Objection #2 and #13 together hold the strongest argument against the filter. The government is parading the filter as a solution to child pornography, which it is not as it can’t filter P2P content or VPN content. It won’t stop the exploitation of children. It’s a waste of money on a solution that won’t work.

Conroy thinks China’s censorship is good. However any young person in China knows how to get on Facebook, Youtube, Blogspot (all of which are censored in China) and pass the government’s firewall. If you actually want to view something online you are always going to be able to get around a filter.

I’m actually embarrassed that there is a strong voice among Christians who support the filter. The filter is not going to stop those who want to get the disgusting content that Christians want to hide.

Hi Cameron, thanks for these insights. I’m wondering how effective you think a filter would be for children (say, under 12 years of age)? Would it be more effective for this age group (the group I’m most concerned about protecting) than adults?

No it wouldn’t. A couple of examples, your child could still encounter legal porn or any number of sites about sexual activities. A perverted adult could groom them on a social network, forum or online game. It could also be as simple as a 10 year old boy spending hours looking at a lingerie website.

There’s lot’s of nasty content out there, which is easily accessible.

In the West household, we police that by putting all the computers in a public place in our house, and discussing the issue amongst the family.

The greater concern for me is stalking and grooming through social networks (ie exploiting trust). My daughter was recently ‘love bombed’ by a boy from her school via SMS and FaceBook.

I can’t see how a filter protects against the exploitation of trust,

Ken

OK let me have a go at being stupid!

1. a clean feed is technically impossible. – a cleaner feed is better than nothing surely
2. it is very expensive, and the money could better be spent elsewhere. – a generic argument thrown around far too often
3. the filter will accidentally block content that shouldn’t be blocked (as evidenced in the trial earlier in the year).- e.g???
4. the government could expand the filter in the future to restrict free speech. – and the world could end tomorrow & we could have a military coup tomorrow – please!!
4. the answer is education, not filtering what we access online. – partially true but education is never a total fix
5. it’s the responsibility of parents, not the government, to keep children safe.- absolutely right but civil authorities have an essential role to play here – parents are not with their children 24 hrs a day
6. it slows the internet down.- I’d take a slow internet to weed out offensive material
6. we’re adults, and we shouldn’t be told what we can and can’t look at online. – so where do you draw the line if you ever draw the line & why there?? snuff movies & bestiality?? the line has to be drawn somewhere – being an adult does not give the right to watch anything you like
7. home-based filters would be more effective. – good point, let’s have them as well
8. there’s far to much content to block effectively. – giving up is not the answer
9. the government’s proposed black-list of content is proposed to be kept secret. – agreed, a bad move
10. there are ways to get around a filter. – there are always ways around filters but not everyone goes there
11. most illegal content isn’t consumed on the internet, but via peer-to-peer networks, proxy servers etc that would not be affected by a filter. – good point, let’s find a solution for these access points as well

OK that’s me being stupid!

Hi Steve,

To be fair, the issue has been exhaustively discussed in the media and elsewhere over the past couple of years, and with the Govt putting it off for another year, I’m not sure I can take another year of debate

I’ve been strongly opposed from the get go — I listed my objections on sydneyanglicans.net 6 months ago here (if you’re interested): http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/news/ozanalysis/smh_bias_on_net_filtering/#11880 & argued against it when it was discussed ~18 months ago here: http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/news/ozanalysis/rudds_porn_filter_will_it_destroy_the_internet/

Unfortunately the level of vitriol from crazies in mainstream news comments has reached a point where we’re lucky if many of them rise to the level of ‘idiotic’ and that has inspired articles like this one (note the author’s objections too): http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/stephen-conroy-filter-critics-should-censor-themselves/ . That said, critics like Mark Newton (particularly), and those from the EFA have been very consistent, level headed and considered in their opposition throughout, so they’re both good sources for objections, I’d imagine.

