Hi Jim,
I doubt you remember me, but we’ve met twice at Shellharbour COC and you also spoke at a course I was attending , ran by Warwick Marsh of the Fatherhood Foundation. I’d just like to make some comments about the recent press release titled “Christian Lobby Welcomes ISP Filtering Moves”.
While it is important that safeguards are put in place to protect children and the community from illegal, abusive and degrading material available over the Internet, we need to be sure that what is put in place DOES work and is not just a panacea aimed at solving the political problem (we christians DO have a lot of clout in Canberra) rather than the real issue of unsupervised uncontrolled access to the internet by minors.
Iin 1999, the Coalition Government (with Senator Richard Alston as Minister for Communications and the Arts) passed amendments to the Broadcasting Services Act (see http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/num_act/bsasa1999449/). This was accompanied by a Ministerial directive to the ACMA (then ABA) to establish NetAlert (see http://www.netalert.gov.au/ ), and for NetAlert to carry out periodic assessments of the “state of the art” of filtering technology.
Since that time, NetAlert and the Department have commissioned separate studies by the CSIRO, Ovum, and most recently RMIT (study available at http://www.netalert.gov.au/advice/publications/reports/a_study_on_server_based_internet_filters/executive_summary/%20%20background.html ) and Enex Testlab (study available at http://www.acma.gov.au/webwr/_assets/main/lib310554/isp-level_internet_content_filtering_trial-report.pdf ).
All of the studies have uniformly demonstrated that online censorship technology:
* slows down Internet access;
* inaccurately blocks content which should not be blocked;
* inaccurately fails to block content which should be blocked;
* is ineffective at inspecting or blocking “Peer to Peer” traffic that comprises over 60% of Australia’s Internet traffic (see http://www.ipoque.com/resources/internet-studies/internet-study-2007); and
* fails to accurately distinguish between legal and illegal content even when specifically configured with lists of illegal content under laboratory conditions.
The most recent trials, conducted in Tasmania by Enex Testlab earlier this year, found that the most accurate product tested incorrectly blocked 3% of innocent material (See http://www.itnews.com.au/News/81637,sageau-slams-cost-of-content-filtering.aspx) and incurred a “slowdown” performance penalty in excess of 70%, and failed to reliably block the ACMA’s prohibited content list.
It beggars disbelief that the Minister for Broadband would be interested in pursuing these systems whilst at the very same time advocating for a $20B National Broadband Network (NBN) intended to increase Internet speeds.
And to what avail ? Any Australian can obtain encrypted Virtual Private Network (VPN) access from the United States for less than $5 per month (https://vpnout.com/ and http://www.secureix.com/personal.shtml are just two providers of this service). The irony is that this is the IDENTICAL technology used by Christians who are persecuted for their Faith to hide their activities from hostile Governments. In short, an effective, guaranteed bypass of any effort by any National Government to filter Internet content.
Note that there is no requirement for complicated software to use these services, VPN clients are installed by default on all common Operating System platforms. Australians who wish to hide themselves from Government Internet censorship efforts are only a few clicks away from that anonymity.
As a Christian, I have a more serious objections to this “clean feed” option (which, BTW, will erect an online Government censorship regime in Australia for the first time). As alluded to above, I am conscious of the fact that Christians elsewhere are persecuted for their Faith. While we currently have Christian or moderate people at the head of our major parties, this may not remain the case. This “clean feed” will be Australia’s answer to the Chinese Government’s Golden Shield Project ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project also known as the Internet Wall of China).
For the “clean feed” to have any chance of success, it would need to be illegal under Australian law to disseminate copies of the blacklist of sites or whatever techniques were used to block internet traffic (just as it is in China). Once this is in place, would we know whether, say, http://godtube.com was blocked or just ‘unavailable’ ? Well, actually, we could know, by using the methods described above, but we would be breaking the law to do so.
As a Christian Parent, I am in favor of anything that prevents the spread of Child Pornography. However, Senator Conroy’s propoosal will not succeed at stopping those who traffic in this filth, while costing an enormous amount of time and money.
Thanks for reading this far.
There’s some text and PDF