5 Concerns About Australia's New Net Filter 158
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?"
Re:A better question (Score:5, Informative)
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 [boingboing.net]
Arrogance (Score:4, Informative)
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...
Misleading headline... (Score:4, Informative)
The only ISPs to have signed up to the filter so far are the 2 big boys (Telstra and Optus).
A number of big ISPs (including the #3 provider iiNet as well as Internode and TPG) have specifically said they will not filter anything unless they are legally required to do so.
Anyone smart enough to care about the Internet filter should be smart enough to know that Tel$tra and Optarse are junk and should be avoided if alternatives are available (if you can get DSL from BigPond or Optus, you can also get DSL from better options like Internode, iiNet and others)
Re:Summary Inaccurate (Score:4, Informative)
Mod parent up. There is a lot of scaremongering on Slashdot about this internet filter as of late. It's almost like people think this is the same as the proposed filter introduced by the Labor party in the last election. It's not.
The Labor party's proposal was an Australian wide scheme. The Labor party's proposal would never pass the senate [greensmps.org.au] with too many people opposed to it in power. Finally most critically of all the Labor party's group dedicated to the implementation of this filter has been disbanded.
This is an implementation of a DNS blocklist by a few ISPs. Optus has been on the record that you do not need to use their DNS servers and doing so would b-pass the filters. iinet, Internode, and TPG all are not implementing this filter with iinet (Australia's third or second largest subscriber depending on how you read the numbers) is on the record as saying they will never implement a filter unless forced to by law.