The objections for me really hinge on the question of effectiveness, and given recent proposals from Gillard have been to have more layers of review and bureaucracy to what is an utterly tiny list in the scheme of things make the whole exercise completely farcical for me. The proposed complaints-based mechanism is particularly open to abuse, and will never be workable. It’ll be completely flooded within an hour of going live, I imagine, and all the complaints may well be legitimate under the law and therefore need to be reviewed.
I think the most recent objections have been summed up like this:
Q? What is the government’s proposed internet filter?
A: Something that doesn’t filter the internet.

As an aside, I’ve been consistently disappointed with the way the ACL have handled themselves throughout the debate — playing fast and loose with the truth for political ends is not a good look for Christians, imo. There are useful things they can advocate for — greater use of home internet filters, which are far better than anything the Govt can oppose — but insisting the Govt do something meaningful is pointless, as there’s nothing meaningful they can do. If they could, they would. Govt options are to filter a handful of URLs, dynamically filter the internet China-style (not going to happen), or offer free home filtering (which the previous Govt spent $90 million on but only had literally 1% of estimated take up).

So the first option is all they can do, but just because they can doesn’t (imo) mean they should

If you can think up an effective, meaningful way forward that addresses the relevant objections, then more power to you, but after months and months of debate I think if there was an appropriate solution (other than home filtering), it would have bubbled up already. Nevertheless, look forward to your article!

Steve said: I’m wondering how effective you think a filter would be for children (say, under 12 years of age)? Would it be more effective for this age group (the group I’m most concerned about protecting) than adults?

That’s the big disconnect between the Govts rhetoric about blocking the worst of the worst, and protecting children — they sound good in the same sentence, but they are mutually separate goals, and the filter simply wont filter anything inappropriate under 12s might come across.

Oops, open tag fail

@John Finkelde Yes, as you said you were being stupid with those arguments.

As Luke has said this has been overly discussed so I will just look at 1 of your points #6. A filter is not removing offensive material. It’s removing illegal material so there will still be a massive amount of content that is offensive and not honoring to God. The filter is not going to make a difference.

Okay, I have to mention #4 too. What if the government choose to filter Christian websites, for example, that discussed God condemning homosexual sex as a sin? In China there are Christian blogs which are blocked. You can’t trust a government to filter only illegal content especially if the list of banned content is secret.

I don’t really want to get caught up in a debate about the filter here, and that’s not what you’ve asked for. I’m a christian, and strongly opposed, that’s where I’m coming from.

Now, to your 13 points. Some of these combine to be pretty devastating for Conroy’s proposal:

The proposed filter is technically ineffectual, but its actual effects will be problematic. They won’t create a clean feed, they fail to address the real avenues of internet porn, and they will probably make porn harder to prosecute rather than harder to find. They money issue is not a blindside, it’s a lot of money for a clunky solution that fails to address significant issues, not least stopping the production of things like child porn.

The presence of questionable websites on the existing RC-list should indicate that questions about free-speech are not extremist claims. Related issues of speech, copyright, and control in the US and UK should broaden our understanding of the issues of censorship.

I agree Luke, it’s been discussed a lot in the last 12 months, but as it’s being discussed again, I wanted to ensure a reasoned Christian response was part of the current debate.

I also wanted to list the objections one by one, because in most of the discussions I’ve read there is a lot of hyperbole and a blurring of the arguments, and I was trying (at least for my own sake) to try and make sense of some muddy waters!

As Ken points out, the issue of exposure to sexually explicit content is part of a bigger problem that we’re facing as a society as a whole – rapidly advancing technological changes – and this is exposing kids to a range of issues on a variety of platforms (for example mobile phones which can’t really be filtered at the moment at all).

We’re sitting at the bleeding edge of these advances, and as a society we’re working out how to deal with these issues for the first time. For example, cyber-bullying – where once a child could escape bullies when they got home, now they can get it 24 hours a day on their mobile phone.

