Drew

I am all for methods of capturing or restricting these criminals, AS LONG AS it does not effect the speed of broadband in Australia (which is already behind other countries such as Japan and the USA). Civil freedoms are another matter, but lets deal with each disappointing problem one at a time. The entire approach has been done incorrectly, and this could well be the first major mistake that may lead to Labor's 2011 election loss. The american election proved that you have to have your national internet users on-side to win an election in this current technological era, and this filter is putting us ALL off-side. Trust me, you really don't want to upset the "YouTube, Digg, Facebook and MySpace generation". A blanket internet firewall will do exactly this. I'm a bit of a Labor devotee (my dad is a Labor party member), but more than that I am an internet devotee. I've basically decided that if you proceed with the policy of implementing a blanket firewall filter, I'm going to campaign and vote against federal Labor for the first time in my life in the next election. I imagine there are plenty more like me you will turn away from the party. And thus the problems are: 1) Slowing the current broadband speeds within our country, which are already disappointingly slow when compared to the US and Japan. This is going to set our country back 5 years in terms of technological advancement. 2) Senator Conroy's office's early letters and attempts to silence the industry critics of the plan, which amounts to nearly a dictatorship. What ever happened to the left aligned Labor movement? With the Democrats all but gone and Labor moving further to the right, the Greens are now the only party with leftist roots. Even the Libs have been sounding more left aligned than federal Labor, which is entirely disappointing. If the Libs ever dump their ex-Howard ministry, the lefties will start to give preference to Liberal rather than Labor. 3) Presumption of guilt - that all Australian internet users are guilty and therefore must be restricted. 4) Missing the source of the problem, which is the perpetuators. 5) False positives ie. legitimate websites that are blocked because no AI/filter is perfect. 6) Potential for civil rights abuse from future governments. Imagine a corrupt government is voted into power down the track, and starts blocking sites that are legal but do not match their own sinister agenda. 7) The inability to block other networking methods such as encrypted peer to peer. Criminals will simply move onto alternate methods to avoid the law. Better to catch the criminals than to scare them away making them that much harder to find.