Uproar in Australia over plan to block Web sites

Uproar in Australia over plan to block Web sites

December 27, 2008

by Tanalee Lee Smith

Associated Press



SYDNEY, Australia - A proposed Internet filter dubbed the "Great Aussie Firewall" is promising to make Australia one of the strictest Internet regulators among democratic countries.

Consumers, civil-rights activists, engineers, Internet providers and politicians from opposition parties are among the critics of a mandatory Internet filter that would block at least 1,300 Web sites prohibited by the government - mostly child pornography, excessive violence, instructions in crime or drug use and advocacy of terrorism.

Hundreds protested in state capitals earlier this month.

"This is obviously censorship," said Justin Pearson Smith, 29, organizer of protests in Melbourne and an officer of one of a dozen Facebook groups against the filter.

The list of prohibited sites, which the government isn't making public, is arbitrary and not subject to legal scrutiny, Smith said, leaving it to the government or lawmakers to pursue their own online agendas.

"I think the money would be better spent in investing in law enforcement and targeting producers of child porn," he said.

Internet providers say a filter could slow browsing speeds, and many question whether it would achieve its intended goals. Illegal material such as child pornography is often traded on peer-to-peer networks or chats, which would not be covered by the filter.

"People don't openly post child porn, the same way you can't walk into a store in Sydney and buy a machine gun," said Geordie Guy, spokesman for Electronic Frontiers Australia, an Internet advocacy organization. "A filter of this nature only blocks material on public Web sites. But illicit material ... is traded on the black market, through secret channels."

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy proposed the filter earlier this year, following up on a promise of the year-old Labor Party government to make the Internet cleaner and safer.

"This is not an argument about free speech," he said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "We have laws about the sort of material that is acceptable across all mediums and the Internet is no different. Currently, some material is banned and we are simply seeking to use technology to ensure those bans are working."

Jim Wallace, managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby, welcomed the proposed filter as "an important safeguard for families worried about their children inadvertently coming across this material on the Net."

Conroy's office said a peer-to-peer filter could be considered. Most of today's filters are unable to do that, though companies are developing the technology.

The plan, which would have to be approved by Parliament, has two tiers. A mandatory filter would block sites on an existing blacklist determined by the Australian Communications Media Authority. An optional filter would block adult content.

The latter could use keywords to determine which sites to block, a technology that critics say is problematic.

"Filtering technology is not capable of realizing that when we say breasts we're talking about breast cancer, or when we type in sex we may be looking for sexual education," Guy said. "The filter will accidentally block things it's not meant to block."

A laboratory test of six filters for the Australian Communications Media Authority found they missed 3 percent to 12 percent of material they should have barred and wrongly blocked access to 1 percent to 8 percent of Web sites. The most accurate filters slowed browsing speeds up to 86 percent.

The government has invited Internet providers to participate in a live test expected to be completed by the end of June.

The country's largest Internet provider, Telstra BigPond, has declined, but others will take part. Provider iiNet signed on to prove the filter won't work. Managing director Michael Malone said he would collect data to show the government "how stupid it is."

The government has allocated 45 million Australian dollars ($30.7 million) for the filter, the largest part of a four-year, AU$128.5 million cybersafety plan, which also includes funding for investigating online child abuse, education and research.

One of the world's largest child-advocacy groups questions such an allocation of money.

"The filter may not be able to in fact protect children from the core elements of the Internet that they are actually experiencing danger in," said Holly Doel-Mackaway, an adviser with Save the Children. "The filter should be one small part of an overall comprehensive program to educate children and families about using the Internet."

Australia's proposal is less severe than controls in Egypt and Iran, where bloggers have been imprisoned; in North Korea, where there is virtually no Internet access; or in China, which has a pervasive filtering system.

Internet providers in the West have blocked content at times. In early December, several British providers blocked a Wikipedia entry about heavy metal band Scorpion. The entry included its 1976 "Virgin Killer" album cover, which has an image of a naked underage girl. The Internet Watch Foundation warned providers the image might be illegal.

Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom have filters, but they are voluntary.

In the United States, Pennsylvania briefly imposed requirements for service providers to block child-pornography sites, but a federal court struck down the law because the filters also blocked legitimate sites.

In Australia, a political party named the Australian Sex Party was launched last month in large part to fight the filter, which it believes could block legal pornography, sex education, abortion information and off-color language.

But ethics professor Clive Hamilton, in a column on the popular Australian Web site Crikey.com, scoffed at what he called "Net libertarians," who believe freedom of speech is more important than limiting what children can access online.

"The Internet has dramatically changed what children can see," said the professor at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, noting that "a few extra clicks of a mouse" could open sites with photos or videos of extreme or violent sex. "Opponents of ISP filters simply refuse to acknowledge or trivialize the extent of the social problem."