Parents, who haven’t grown up with these technologies and most of the time know very little about them, are very uneducated, and to be honest naive about the dangers and impact of these technologies. This was very clear as I chatted with them at the seminar last week, and let’s face it – there’s a lot of ‘technology’ for them to get their heads around! Obviously, education is a very large part of dealing with this problem. I’m going to consider how we might respond as Christians later on.

Cameron makes the point that he’s embarrassed by how many Christians are expressing support for this. I can see where he’s coming from, but I can also see the other perspective – (some) Christians are aware of the extent of the problem, and see the government trying to act to address it. Sure, there might be lots of holes with the proposed solution (as this discussion is pointing out and the objections make clear), but it’s a technical issue and most Christians and the Australian public in general aren’t technical. So, from a laymans perspective, what the government is doing may appear to be not such a bad idea.

I think the challenge for those Christians who are more technical is to explain why the filter wouldn’t be effective at doing what the Australian public thinks it will do AND (not or!) be at the forefront in making constructive suggestions for helping the government and parents to protect their children from harmful content that is increasingly easy to access.

This is a part of the debate that I’ve been disappointed about, generally speaking, from the Christian perspective – I’d like us to speak in favour of protecting children, and be the promoters of positive and constructive policy suggestions. It’s not enough to say “the filter won’t work” – we need to offer other ideas for what will.

Hi Steve, thanks for the response, and I take your points. Your disappointments are similar to mine, but perhaps from a different point of view. I’ve been disappointed in the ACL, as I mentioned, for backing a dud solution, in the face of plenty of good evidence, instead of supporting home filtering, which is the only filtering that’s strict enough for under 12s. To my mind, their lobbying efforts have been extremely counterproductive, and generated a great deal of ill-will for Christians, and for what? A solution that doesn’t actually solve anything, when there’s good commercial solutions available. Worse, it may well give some parents a false sense of security, making their children even more vulnerable than they were before. It’s not enough to simply say “Our intentions were pure” when you’ve been warned full well that the proposed solution may do more harm than good.

There simply is no solution that the Government can impose upon ISPs that will protect under 12s, and I think it’s unfair to say technically-minded Christians haven’t been being productive in the debate, though maybe that’s because the solution is so obvious: educate, and encourage the purchase of home filtering software. But if lobby groups insist it’s the Government’s duty to take responsibility where parents wont in a way that actually encourages a frankly dangerous false sense of security, then I think it’s appropriate to speak out, to at least prevent that harm from happening.

There are plenty of productive things the ACL could do — start a church by church home filtering drive, and encourage 100% participation for families, or something like that, and educate, educate, educate. That’s the sort of thing I’d think they would do if they we’re really serious about the issue, and not just the politics.

As it is, I think we have a moral responsibility, if anything, to stop the filter. A filter that doesn’t actually filter, and encourages parents to abdicate their responsibility or ignore better solutions like home filtering is something we should morally oppose. Good intentions don’t keep kids safe.

Have you seen this? GodBlock – an anti-religion filter

http://www.godblock.com/

I should also add that this is a case of the ‘law of unintended consequences’ being in full effect — the list of the ‘worst of the worst’ was leaked a year or so ago and is freely available, and is now essentially a Government-sponsored honey pot for very nasty stuff. Again, this is a pretty predictable outcome.

Here’s another piece on the technical futility of the filter published today: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2010/07/why-the-filter-wont-work-a-technical-story/

@ Cam thanks for the compliment

Re: # 1 at least dealing with illegal content is a start isn’t it?

Re: # 4 Actually banning Christian sites that hammer away at homosexual issues would be a relief so I’d be fine with that one. Given the state of the church in China vs the Oz church maybe some govt interference may actually be good for us. OK I do not have a a rabid martyr syndrome so go easy on that one!

@ Steve I totally agree with ” It’s not enough to say “the filter won’t work” – we need to offer other ideas for what will.” So what will work? I am fairly tech savvy & am completely aware of the porn probs plaguing people in our churches yet I am obviously ignorant of the tech issues here. Help me out!

You have sparked a heated debate Steve!

