saraswati

Hi Senator Conroy I have no concerns at all if you chose to provide an opt-in filter to parents. That way if parents chose not to have their children view certain material, that's their choice. However I am totally opposed to your mandatory filter for a number of reasons. 1) We've been advised that the list of banned sites will be secret. There is therefor no accountability or transparency about what is banned. So we have no way of knowing whether all of the banned sites are actually illegal or not. 2) Barring terrorism issues, it is not ok to ban people based purely on point of view. The idea of banning someone for running an euthanasia website is antithetical to how a free society operates. This issue in combination with the above concerns about a secret list has everyone incredibly worried that this list will creep out to include unpopular political viewpoints. Such a move would mean the beginning of the death of Australia as a free society. 3) I work in an IT department and I know darn well, filters don't work. You can either block something based on objectionable words or skintones or you can block specific urls. In the first instance you will often find that it will block the wrong things. A painting sold for Breast Cancer awareness week will get blocked for the presence of the word "breast" in the title for example. In the second instance, it's incredibly difficult to keep up with people who do the wrong thing because they change their URLs so quickly. I know from experience it takes very little time to register a URL (around a day) and you cannot block them all without spending massive resources that could more effectively spent elsewhere. 4) The government has no business imposing a regime primarily designed to protect children on households where there are no children, only adults. Especially considering your own tests show that these filters slow down speeds between 35 to 80 percent. We're already behind the rest of the world, we don't need to fall further behind. If you really want to spend this money, go out and explain the dangers of cyberspace in plain language to parents. I find myself doing that to my family. I explain to them to watch what their kids are doing, to know who they're on MSN with and to seriously limit the time that they're on to half an hour to an hour a day at most. I also advise them of the more dangerous programs like ICQ that they need to disallow on their pc. These measures and educating parents on an individual level are generally FAR more effective than any technologically based solution. You need to start listening to the technical experts and providing solutions that actually work. Regards Kathleen