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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.
If this scheme ever gets off the ground, I'm going turn every machine I have admin privileges on into a Freenet node, just to spite them.
Boo! Hiss!
'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.
Maybe Conroy could explain to Australian families why hanging a blanket in front of the sites is better than shutting the sites down and prosecute the operators? Especially since it is so easy to peer behind the blanket by using a proxy, or alternate DNS resolver, etc, etc.
Are all those sites operating from countries where child pornography is legal? Which countries and sits are we talking about?
)9TSS
He's hell bent on hiding sites that contain child abuse material...
That doesn't prevent a child getting abused.
That doesn't help the child already abused to create the content.
Who the fk knows what these sites are anyway?
Sick bastards are going to work around his filter quicker than he can think.
How about, policing, work within the international community to have these sites removed and keep up the pressure.
If he put half the budget and pressure on law enforcement as he is putting on stringing a tarp over the crime scene he'd actually have a hope of getting somewhere!
FIX IT! DO NOT HIDE IT!
Most of it was plain old adult content, with dentists, dog boarding kennels, caterers, poker websites, and anti-abortion sites making up the balance.
I got some accidental inside information from a religious political lobbyist some years ago when this furor began... he was happy to get anything done to filter the net. But the religious lobbyists don't have that much clout .. he pretty much provided his perspective on legislation that happened to fall into his area of knowledge or got laws tweaked here and there to fill loopholes, that sort of thing.
The real reason that the lower house members listened to this suggestion was because the casino operators sided with the religious lobbyists to try to stop off-shore internet gambling, which is of course losing them loads of cash and losing the government loads of tax revenue.
If this filter were to be implemented (which appears to be next to impossible at this point) the first additions to the list would be every identifiable offshore gambling website. The 'child porn' is just to raise public outrage / support and imo the rest of the sites just added to the list as white noise to hide it's purpose. 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.
I think this came up before and I believe that in those countries the blocked site returns a page saying that it has been blocked, just like bluecoat in my workplace. You can use information on that page to find out why the page has been blocked.
The proposed Australian system seems to be set up to pretend that the blocked page doesn't exist. This makes it hard to distinguish between bitrot and censorship, so nobody really knows what is censored.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Also - think of the cost! I believe it was around $42 million set aside to implement such a filter - a hair over $100k per site. Are you really telling me that there is value in this? Are you really telling me that you could not put $100k under a police investigation per site in order to shut some of them down? I'm aware there was already funding for the AFP included in the initial proposals; but if you are going to do something, why not do it right? Give $42 million to those that can actually prosecute the offenders in some % of cases.
Conscience votes from the Liberals and Nationals are very rare. While they can in theory cross the floor on any issue, in practice they get disendorsed so that somebody else will take their seat next time or they get thrown out of the party entirely. Consider how many ex-coalition independants there are in both State and Federal Australian politics. Don't you think they would have stayed in a party that let them speak their mind?
It's ironic that the only other conscience vote I remember in the last decade was to tell Tony Abbott to stop playing pretend Catholic games to raise his profile with religious voters and instead do his job as health minister.
If not his enormous lack of understanding of his portfolio I wouldn't feel so compelled to go into politics and protect Australia from the cost of his ignorance.
The debate is fundamentally about censorship.
Yeah but I think the actual agenda is the National Broadband Network. Basically the TV network owners don't want competing, free content bypassing their networks and going directly into the home. The idea behind filtering is that reasons will be found to block this content, thus preserving a revenue stream for the TV networks. Its just a way to encourage them to keep paying their license fees to the federal government.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It works because it is a real problem. Child porn is a bad thing.
It isn't a real problem. Child porn isn't bad -- child molestation/abuse is. The porn itself are just images/videos, and trying to filter it will change nothing.
