sincerely appreciated. I have considered the issue of filtering from many perspectives, and have to admit from the onset, that I do not approve of the wholesale filtering of the Internet connection coming into my home. Let me explain. I am a Parent, a Christian, and an IT Security Consultant, so I believe that I have a fairly wide range of perspectives that I can use in examining the issue. As a parent of two children (16 and 12), I admit that my wife and I had to contend with the adverse effects that leaving a child alone with an Internet connection, who subsequently encountered a barrage of pop-up porn ads, had. My daughter experienced a plethora of reactions, ranging from fear, through to a desire to maintain secrecy. It was the secrecy issue that I felt was the most important. She was concerned that she was in trouble for the action. We assured her that the technology can be a problem, and we had open and honest discussions regarding the event. At no stage did we hide sexuality, nor did we hide the existence pornography. In all, the experience improved the relationship we had with our child. Of course we installed NetNanny on her personal computer, but we didn’t block our own machine in the study. We trust our children. I look upon the internet as a massive library. I remember the days when the librarian restricted access to the adult section of the library. When I became an adult, I was able to access any part of the library I liked. Filtering the primiary feed into my home will silently, and without recourse, limit access to parts of the Internet based on the will of the many. On the subject of the will of the many, I indicated that I am a Christian. I am an elder in my church, and firmly believe in freedom of expression – for all faiths. Accordingly, I do not attempt to suppress the teachings of any other religion. In my personal library (for my kids), I have the religious texts of many other religions. My children are welcome to read them as they like. All I ask, is that they THINK. I also have copies of the Karma Sutra, Joy of Sex, and a significant number of texts discussing sexuality. My kids are also welcome to read them. As an IT security consultant, my job falls into 2 parts, 1 – I write policies and procedures for the protection of Information Processing Systems. And 2 - I perform penetration testing (authorised of course!) to ensure that clients networks are unlikely to be attacked from hostile agents. Professionally, I am aware of a significant number of circumvention technologies that are freely available. It is interesting to note that some of them include encapsulation technologies such as TOR, which was heavily distributed prior to the Beijing Olympics to allow people to bypass the Great Firewall of China. I do not want my country to be considered in the same light as the Chinese for wholesale, secret censorship. I do not want the views of the few imposed on me. If you must censor (which I suspect we are stuck with), then at least make the list of sites that are blocked openly available. We, here in Australia, seem to be stuck on the abhorrent topic of Child Pornography (CP). I firmly believe that the people responsible for the creation and dissemination should be appropriately punished. But to see cases, like occurred recently, where the position of cartoon images were deemed to be child pornography is actually quite frightening. Given this new stance, where is the line? I am worried that we, as a society are moving down a path, where the possession of a sequence of characters is deemed to be illegal (pushed to an extreme, the existence of ASCII ART is now a problem. Why not spend the money we are spending on affecting the whole on improving the monitoring capability that I am sure exists to allow the effective detection of legitimate contraband?