I like the filter initiative, I freaking hate porn on the internet and the damage it does, but Porn will be resilient and I think people will find other avenues for accessing it.

I also personally like the idea of the .xxx suffix, I think that is also an excellent step in the right direction.

I’ve been doing some reading about some of Australia’s ISPs voluntarily introducing a filter (e.g. ‘Fractious ISPs may fumble their chance on internet filter’).

Here’s a comment I read at the bottom of the article:

“I’m pretty horrified by the style of reporting in this article. It’s as if to say that ISPs are at fault for resisting attempts to introduce a censorship regime that’s not unlike what China or Iran have.”

This is a common criticism – censorship of internet will turn Australia into a China or Iran. However, there already is censorship in Australia for offline materials. Some types of content are refused classification and are not legal (and therefore not readily accessible) to Australian’s in general, and children in particular.

The internet changes this – content that is restricted offline, is available fairly easily online. Because much of this content is created and hosted overseas, there is very little the government can do to police this material and restrict access to it.

The globalisation of information is in many ways wonderful, but not when it allows people to circumvent laws that have been put in place for good reason.

@John Finkelde “Re: # 1 at least dealing with illegal content is a start isn’t it?” The problem is that it will lead to a false sense of security and thus complacency. And it just won’t work, at any level. It won’t stop pedophiles accessing child porn, it won’t stop kids stumbling across ‘legal’ porn.

I installed a filter on our home computer once and it was just a pain – so many false positives. The settings were just too complicated to bother with (and I’m tech savvy). It even blocked YWAM!

The best solution for protecting kids is manual filtering. Keep computers in a public part of the house.

As mentioned before, the filter doesn’t block all porn, just the illegal stuff.

Someone asked for an example of the block banning the wrong stuff. When the list got put up on wiki leaks the government then had to say that only 32% of the sites blocked were related to child porn, and then 150 sites were then taken off the list, including the famous QLD dentist website. (http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Australian_government_admits_less_than_32%25_of_secret_censorship_list_is_related_to_underage_images) <- you can crawl around wikileaks to see the list, but even viewing the list in Australia opens you up to I think an $11,000 fine (http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Banned_hyperlinks_could_cost_you_11,000_dollars_a_day) also it seems they blocked an anti-abortion site, which does seem political and I don't think the ACL would have approved of that block (http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Australian_Government_censorship_of_US_anti-abortion_site_abortiontv.com,_21_Jan_2009)

A while ago the Howard government was giving out free licences for the program "Safe Eyes" which is a content filtering program that allows you to customize what you want to block. I don't even have kids, but i installed it on my PC when I could. That type of plan I think is better than a nation wide ban. Of cause it is possible to circumvent it, and it didn't block all porn online (it did block way more sites than the governments filter), but it was a way better start then this national filter.

Also knowing how to block sites and ports on your own router is a good place to stop illegal and illicit material from coming into your home, as well as making your child a user on the computer and not an admin. If you bought the PC, you should be the admin and be able to control what programs you want on your PC.

Also the .xxx domain is like the filter, sounds like a good idea, but also will not work. In 2004 .sex was discussed. Have a search for [page 9] in this file: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3675.txt to get a quick idea as to why a .xxx domain will not work.

Sorry – too lazy to read all the comments to check if it’s been said yet or not, but #13 is incorrect. Peer-to-peer _is_ on the Internet. I think there’s a confusion about what is “The World-Wide Web” and “The Internet”, which carries everything (But yes, that’s a mistake made in the propose legislation anyway).

Another issue I see (Which is a bit of a riff on #4 and #12) is that the government may make it illegal or criminal to circumvent the filter. This would kick an incredible hornet’s nest of difficult edge cases: Would it be illegal to telecommute to the USA? What about a foreign company providing a simplified filter-circumvention service to the Aus. general public?

