Australian Government Ignoring Problems With Proposed Filters

halll7 writes with an update to the proposed Australian national firewall we discussed recently. According to the BBC, "The official watchdog, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), has been conducting laboratory tests of six filtering products, and the government plans a live trial soon. ... After its recent trials, ACMA reported significant improvements on earlier studies. The network degradation on one product was less than 2%, although two products were in excess of 75%." Now, Ars Technica reports that "an Australian newspaper has uncovered documents showing that the government minister responsible for the program has ignored performance and accuracy problems with the filters, then tried to suppress criticism of the plan by private citizens." The EFA has a great deal to say in opposition of these plans.

Comments

Re:Child Porn Out of Control

[Anonymous Coward]

Australia's zero-tolerance laws regarding child pornography include fictional and drawn images.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolicon#Australia

It is all about Australian domestic politics

[papafox_too]

The Australian governments' proposed ISP filter system has little to do with censorship or child porn - it is all driven by Australian domestic politics.

The government requires control of the Senate to get its legislative program through. The Senate consists of 76 members, with the Government (ALP) holding 32 seats, the Opposition 37 seats, the Greens 3 seats, Family First 1 seat and one Independent senator.

The goverement requires the support of all non-Opposition memebers to get legislation passed - with Senator Steve Fielding, the Familiy First senator a vital supporter.

The Family First party is a socially conservative political party. Senator Fielding recieved 56,000 primary votes out of a 3.3M votes cast. However, through preference distributions he gained a quota and was elected.

Senator Fielding has demanded that the government implement porn filters, with ISP filtering being his method of choice.

So, the Australian government is implementing ISP filters, no because they work for filtering porn, but because they work at meeting their political needs. Complaining about the effects of ISP filters on freedom of speech or internet performance will fall on deaf ears - the filters will be implemented because they are critical to the governments tenuous control of the Senate.

Re:What is going on?

[shutdown -p now]

It makes a lot more sense to sub-divide those things across multiple owners, and have those owners compete for your business. That provides the People with the *most direct* method of control - the power of the purse. If you don't like company A's practices, withhold your money. Stop buying the product.

Who would do the division and redistribution, if not the government? And, once it is divided, who would ensure that they stay that way, and not merge into a cartel to increase profits for themselves?

Re:What is going on?

[batwingTM]

Well, it began a bit more innocently than that. Over the last 5 years or so the Media in Australia has given a lot of airtime to child porn rings. The Federal Police have broken a few and when they do it s HEADLINE news across the whole country. As a result parents are getting worried that the lonesome guy next door is a pedophile (It is like a witchhunt, but this is my opinion, not the facts).

So the Howard Government (Liberal Party, Conservative) put forth all these ideas about "Protecting" the children. Tacked onto this was the issue that it is too easy to access porn on the internet, so the idea of putting up a filter to prevent children having access to these materials was floated. Now the Media has pushed forth these ideas that the Government must protect us from the big bad world and completely ignored the issues of parental interaction (again, this is filtered by my opinions)

Last year the Howard Government was defeated in the election and the Rudd Government (Labor Party, left leaning) came to power. they spent a lot of the campaign pushing for "Working Families" (Industrial relations, Tax benefits etc) and one of those platforms was keeping the kids away from "questionable" material. The government has put a lot of money into providing access to free filters for parents to access and police their children's use of the internet. Personally, I think that is a good think, the parents being involved with how their children access the internet is a good thing (Again, opinion, not facts)

Now, however, we have a problem. In it's goal to be the Family friendly government the men in power have decided that the internet needs to be filtered to keep "Questionable" material out. This is how we got to this point. and there are a few factors working towards this

1) The Family First Party
            There is a relatively new party representing voters in the senate in Australia and that is "Family First" a quasi religious party pushing "Family Values" the problem is that the one senator from this party effectivly holds the balance of power in the senate (Upper house) so that if the government wants his support, they have to appease him. I am sure that this internet plan plays into this (Opinion, not fact)

2) Terrorism
            Of course, Terrorists are out to get us all, and as a subset of this pedophiles are out to get our kids. this belief is a product of the media, for they are only interested in the next big shocking story, and child porn is shocking. but there are already a lot of ways to violate civil liberties in place because of the "War on Terrorism" and that has created an environment where this kind of censorship is acceptable to the public

3) The Stigma of Porn
            No-One wants to come out and oppose this. MP's do not want to come out as say "No, the Australian internet should not be censored" because the media will read that as "Mr Whomever supports Porn" and that would be political suicide.

So what can we do from here, it's a good question. I know that I personally and raising the issue with everyone I know, sending letters (yes, paper letters, they are harder to ignore than email) and what-not, but there seems to be no organisation in place to fight this. so if anyone knows of one, please forward me the details. travisDOTmatheson(atSymbol)gmail.com