Conroy confesses: web filtering will hit ‘other content’
Stephen Conroy yesterday confirmed that the Government would consider the possibility of legal content being blocked by its mandatory internet censorship scheme.
At Estimates hearings conducted by the Environment, Communications and the Arts committee, the Minister repeatedly confirmed that the censorship trial announced on 11 February, to be conducted in association with ISPs Primus, Tech 2U, Webshield, OMNIconnect, Netforce and Highway 1 and others, would be based on “illegal sites” under the Broadcasting Services Act, but that the censorship of other content would also be “determined after the trial”.
Conroy’s statement — which he reinforced when he said that censorship of other (i.e. non-illegal) content would be determined “on the basis of the trial” — establishes the basis for using the results of the censorship trial to extend mandatory filtering to content that is currently legal.
At Estimates in October last year, Conroy emphasised that only material that is currently illegal would be the blocked under the ALP’s policy of “mandatory filtering”, and repeated his suggestion that opponents of filtering wanted access to illegal material such as child pornography.
The BSA currently prohibits both Refused Classification material and X 18+ material, meaning content depicting actual sex is treated in a manner similar to criminal content such as child pornography. The BSA also bans R 18+ material (including simulated sex) if there is no age-based restriction. This clumsy regime means material that is available in your average newsagent, let alone the local adult shop, is banned online and will technically be blocked under the ALP censorship trial. The Australian Communications and Media Authority maintains a secret blacklist which it describes as “the worst of the worst” in terms of child pornography and other criminal material. It is this list that will be used in the trial, although it will extended beyond that to other filtering techniques such as key-word-based blocking. Given that the current regime also prohibits much of the petabytes of porn freely available on the internet, the idea of effectively filtering via a list is nonsensical.
The ban also perpetuates the Ruddock-era ban on alleged terrorist books imposed by the Howard Government as part of its national security-based attack on civil liberties. Academics using the internet to research terrorism-related materials may be blocked if filtering is imposed.
Conroy yesterday explicitly confined the trial parameters to BSA-prohibited content, ruling out filtering intended to block file-sharing and copyright breaches. Conceivably the additional content that will be considered after the trial relates to other illegal content such as gambling sites, websites that “counsel suicide”, seditious material and material banned at the behest of multinational copyright owners. However, Conroy did not limit his remarks to those areas.
The Minister, ACMA and, briefly, the Department of Broadband were questioned by Senators Scott Ludlam and Simon Birmingham, who have both taken a close interest in the Government’s censorship plans, as well as noted golfer Cory Bernardi and Nick Minchin, who grilled ACMA about the banning of an anti-abortion website. Despite his conservative credentials, Minchin correctly noted that a lot of Christian groups backing internet censorship might not be so enamoured of the idea if it was used to block their views on abortion.
On the Government side, Kate Lundy ran interference, asking a series of Dorothy Dixers of Conroy and officials, taking up so much time that Scott Ludlam, who elicited all sorts of confused answers from Conroy and his officials in October, later ran out of time to properly grill departmental officers.
The results of the trial will not be known until at least mid-year.
George Orwell would have been impressed!
At what stage will Orwellian 1984-type “NEWSPEAK” be introduced on the internet through the banning of words governments do not particularly like the people to entertain, for example:
“climate change”
“war crimes”
“nuclear accidents”
“torture”
“unemployment”
“social justice”
“peace”
?????????????
It’s becoming clearer to me. This ain’t going to happen. Everyone who’s campaigning against it needs to keep up their work, sure, but the Government is not going to roll out this insane plan across the board because it will recognise the political suicide that would be. The best example of a comparable situation I can think of was an insane idea called the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. One moment, it was a dead cert likely to be supported by both major parties with then MP Pauline Hanson kicking up the biggest fuss, the next minute it was completely dead with everyone wiping the sweat off the brow saying ‘ooh, dodged a bullet there’.
My prediction is that the Government will do a more thorough test, followed by some more thorough research (ie focus group research followed up with a sham bit of research on the technological effects), which concludes the impact will be to slow internet access in such a way which inhibits economic activity and the only responsible solution is to wait until technology improves. Then we’ll never hear of it again.
Joel B1 keeps surfacing as a mercurial Crikey comment. Within hours he’s soured from “Nice article” to “go teach your granny to suck eggs Bernard” !! If mood and opinion swings are so opposed Joel B1’s lost more than a bit of credibility.
There’s a decidedly conspiratorial tone to some of the commentary here.