Also, #10 “far too”, not “far to”

Here’s an interesting way to think about the filter. Let’s say we’re trying to immunize kids against IN (Internet Nasties), like we would other diseases. So the Govt says they’re going to launch a mandatory, nation-wide IN immunization program. They say it wont stop it completely, but it will help in the worst cases, and it will be a “step in the right direction” in “protecting our kids” etc etc.

Now, every kid gets immunized. Then research is done to follow it up, and it turns out not only was the immunization no better than placebo in 80% of cases, in 20% of cases it made cases of IN worse!

Imagine the outrage if parents had to deal with this – the Govt spent tens of millions of dollars on a dud program that not only didn’t stop anything for the kids, it made some worse! I don’t think “we gave it a try” or “it’s a step in the right direction” would cut it; and I don’t think “Well, what’s your idea?” would be an appropriate response either.

That’s what the filter is. Supporters, to my mind, need to outline why they should support something as wasteful and dangerous as this. (Keep in mind that it can be defeated by simply adding a ? to the end of a URL, too.)

@M0les So you want #13 to say “most illegal content isn’t consumed on the World Wide Web” – hardly anyone is going to understand the difference of terminology but still the current filter plan won’t block P2P sharing or VPNs which are accessed “through the internet.”

Good illustration Luke, although I’m unclear about what you mean by the filter ‘making things worse’? Is this in regards to providing a false sense of security?

I think because this is a technical issue, and most people aren’t technical, the complications are increased. Also, supporters might give their support to the sentiment, without understanding the implications, and I agree that this is dangerous.

What do you, and others think of the ISPs volunteering to filter content? Does this demonstrate that filtering is possible? Are they doing this simply as a means of getting the government to stop its filter?

I’d appreciate someone helping me to understand what’s going on here

Steve said: The internet changes this – content that is restricted offline, is available fairly easily online. Because much of this content is created and hosted overseas, there is very little the government can do to police this material and restrict access to it.

The globalisation of information is in many ways wonderful, but not when it allows people to circumvent laws that have been put in place for good reason.

This is not strictly true — it’s illegal to distribute hardcore porn for eg in most states, both on and off line, but it’s not illegal to access or possess it, as far as I can recall. So you can/could (?) legally order DVDs from Canberra (or anywhere in the world), for example, but you couldn’t see those DVDs in a shop in most states. (That was my understanding anyway.) Sure, from a Christian point of view we may not like it, but the laws cut both ways, especially with anti-abortion material on the filter list, for example, when it treats everyone like a distributor. So in that sense, it’s a bit of an abuse of the law about ‘restricted’ material (the extreme end of which is illegal).

–

As M0les points out, #13 should be “most illegal content isn’t consumed on the *web* (not Internet)”, as the www is just one protocol for Internet communication. And I was saying, keep in mind this isn’t just ‘illegal’ content per-se, but ‘restricted’ content, some of which is illegal.

@Cam and @M0les – would a better wording be – “most illegal content isn’t consumed on websites”?

@Steve, yes, due to a false sense of security. If people aren’t technical enough to understand why there are problems now, then I don’t think they’ll understand why the filter doesn’t actually filter anything when it’s rolled out and the Govt is talking it up.

I think because this is a technical issue, and most people aren’t technical, the complications are increased. Also, supporters might give their support to the sentiment, without understanding the implications, and I agree that this is dangerous.

Yes I think this is pretty common, not just with supporters, but with the general public. If someone rings up and says “Do you support a Govt filter to block child porn and other material on the internet?” people are going to hear “child porn” and say yes, of course, without understanding the technical detail and unintended consequences. And if it polls well…

What do you, and others think of the ISPs volunteering to filter content? Does this demonstrate that filtering is possible? Are they doing this simply as a means of getting the government to stop its filter?

In one sense I don’t have any problem with a voluntary, ISP-driven filter for child porn sites, and last year I remember saying that if Conroy wanted to block this material, then he could have organized something like this without too much hassle (I would imagine), instead of trying to open the door to blocking all ‘restricted’ content across the entire web, which is a nonsense. (Any filter is open to abuse by Govts putting it up for political auction though, so I’m assuming this is truly ISP-driven.)

