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Conroy Still Hell-Bent On Internet Filter
lukehopewell1 writes "In an interview for the ABC's PM program yesterday, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said that there would be no conscience vote on the Australian government's proposed mandatory internet filter. 'Conscience votes go to matters to do with life and death in the [Australian] Labor Party,' Conroy said. The minister said that the filter debate was not about censorship, rather it centred around refused classification material — an issue up for review in parliament. 'I'm not sure that the censorship claim stacks up. This is about classification systems. At the moment in Australia, there is no conscience vote on refused classification for movies, TV, DVDs or book stores,' the minister said. Conroy then called on the newly installed Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull to justify his position on the filter to families concerned about child pornography. 'According to the latest information I have here from the [Australian Communications and Media Authority], there are 430 child pornography sites on the [World Wide Web] ... that are accessible to anyone...[Malcolm Turnbull] has to explain to Australian families that he is prepared to do nothing about blocking access to those sites,' Conroy added." I hope some Australian and UK readers can help the rest of us understand the significance of conscience votes, though Wikipedia helps.
Fielding will be gone in six months so maybe the policy will change then.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Normally in Australia, party discipline and solidarity is such that any member going against the party line on a vote is taboo and noteworthy - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_floor#Voting_against_party_lines . If the party allows a conscience vote, then they don't lay down a policy on how they expect members to vote - so they can vote whichever way they want.
Well since the blacklist contents is blacklisted itself, there's no way of knowing. When the list was leaked last year, there were about 1300 sites and not a single one of them contained any child pornography. Most of it was plain old adult content, with dentists, dog boarding kennels, caterers, poker websites, and anti-abortion sites making up the balance.
We know that most of the worst stuff on the net is much further underground, with P2P and private trading via email.
What limited child porn there is on the web specifically falls under only a handful of categories.
* Hacked websites. Supposedly this is why some of the sites appeared in error in the leaked list - they were "hacked by the Russian mob". An Aussie dentist website with a known hosting company had some child pornography buried under several "backslashes" (as Conroy put it) after being hacked. Instead of contacting the owner/host and getting their co-operation in removing the content and prosecuting those responsible, the whole site was just blacklisted without notifying anyone. The guy running it only found out when the list was leaked. A "just ban it" filter will only encourage laziness such as this when we should be policing it.
* Trolling attempts. There was a rather unfortunate case a few months ago of a certain imageboard trolling the facebook memorial of a murdered eight-year-old girl by flooding it with gore, bestiality and child porn. Not a lot really needs to be said about the perpetrators here, I think most will reach the same conclusion. It was jumped on by the censorphiles in Australia, but even in the best case, classification of websites takes months (I know, I've tested the submission process). Legislation is probably years in the future, and certain to fail with the current parliament. Sites like Facebook would actually be exempted because "high traffic" websites would break the filter and embarrass the government. Rather than the filtering approach, Facebook removed the images themselves in a matter of hours (and the police would have if they didn't), and the guy who did it was eventually prosecuted. Good riddance.
* Honeypots/sting operations. I think Conroy's even said he'll exempt sites from the filter if the filter would interfere with a police investigation. People dumb enough to access/post child porn on the open web deserve to be caught. With the proxying of the filters making online forensics more difficult, and policing resources being diverted to an idiotic waste, this is yet another example the filter will only make worse.
And that's without even mentioning the fact that the filter is being sold as a child-safe filter. The government has already dumped its "voluntary filters for parents" program, and has left almost all hardcore material accessible under the filter because blocking it all is obviously impossible.
Every time I think about this plan, it makes me furious. It's the main issue I voted against the government on last month, and I wouldn't be surprised if enough people joined me to have cost them their majority. But the independents hand the reins back to the ALP and it's full-steam ahead with the filter despite no-one outside of the ALP supporting it, the ALP being in minority in both houses of parliament, significant elements within the party opposing it, and ALP members only likely to vote for it because they will be expelled from the party if they don't. (That's basically what a conscience vote is for those who aren't familiar - a "we won't kick you out of the party if you don't vote for this" vote. By refusing one, anyone who doesn't toe the line is out of the party. The ALP is extremely strict on this.)
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/fight-to-filter-out-evil-leaves-bad-guys-to-do-their-worst-20100514-v4cq.html
They cut funding to the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Team, a unit of the Australian Federal Police.
The filter is pure faith based pay back.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The Liberals and Greens and of course the independents are able to step outside the party line if they really need to, when they do this it is called crossing the floor.
Quite recently Liberals have been crossing the floor to vote for climate change laws.
http://www.google.com.au/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=liberal+cross+the+floor
No matter matter what the issue a Labor MP is not allowed to cross the floor unless he has been given a conscience vote. He must vote as caucus directs or lose membership.