The problem is not that the a filtering regime will be used to turn Australia into China or North Korea overnight. It’s that the range of prohibited content will be slowly expanded, and the implementation of the regime will have no accountability or transparency because of the need to keep blocked sites secret.
There is already a range of non-pornography online content that is illegal in Australia. Casino sites, alleged copyright violations, sites discussing euthanasia (anyone “counselling suicide” online can be locked up in this country), allegedly violent texts, “sedition”. These categories would permit a wide range of material to be blocked, and each time there’s a moral panic, each time there’s another turkey-slapping incident, there’s a chance they’ll be added to, to be administered in secret by ACMA.
And that doesn’t even get us to the problem of what ‘legitimate’ sites would be blocked unintentionally in the quest to make sure, say, nothing on suicide was allowed through.
So I’d suggest quit the melodrama about Stephen Conroy as Big Brother and focus on the more realistic problem of what is currently banned and how we have arrived at a state where are freedom of speech is curtailed already, and would be curtailed further if existing restrictions were allowed to be used to filter everyone’s content.
ok, I dont want our country to turn into an information controlled country like china or north korea, so our minister for communications (Conroy) labels me as a child molester. If he wanted to protect the children, he would strictly filter out sites like child porn etc. He is not doing that!! He wants a system that will filter out anything the government wants, even perfectly legal information. That wont help our children, it will hurt everyone! Why is our political representative such a creep.
The scheme is fundamentally flawed and will not work. It will impose extra costs on ISPs, degrade performance and won’t stop the distribution of illegal content.
Peer-to-peer traffic - that is, content distributed via file sharing networks - accounts for the majority of traffic on the Internet and is the preferred way of downloading multimedia because it is fast and efficient.
Senator Conroy might claim otherwise, but whatever technology exists to filter peer-to-peer traffic would be useless. Not only would it be slow and unreliable, but also it would only work on unencrypted traffic.
The filter will be easy to circumvent via various methods of tunnelling, including connecting to Web proxies and VPN.
People like Conroy need to rot in a jail cell for taking people’s rights away. Censorship is the most deplorable human act next to rape and murder.
Piss off Conroy you hypocritical law dodging breeding mongrel!
This filtering is only a way to control us all and rid a nation of critical thinkers. Just keep throwing sport down our throats to distract us while they run the country any way they see fit!
Every time I see sport make the front page of the newspaper over other more important global issues and events it makes me laugh! “Our Heroes - Sports”. Stop blurring the line between REAL heroes of society and sports legends. Keep sports in the back page where it belongs.
In case we aren’t all sick of the following quote yet, I’ll just reiterate:
“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.” - Adolf Hitler
Yet, we all know that this agenda is a false stepping stone for greater loss of internet freedoms and it has nothing to do with pedophilia. Google search takes serious steps deleting search results linked to “child pornography”. Visit CillingEffects.org for more on that.
So go spin the bs to someone else Conroy you Silvester the cat, saliva dribbling baboon. Your lack of internet and digital media savvy is disgraceful and quite laughable!
I rang ACMA today to try and obtain a list of banned sites (at least when Portnoy’s Complaint was banned you knew it was banned) only to be told it was secret. Trust me I’m from the government seems to be their mantra. The only way to successfully fight this is for people to leave the ISPs involved in the trial. If mine was I’d be out quick smart.
As for Bernard Keane and others who decry conspiracy theories, please explain what happened to six million Jews.
Conspiracies do exist and this is one of them.
David Chang: I don’t believe it’s a conspiracy at work. You’re correct to say it has nothing to do with porn, per se, but ‘hidden masters’? No it’s not even necessary . Each succeeding political party sees the ease with which the preceeding government was able to invoke censorship. The people who are the most vocal about the kiddies are the least educated and the most intellectually challenged members of the community. Also they are the ones most given to fits of hysteria. All of which makes it desperately easy for the new government to enlarge upon a theme so dear to any government’s heart. To control the press, the visual medium and clobber the nation’s art structure.
And it’s all done for the good of the people. Ha! ha! ah ha!
Paradoxically, the greater the numbers of the population, the easier it is to follow everything each individual does. No wonder you imagine malign masters. Sometimes I start imagining them myself.
Cheers
V.
I wonder if a legal site blocked by an ISP could sue under boycotting provisions of the ACCC?