That said, blocking such sites is tokenistic at best, and certainly has nothing to do with protecting children from accessing harmful stuff. I imagine adults searching for child porn aren’t under any illusions about it’s legality, and would probably have no qualms using a VPN or whatever to continue to access it, and this is well before we get to people trading stuff on p2p networks. So the question is not so much whether a filter is “possible” — it’s always possible — it’s whether it’s meaningful, and at what cost. In this case, assuming it didn’t disrupt law enforcement, it’s not particularly meaningful, but the costs are negligible so it’s not a big deal.

Other filters on the other hand are not only not meaningful, they come with significant costs in terms of a false sense of security, and then future political implications, financial costs etc, which make them worthy of opposing, imo.

One of the other difficulties with the argument to ‘get a filter on your home PC’ (which is definitely part of the strategy) is the growing access to the internet on mobile phones.

I haven’t seen or heard about filters for phones. Covenant Eyes offers accountability for iphones, but this relies on you wanting to be kept accountable.

Filters on the home PC can filter some content, but what about mobile devices which more and more teens and tweens have access to?

Hey Steve,

I promised my thoughts on Twitter – so here they are in a nutshell (they’re extrapolated somewhat in these posts on my blog).

I share elements of most of your 13 points. I don’t think #6 is a factor because I think the government does have a role to play in protecting children.

I think censorship controlled by a secret government process is dangerously murky territory. I don’t think Christians should be pushing our morality/views on people as though we’re the majority (I think this is bad for evanglism) and I don’t think we should be expecting people to live as though they have the Holy Spirit when they don’t (though we should be trying to protect people from the consequences of sin – through reasoned arguments, education and studies).

My biggest objection though has been the way the case for the filter has been prosecuted both by the ACL and the government – it has been offensive and myopic. Anybody objecting has been met with the charge that they’re soft on child exploitation (which is pretty much untrue – most are objecting on the basis that it won’t actually do anything to stop the exploitation of children). This is just ad hominem avoidance of dealing with the herd of elephants in the room.

It’s a bad idea being pushed through fundamentally good motives and I think broadly speaking the solution (and this might sound a bit Matthias Media) is the gospel – the best way for the church to deal with the problem of pornography is by doing our job as servants of the gospel, this is where I think the ACL’s approach falls down somewhat.

The analogy I like to use of the Internet filter is that of a fence across a field. Let’s say you live in the middle of a field in Africa. Lions frequently walk across the field. You have children, and you don’t want them stuck inside all the time, but you can’t let them outside because of lions. So, you decide to build a fence. You build a 100m long fence, so that when you look out of your window, it looks like the fence crosses the whole field, and then you let your children play outside. The problem is, the field is kilometres wide, the fence doesn’t even begin to cover it. So the lions can go around it, in fact, they can jump over the fence too, and they could probably even push the fence over if they wanted. So, before your children was safe, because you kept them indoors. Now they are unsafe, because you are trusting a fence that doesn’t work. This is exactly how I see the filter.

I find it odd though that the same opponents that say that it restricts free speech also say that it won’t work. How can something that won’t work restrict free speech?

I’m reading a media statement from Telstra – ‘Telstra supportive of interim internet child protection measures’. Optus has a similar media release, and back in December of last year Primus released a very supportive statement.

These ISPs (admittedly, not all ISPs), will voluntarily introduce a filter. What does this say of the possibilities of filtering at an ISP level?

Also, from what I’ve read, this ISP-level filtering is happening overseas, and particularly in Europe. Does anyone know more about this, and if it’s been successful (in any measure) in other countries?

I think point 11 needs to be expanded. It’s not simply that the list is secret. It’s that it’s secret, compiled by unelected officials, and unable to be subject to any proper review. Secret-censorship lists by their very nature work against processes of transparency and accountability in government. And, at least by now we know “just trust us” isn’t a good argument.

