So it would appear all our hopes and desires have been dashed and we are still lumped with Senator Conroy and mandatory internet filtering. It disappoints me somewhat that Ms Gillard can’t see the forest for the trees. I’ve said it before there are 16 million internet users in this country and I would hazard a guess that 80% of them oppose mandatory filtering, that is a very very large voter pool to be ignoring and not taking seriously.
This fear, uncertainty and doubt card Senator Conroy and now the Prime Minister are playing is just that it’s smoke and mirrors, it’s not real.. there is no great threat to our children coming out of the internet, no more so when Robert Menzies tried to have the communist party outlawed in the 1960’s.. all there is fear, and as we should all know fear is the mind killer.
I read a quote this morning from Prime Minister Gillard that went like this;
“I’m happy with the policy aim and the policy aim is if there are images of child abuse, child pornography … they are not legal in our cinemas, you would not be able to go to the movies and watch that … you shouldn’t … no one should want to see that.”
When you look at a policy aim and outcome, you need to assign a metric to measure this and decide if it can successfully achieve it’s stated aim. Putting aside all moral debate about free speech and democracy , I want to look at this policy in it’s simplest form can it achieve the stated outcome? The answer is a resounding no, Senator Conroy has already stated on more then one occasion that any technically inclined person can circumvent the filter, that numerous transmission mediums found on the internet cannot and will not be filtered.
The filter will only listen on http ports, this is just one of a dozen protocols used on the internet.. there is no filtering of p2p, ftp, embedded media sites, external proxy services, ssh, gropher, or newsgroups. Nor can it filter encyrpted SSL https traffic.. this is like designing a car that can only turn one wheel out of four and expecting it to drive in a straight line. Forgetting all that still, the key metric we need to use if this is really about the children is simple how many more arrests will be made and how many more children will this filter prevent from being abused? I will go out on a limb here and say not a single one.
Thing is the scum bags that perpetrate these crimes operate in the shadows, their insidious nature means they hide and lurk they do not register tld’s / domains and put up big ole billboards on the internet that say “find us here”. I challage the Senator and the Prime Minister to sit down with the Australian Federal Police crack open Google or Bing and start searching for this child porn content I promise you a google search will not find it, it’s not made to be found by average joe punter.. there is no accidental exposure to it.
Coming back to the Prime Ministers quote, she is right it’s not legal in our cinema’s, you can’t go down to the dendy and watch it and rightly so, but does she really honestly believe that this content is not already here or that cinema’s are the method of choice these vial creatures use to watch or distribute? Where is the great mandatory filter on the movie industry, why are customs officers not inspecting every single dvd, blu-ray, vhs that enters the country for it? Because it’s a waste of time and they know it.
When you let fear govern your policy you are out of control.. do we have so very little faith in our police investigators and our criminal justice system that we need to start taking stabs in the dark? We have a method of dealing with this filth it’s called the cyber crimes unit. We need to take the resources being wasted on this bad policy and apply it to where we can quantify the outcome, give the police more resources to track, apprehend and prosecute these people.
A mandatory filter gives a false impression of safety to parents and children a like, fact is most predators on the internet operate out of chat rooms and instant messaging clients again something the filter can have no effect on. For me the most scary thing happening on the internet at present are the social networking sites, they give away far too much personal information to perfect strangers this makes it easier for predators to pick their targets, not to mention it’s been the greatest tool for identity theif in the last decade. To give you an example a friend of a friends daughter who is 11 I might add had her full name, address and mobile phone number listed for all and sundry to see.
We need a policy of greater education on how to be safe on the net, an opt in filter so parents can decides what their children can and can’t access (plenty of which is legal content), and a robust criminal investigation unit with the resources to track these predators from one side of the globe to the other.
Unfortunately we have instead a half wit for our communications Minister, and a Government unable to understand the real nature of the issue that is either too pig headed to work out it’s bad policy and back away from it or think of it as a non-issue to voters. The sign of a bad Government is one that cannot admit if got it wrong and then set about correcting it’s mistakes. I feel I have been backed into a corner I can not support the Liberal party as they are only liberal by name and not by nature, nor though can I support a Labor party that peruses the mandatory censorship of it’s people.
The filter in itself is insidious in that it blocks content that is quite legal in Australia based on what some person deems is amoral rather then illegal. We are smart enough to self censor, I know what I do and do not want to see, as are most people but by god if I am denied the right to view and research legal topics why don’t we just light the book pyers of the 1940’s because that is what we’ll have become.