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5 Concerns About Australia's New Net Filter
daria42 writes "As you might have heard, this month Australia gets a new Internet filter, using Interpol's blacklist of 'worst of the worst' child pornography sites. In general, it seems like most people don't object to the idea in principle, but concerns are being raised around the transparency of the scheme, which so far has no civilian oversight, unclear backing legislation and an appeals process which does not exactly inspire confidence. Why is it those who want to implement this kind of filtering never quite address these sort of concerns up-front?"
A music-industry speaker at an American Chamber of Commerce event in Stockholm waxed enthusiastic about child porn, because it serves as the perfect excuse for network censorship, and once you've got a child-porn filter, you can censor anything:
"Child pornography is great," the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. "It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites". The venue was a seminar organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Stockholm on May 27, 2007, under the title "Sweden -- A Safe Haven for Pirates?". The speaker was Johan Schlüter from the Danish Anti-Piracy Group, a lobby organization for the music and film industry associations, like IFPI and others... "One day we will have a giant filter that we develop in close cooperation with IFPI and MPA. We continuously monitor the child porn on the net, to show the politicians that filtering works. Child porn is an issue they understand," Johan Schlüter said with a grin, his whole being radiating pride and enthusiasm from the podium.
Source: http://boingboing.net/2010/04/28/music-industry-spoke.html
Arrogance might be a factor. Here in Finland the ministers responsible never really even wanted public interest groups like Electronic Frontier Finland to participate in any discussions regarding laws like internet filtering or the infamous Lex Nokia that gave companies rights to monitor their employees' message traffic headers. In Finland all this culminated in a local Internet activist who publicly criticized shortcomings in the preparations of internet filtering getting filtered, labelled a paedophile and punished. This in turn led to a court case that ended in a decision that the police had greatly abused the rights given to them.
In Finland, the ministers seem to get more and more convinced that they don't need to listen to the citizens; that's when they're not completely bought or led like the minister responsible for our new, stricter, iPRED compatible copyright law...