Well, how do you define “success”? Are the handful of URLs blocked? Sure. Is it possible technically? Yes. But ‘filters’ run the gamut from these small scale filters to vast, dynamic filtering (ala China) — all can be implemented technically, but there’s a tradeoff between the amount you filter and the performance impact (and false positives) of the filter.

Originally, a two-tiered system was mooted by Labor here, with a dynamic filter for “inappropriate” material, and the blacklist. (There’s some background on the evolving policy here: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2010/07/the-evolution-of-labor-internet-filter-policy/ .) The dynamic filter has thankfully fallen by the wayside, and now there’s just focus on the blacklist.

As an aside, this also illustrates the reality of filtering — if you really do want to filter out inappropriate material (for kids, for instance) you need a dynamic filter, but such a filter is so intrusive and problematic when applied to the entire population it would never be tolerated (well, unless you’re China or similar). Therefore you’re left with a comparatively smaller blacklist monitored by bureaucrats, but end up not actually filtering in any meaningful way (especially as it can be defeated by simply adding a ? or ?some=thing to the end of a URL).

So you might think, well, if it’s just a small blacklist (ie the ACMA list), what’s the big deal? The problem is the scope for material that can be added to the filter is so broad that the blacklist could easily balloon to the point where it became problematic. For example, this graphic http://gizmodo.com/5552899/finally-some-actual-stats-on-internet-porn suggests there are 25 million porn sites. But the blacklist doesn’t filter *sites*, it filters individual URLs, ie on a page by page level, so mysite.com/page1.html might be banned, but mysite.com/page2.html might not be; and both would be seen by Google. So let’s say there are 25 million sites with 10 pages each (it’s probably vastly more, but be that as it may…). That’s 250 million URLs alone, compared to the ~1,000 on the blacklist currently (which is 0.0004% of 250m), with an upper limit of 10,000. But what if those figures are conservative? This recent story on the .xxx domain ( http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/green-light–for-xxx-porn-website-address-20100625-z497.html ) says there are 370 million sites. Now let’s say there’s 10 pages for each site, that’s 3.7 billion URLs that would need to be filtered. Now you can see why a blacklist is absurd…

From the perspective of protecting children online, I imagine it doesn’t matter if there’s 1 or 100 million porn sites out there, as one is one too many. That’s why arguments about this filter being ‘a start’ are irrelevant — a start towards what? Even if we blacklisted say 99% of the 25 million sites (using conservative numbers), on a whole site basis, that would still leave 250,000 sites. What if it was 99.9%? Still 25,000 porn sites. We simply can’t boil the ocean.

The only real alternative is home, dynamic filtering, and parental supervision. All else is an exercise in futility.

A friend shared this quote with me, from an interview with a moderator from Encyclopedia Dramatica. It’s an interesting interview, particularly regarding censorship. But here’s the quote:

“The IT muscle of Australia leaves a lot to be desired. This is a country that took $80 million to develop a filtering proxy, something which has already been done more effectively (http://www.squid-cache.org/) for free. Literally, squid did regex-based filtering, and not list-based filtering a decade ago. In addition, it can speed up web traffic instead of slow it down like the Australian filter. ISPs that push more traffic than the entirety of Australia’s internet usage have already implemented squid at cost in the hundred thousand range (which includes all hardware and development costs).”

Today I’ve written an article on Sydney Anglicans as a follow-up – ‘Keeping kids safe cannot be outsourced‘. I welcome your thoughts.

What I am most worried about is the expansion of the scope of the filter to include things such as copyright violation, after all copyright violation is illegal too. If the entertainment and media industries can lobby this expansion the internet will be in disarray.

Give someone the platform and they will surely try to use it.

@ John..

1. a clean feed is technically impossible. – a cleaner feed is better than nothing surely.