[dagon]

interesting. esp after reading an artical like this.

http://www.allnewsweb.com/page1241241.php

UFO related information ‘Above top secret’ says Australian political leader
Australian’s are seeing strange things in the skies and sometimes on the ground, from Melbourne to Mullumbimby, from Budgewoi to Bundaberg. UFO sightings have never been more frequent, yet politicians are keeping mysteriously quiet on the topic.
One of these politicians is Malcolm Turnbull, one of the biggest names in Australian politics. Malcolm Turnbull is a member of the Australian Parliament and the Leader of one of Australia’s two main political parties, The Liberal Party, the party identified with John Howard, Australia’s previous leader. The party is now in opposition, however Turnbull stands a good chance of being Australia’s next Prime Minister. Turnbull is also highly associated with the movement calling for Australia to ditch the UK Monarchy. If he does become PM Australia might have a good chance of becoming a republic (in the event Australia’s current PM, Mr Kevin Rudd doesn’t beat him to it) but don’t hold your breath for any UFO related disclosure.
Michael Cohen, of All News Web, happened to chance upon Mr Turnbull and ask him a few questions regarding UFO related topics, probably the first time he was asked anything on the topic by any media outlet. Some of his answers were startling. On whether he would disclose what the Government knew about UFO and Alien visitation and contact with humans he was rather evasive, claiming he wasn’t sure they knew anything and if they did they weren’t telling him or anyone he knows. Then he made the surprise revelation:‘That information would be above top secret, highest classification of secrecy’. This was a truly remarkable comment. He also mentioned that ‘Australia hasn’t had its Roswell yet’ to which our reporter replied ‘That’s not exactly true.’
So there we have it, yet another top ranking politician alluding to a government within a government that might know something about the topic but isn’t telling anyone, even elected officials and party heads.
When asked if he believed earth is being visited by Aliens and whether he believed in UFO’s he simply reversed the question and asked our reporter if he did. Yet the impression gained was that he knew more than he was prepared to give away.

Reality is that Australia’s attitudes towards UFO disclosure are as progressive as the nation’s attitudes towards internet censorship: We can expect secrecy for decades. I guess we will never find out why so many UFO sightings down under involve helicopters in tow, spotlights searching for something in sky. We will never find out why the next day no one can even confirm if there were helicopters aloft the night before, what government department they were from or what the heck they were searching the sky for at 2am.

After all, we powerless mere mortals are way too dumb to be trusted with information on questions like ‘is there anyone out there?’ We would rather leave that to the ‘elected’ elite that control our lives.

[Dantheman62]

The government has committed to trials of the mandatory internet filter before implementation.

On 28 July 2008, an ACMA report entitled “Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Internet Content Filtering” showed that of the six unnamed ISP-based filters evaluated:

One filter caused a 22% drop in speed even when it was not performing filtering;
Only one of the six filters had an acceptable level of performance (a drop of 2% in a laboratory trial), the others causing drops in speed of between 21% and 86%;
The most accurate filters were often the slowest;
All filters tested had problems with under-blocking, allowing access to between 2% and 13% of material that they should have blocked; and
All filters tested had serious problems with over-blocking, wrongly blocking access to between 1.3% and 7.8% of the websites tested.

Mark Pesce believes that the nature of the internet itself has allowed the organization of unprecedented levels of ad-hoc political action ("hyperpolitics") to oppose internet filtering, and that the Federal Government will be forced to back down from the filtering proposal.

The leaders of three of Australia's largest ISPs (Telstra, iiNet and Internode) have stated in an interview that the internet filtering proposal simply cannot work for various technical, legal and ethical reasons. The managing director of iiNet, Michael Malone, has said of Stephen Conroy "This is the worst Communications Minister we've had in the 15 years since the [internet] industry has existed," and plans to sign up his ISP for participation in live filtering trials by December 24 to provide the Government with "hard numbers" demonstrating "how stupid it [the filtering proposal] is."

Dale Clapperton, the current chairperson of EFA, argues that the Labor party cannot implement the clean feed proposal without either new legislation and the support of the Australian Senate, or the assistance of the Internet Industry Association. As the Liberals and Greens have both stated that they will not support legislation, it can only be implemented with the support of the IIA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interne...p_in_Australia

[Anchor]

Yup - this from the country that wants to fluoridate bottled water.

[Egg]

Originally Posted by Anchor

Yup - this from the country that wants to flouridate bottled water.

Same old pattern.


Take the guns, take the civil rights, take the freedom of speech and then take their minds.

UK, US, Oz, NZ........ The west is being slowly strangled from within by these traitors.

Originally Posted by Anchor

Yup - this from the country that wants to flouridate bottled water.

All our problems went away once they flouridated the water