Stephen Conroy makes me so sick I want to throw up. I don’t care about the $900 freebie, I don’t care about the promises on schools, etc (which the Liberals will fund just as adequately). I do care about censorship and the continuing nibbling away at our supposed “free society” that Conroy (at Rudd’s behest) appears determined to introduce. If Malcolm Turnbull was to commit the Liberals to opposing this legislation I would seriously consider switching my vote …after a lifetime voting Labor. I hate this planned legislation that much - yes, it is that important.
Why is the parliament so overpopulated by Christian zelots? Its not exactly representative of that demographic in the society in general. Its unbelievable the level of censorship in Australia, we are the only Western country without an R 18+ rating for games simply because of the backwardness of the Attorney General of South Australia.
Its unfair that such a tiny majority has to hold the rest of the population to ransom with an idea that will slow down and make more expensive our already overpriced and slow broadband and block perfectly legit material. Its a known fact that it probably wont do anything much to stop the illegal activity that is going on anyway.
They had a piece on the “rabbit proof firewall” last night on Lateline, with a concerned mother complaining about how she and her friends wanted ISP level filtering because “it was too hard to set up a firewall at home” what a joke, last year or the year before the Howard government was giving out free firewalls to families, one of my friends with young children took up the offer and set it up without a problem.
It boggles the mind to think that this relatively small group of people cannot make the effort to learn how to implement something as straight forward as a firewall on their personal computer either due to laziness, inompetence or technophobia. So they want the government to do it for everyone!!!!!!!!????????
Are people aware that this proposed censhorship thing has nothing to do with filtering out porn sites or would be terrorism blogs?
It’s all about filtering out anyone or anything that has a counter view to the purported view.
And our politicians are willing puppets for their hidden masters, to see it through.
“There’s a decidedly conspiratorial tone to some of the commentary here.
The problem is not that the a filtering regime will be used to turn Australia into China or North Korea overnight. It’s that the range of prohibited content will be slowly expanded, and the implementation of the regime will have no accountability or transparency because of the need to keep blocked sites secret.”
Go teach your Granny to suck eggs Bernard. You’re so far behind the wave we’ll have to call you French and get the Navy to find you.
“If this level of censorship is down to a few narrow minded, vocal minority groups with an inflated sense of their own importance and relevance”
So that’ll be me then?
Remember the adage: “never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence”?…..
The internet censorship proposal is beset by secrecy, stonewalling, no evidence and a complete lack of communication of the part of the Minister. Is it not time that the Minister in this portfolio had a background in some form of technology, not necessarily even IT? Telecommunications and the massive networks we call the “internet” are critical business infrastructure. The administration of this portfolio should not be in the hands of a moralistic, Luddite union heavy. It is far too important to be so badly mismanaged.
Where did the proponents of this scheme get the idea that ISPs were content providers or even had a hope in hell of controlling the content provided by billions of websites? I’m disappointed with Kate Lundy. Another non-wowser reduced to nitwit status by moralistic prudes maybe
It even seems that it is time to review the whole censorship system. Until the internet censorship debacle started, I had very little idea of just how idiotic the whole system is. Libertus.net is a well researched resource of most aspects of censorship in Australia. it seems that various State governments and Federal governments, over a period of many years, have been fighting, in a race to the bottom, to see who can censor the most material and apply the most conservative judgements to any material, information or content that might be available. All with absolutely no substantial body of academic research to support their view that this material is even damaging.
Conroy continues to claim that his policy is based on evidence, but has failed, since he became Minister, to produce any evidence of any kind.
Are Australians really so damn precious that they can’t cope if some bureaucrat doesn’t check their interwebs, library books and DVDs first? If this level of censorship is down to a few narrow minded, vocal minority groups with an inflated sense of their own importance and relevance, where do we find a government with the balls to represent the rest of us?
“It will mean goodbye to Crikey for starters.”
Oh no! And I’ve only just seen the light that is Crikey…
This is the Chinese Internet model by stealth everybody.
So I guess the State can count on Google’s and Microsoft’s support!
It will mean goodbye to Crikey for starters.
Notice how Telstra, which doesn’t need the government ,didn’t play in this little game.
It was left in the hands of those who need Brotherly love.
Its time to take to the streets folks!
When Dicky Alston was the Minister he was awarded the appellation - “Luddite of the Decade” by the Register, an expert tech website. Conroy is now scheduled to be Luddite of the Millennium. He richly deserves the title.
Its becoming clearer and clearer by the day that this ever increasingly inept government wants to restrict access to INFORMATION and is using child pornography as a smoke screen.
Nice article.