Maybe you are right, but only in a world of infinite resources. The filter is set to cost Aud$48,000,000.00 in the first year, then Aud$30,000,000.00 every year there after for support costs. So in the first 4 years alone that’s more than an 1/8th of a BILLION dollars. I think we can all agree that money would buy an awful lot of Aust Federal Police “cyber cops”. An Internet filter has never caught the producers of child porn, distributors of child porn or the viewers of child porn, only the police can do that. What would you rather do John? try (unsuccessfully) and block the child porn, or actively pursue them via the police…you can’t have both due the to costs involved.

2. it is very expensive, and the money could better be spent elsewhere. – a generic argument thrown around far too often

No it’s not…see above.

3. the filter will accidentally block content that shouldn’t be blocked (as evidenced in the trial earlier in the year).- e.g???

Look this up for yourself John, it has been reported often enough. Two immediate examples are a dentist in Qld and a dogs boarding kennel being blocked by accident.

4. the government could expand the filter in the future to restrict free speech. – and the world could end tomorrow & we could have a military coup tomorrow – please!!

Sorry, but this is already happening. For example…Bill Henson’s photos of young girls made there way onto the last black list. Now, his photos may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there WERE NOT classified RC, XXX or anything else. Another example is an Australian based anti-abortion website. It’s late term abortion pictures were thought to be too offensive, and has a result the offending URL’s had to be withdrawn for local Internet hosting. These two examples demonstrate a slide into “political” bias, as opposed to “pornography” or “saving the children”.

4. the answer is education, not filtering what we access online. – partially true but education is never a total fix

I do not agree with you here. Education is EVERYTHING. “Teach a man to fish” and all that…

5. it’s the responsibility of parents, not the government, to keep children safe.- absolutely right but civil authorities have an essential role to play here – parents are not with their children 24 hrs a day

So? That’s what PC filters are For.

6. it slows the internet down.- I’d take a slow internet to weed out offensive material

I wouldn’t…what’s the point of a $43,000,000,000.00 NBN if you are going to slow it down..?? Besides, when was teh last time you saw offensive material on the web that you didn’t actually request..?

6. we’re adults, and we shouldn’t be told what we can and can’t look at online. – so where do you draw the line if you ever draw the line & why there?? snuff movies & bestiality?? the line has to be drawn somewhere – being an adult does not give the right to watch anything you like

Sorry, but when was the last time you saw anything illegal on the net..??..seriously..?? The things you describe are illegal EVERYWHERE, and as such do not exist on the open web (www) in any meaningful quantity. When it does exist on the web, it is for very short, highly co-ordinated periods of time….For too short a length for the cumbersome filtering process to deal with.

7. home-based filters would be more effective. – good point, let’s have them as well

Stupid suggestion…why would you put a demonstrably inferior, woefully expensive filtering solution in front of a far superior end point solution..?? it would serve no purpose.

8. there’s far to much content to block effectively. – giving up is not the answer

No one every said anything about giving up, did they??…pour the money into more cyber cops, education and make PC filtering free and optional.

9. the government’s proposed black-list of content is proposed to be kept secret. – agreed, a bad move

Agreed.

10. there are ways to get around a filter. – there are always ways around filters but not everyone goes there

So, by your logic the only people the filter will “catch”, are the ones who are unlikely to visit the filtered sites in the first instance.

11. most illegal content isn’t consumed on the internet, but via peer-to-peer networks, proxy servers etc that would not be affected by a filter. – good point, let’s find a solution for these access points as well

I thought you said you were in IT..? Just how much overhead do you wish to place on our already expensive, slow Internet access..??

Lastly, while you are at it John, could you please tell me just how much of a problem you think this actually is..?? Just how often do you think kids actually “stumble” onto child porn..??

I have never seen a proper study which actually quantifies the size, frequency or effect of the “problem” that the filter claims to “solve”.

@ Ken West

“Love-bombed”?

I had to Google this one (n00b I know!), and found out that this refers to either a genuine expression of friendship, or an attempt to recruit someone to a cult or religion.

I am guessing then, by the negative context of your post, that this boy from school was trying to recruit your daughter to a cult??

Apologies if I have completely misunderstood what you have said!