Orationem pulchram non habens, scribo ista linea in lingua Latina
Neither the Greens or all of the Independents support the filter. He does not have the numbers.
And the opposition are busy "opposing", so they aren't going to support anything the government wants to do.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
Different debate. Most governments censor their citizens; that debate is only over how much.
The debate going on here in Australia is about how to implement that censorship. Currently it's done at a legal and retail level. Conroy wants to extend that to ISPs too, by means of a URL blacklist.
The problem is, any attempt to explain that it'll only block < 0.001% of the RC content on the net, or that it's trivially bypassed by altering the URL (e.g. adding a "?" to the end), or that it's far too open for errors/abuse, gets either ignored or re-framed as "against filter == pro child porn".
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
For Finland:
"No impact on speed": true, there's no effect (it's usually just a simple DNS blocklist at ISP, or sometimes a http proxy).
"80-95% of citizens are censored": False, as far as I know. Some large ISPs did start enthusiasticly but it seems most have now gone back to not censoring, or offer both censored and uncensored access. The three large ISPs I am in contact with (Elisa, Sonera and Welho) all offer uncensored DNS.
"Accuracy is 100%": True if you define accuracy as "how many sites on the block list get blocked when using a blocking DNS server". No-one knows how many false positives the list contains or what percentage of all child porn sites are on the list -- there's no possibility of knowing this for sure as the only time citizens get to see the list is when it happens to leak (check wikileaks for the most recent ones). There have been some fairly high profile false posititives though: www.w3.org was blocked for a time -- and the police had no other explanation than "human error".
It's still a lousy excuse for not doing the actual work.
When the Finnish block list leaked (for the first time) it turned out a lot of the sites were actually hosted in countries where child porn is illegal (and where you could actually assume the police might act on it). Guess what the Finnish police did? They just slapped the sites on their secret list, and did not inform the police in the countries where the crime was being committed.
"Before the recent elections the party he belongs to, Labor (a middle left party), could have passed it on their numbers alone"
No, before the election the libs + greens had the numbers and the inclination to block it in the senate, that situation has not changed. When the libs were in power they were the ones pushing for a mandatory filter and labor + greens were blocking it in the senate. It's never really been a serious proposal, it's a political distraction aimed at certain independent senators, an endless "Yes Minister" style inquiry that has been going on now for a decade with the libs and labor occasionally changing roles from good cop to bad cop.
There is no chance in hell the inquires will ever come to a conclusion since that would mean both major parties would have to give up the carrot/stick they use to placate the christian right and their nutjob senator(s).
I'm actually looking forward to Downer's answer, he's more than a match for Conroy.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I'm guessing here that the secure gambling connections to offshore sites would be a damn site more difficult (impossible?) to pass through a proxy and that the average on-line gambler may not even bother to try ... just hop in the car, and go to the casino.
It's very simple to block SSL sites. Though SSL connections are encrypted once they are established, clients still have to pass a "CONNECT domain.com:443 HTTP/1.x" request through the proxy to create a tunnel. If the domain is in the proxy's blacklist it can just respond with a "forbidden" instead of establishing the tunnel.
Of course it was already demonstrated in the filter trials that the system can be bypassed trivially.
In the USA everybody has (or is able to have) guns,
Not legally. I'm banned from owning guns for my entire life because I was convicted for giving a friend of mine a nickel bag of pot when I was 16. Anybody convicted of a felony (and almost everything is a felony these days) is banned from owning a gun.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Eureka stockade was a failed revolution of criminals against the govt.
Failed? They achieved their objectives. The leader was elected to the legislature. That's some failure! By the way, those men were found not guilty by juries of their peers, by what authority do you declare them to be criminals?
I do not know even one person in .au who thinks a the general population should be armed.
Well I assure you there is more than one. The ABC's reporting of Queensland senate election results shows the initial allocation of votes includes 55,222 for the Liberal Democrats (LDP) whose policy is to legalise firearms ownership for self-defence including concealed carry and 42,669 for the Shooters and Fishers party. NSW had 95,752 for LDP and 96,638 for the Shooters and Fishers party. Victoria had 59,116 for LDP and 44,639 for Shooters and Fishers. SA 5,584 for LDP and 11,425 for Shooters and Fishers. WA 14,517 for LDP and 7,459 for Shooters and Fishers. NT 4,640 for Shooters and Fishers.
That is 230,191 votes for the LDP (pro concealed carry) and 207,470 for the Shooters and Fishers party in the initial allocation, more with preferences. Over 430,000 pro firearms votes.
It is YOU who have no idea of the opinion of the general pubic.
My reference to the public opinion was not intended to refer to my opinions on firearms, which I know are not mainstream. It was supposed to be specific on the issue of whether "armed conflict is the worst possible outcome". I should have expressed that better.