I wonder why there is such a disconnect between the ALP and its constituents? I wonder if they understand that their position on this issue may have cost them their majority (among other things like the refusal to follow-up on environmental promises)? Conroy should have been sacked with Rudd (or re-assigned as the case may be since he's now Minister of Foreign Affairs). How do you get it through their thick heads that they are losing votes? We have the same problem in 'America. All of these Attorneys General think that they are gaining votes for shutting down Craigslist's Adult Section but really they are losing votes. I certainly won't vote to re-elect my Attorney General based on this one issue. Her opponent could be a stuffed doll and I still wouldn't vote for her.
I refer you to http://www.lolconroy.com/
In most Westminster democratic systems - of which the UK parliament is the original, and convention in Australia follows closely, members of parliament are elected on the basis of a political party. The party system is much stronger in those countries that in the US, in many ways:
1) The party organization chooses who will stand for a particular seat as that party's representative in a process known as "preselection". This can be a combination of votes by paid up party members in local branches, with "head office" votes as well. By the way, in those countries, to be a member of a political party, you pay a membership fee and join a branch - and there may be an acceptance process. In the US, you simply say that you are a member of the democratic or republican party - and in some states, mark that preference when you enroll to vote.
2) Because there is no popular election for head of state / executive members, formation of government is done of the basis of which party can command a majority of votes on the floor of parliament. This is generally a no-brainer, but as we have seen in the last few weeks following the Australian federal election, can take a lot of negotiation. The party forming government determines who the Prime minister and other cabinet ministers are, and they can change their mind on who fills these positions at any time. The general population don't elect the Prime Minister directly.
3) Votes in both chambers are along party lines. If an individual member votes against the their party's policy, that is a big deal - known as "crossing the floor". The argument is that since you were elected as a member of the party, based on the party's platform, you support the party's vote.
4) There are some limited number of issues that are seen as having very personal implications - for example, abortion, matters affection religious beliefs, things like that. So the parties allow a "conscience vote" - where there is no binding party position, and each person may cast their vote according to their own beliefs.
More specifically, the production of child porn is bad.
I've always wondered on this topic, why the law is the way it is. It seems to me that child porn is evidence of a crime being committed. Why not simply render production, sale, purchase, and distribution illegal but not possession and actually encourage anyone that ends up with it in their possession to provide it to police, in order to help identify and rescue the victims thereof? It just seems like the manpower/funds freed up by doing that might allow some actual good to be done.
Make the economic side of child porn as difficult as possible and see what happens. I know back when it was legal there were only a handful of companies that did it even then, Color Climax being the most notorious. Even they barely sold anything that was entirely kiddy porn because it wouldn't sell, so their more common scenario was to add in an underage actor into an otherwise mostly vanilla scene -- and even that wasn't *that* common.
It makes me think there's not a huge economic incentive to kiddy porn, so the question becomes why does it get created? After all, explicitly filming evidence of your crimes seems like an unbelievably stupid thing to do, then turning around and distributing it on the internet seems even dumber.
Most of the "faith based" groups barking loudly for the filter DO NOT SUPPORT the Australian Labour Party*. The filter is getting pushed not to pay back the support of whining Christian groups (because this support doesn't exist) but for pure "Think of the Children!" politicking. And because all bureaucracies reach a life stage where instead of performing their function they instead focus on holding onto or acquiring more power.
Many Christian groups are against the filter because with the way Australian society is going it wouldn't be long until ACMA started censoring Christian web sites (as they were already going to filter abortion and euthanasia content).
* At least since the ALP went right wing on immigration policy. Australia does not have a large "Christian right" like America. We have a small Christian right and a slightly larger Christian left. The larger part of society is only religious in a "no atheists in a foxhole" way.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Speaking as a US citizen, I'm sure glad our founding fathers weren't such bleeding whiners.
Well, he has a point. The US military would walk all over any armed opposition in any sort of typical battle.
What they wouldn't do is win a political war, since that's obviously their Achilles heel.
I would not have taken issue with this statement if stick-figure drawings could not be (legally!) classified as CP.