Australian Government Ignoring Problems With Proposed Filters 292
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.
Re:So the govt. is actually AGAINST net filtering? (Score:2, Informative)
The answer is possibly that Conroy is only continuing to push the filter because he wants to keep Senator Fielding (single representative of a Christian minority party, holds part of balance of power) happy for several difficult votes ahead.
I can't imagine that Australian citizens will be too impressed if they find their 'net being censored. Actually implementing something that worked badly would be political suicide.
Re:Child Porn Out of Control (Score:4, Informative)
Australia's zero-tolerance laws regarding child pornography include fictional and drawn images.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolicon#Australia [wikipedia.org]
Report (Score:2, Informative)
It is all about Australian domestic politics (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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? (Score:3, Informative)
power hungry is about it, the governments have realised that they can do what they want, and even if everyone complains, no-one will ever actually get off thier arse and do anything about it like they used to, we are all content to be passive aggressive even though it achieves nothing and the big wigs can do what they want
I think that the last generation would get off their arse and protest and that is the big difference is almost as big a myth as that whatever music the young generation listens to is garbage. I think humans were lazy last century, are lazy this century and will be lazy next century. The difference is that the surveilance is so much more indirect, impersonal and maybe even as far as subtle. There's not the vast armies of STASI where one in fifty(!!!) citizens was an informer. You don't need the same sort of massive backroom to do basic data entry and compiling, nor of analysists. Today they simply latch on to existing systems for most of their data and computers do most of the basic data processing and profiling, in short the ratio of surveilance power to manpower and surveilance power to population has increased wildly beyond imagination. It's not the milkman or the janitor or the shopkeeper you should worry about these days, it's someone sitting far, far away groping in your privacy that you'll never see. It just doesn't get the same kind of personal reaction that it used to.
Re:What is going on? (Score:4, Informative)
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:Child Porn Out of Control (Score:3, Informative)
If the "court" is the Supreme Court of the United States, then I'll be freed, because the justices have already affirmed (several times) that nudity is not pornography, regardless if the person in the photo is an adult, a teen, or a child. That is why nudist websites are perfectly legal within the U.S.
Re:Whats the solution ? (Score:1, Informative)
(3) Animal sex like "goatse" I personally find disgusting
i take it you've never actually been to goatse? I'm not saying it's not disgusting, nor would I really recommend you change that you've never been there, but there's no animal sex on goatse
Re:What is going on? (Score:4, Informative)
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
Contact details for Sen. Conroy (Score:3, Informative)
Senator the Hon. Stephen Conroy
Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
Suite 1B, 494 High Street
Epping Vic 3076
I'm not normally one to write to politicians on issues, but I did so for the first time regarding the filter because of the grave privacy and censorship implications. I encourage everyone else in Australia to do the same.