People’s privacy is under assault in Australia, nowhere more so than in the Rudd Government’s plan to impose censorship on the internet, says Marie Gordon. And Minister for Communications Conroy is proposing to spend billions to create a speedy national broadband, then slash its speed by 75% with his mandatory filtering system – it does not compute!
Big Brother is becoming a Ruddy nuisance
By Marie Gordon
The Big Brother inquisition is spreading through Australia like a plague.
Privacy – the right to – is being trampled to death in general. The Rudd Government is leading the way by its plundering of the internet, using $44 million far better spent elsewhere with its main aim (so the story goes) of blacking out illegal content, such as child porn. However, the blacking out would, it states, also apply to “other material”. What other material?
We’ll never know. The black list is secret.
We cannot allow this invasion, this utter disregard for our privacy and rights. If we do – in the words of the CEO of Civil Liberties Australia – “It would amount to the most massive imposition of censorship ever in Australia’s history”.
The stated aim of the Government – to keep porn away from children – is not in question, but this aim could be achieved by giving parents the software (and, if necessary, installing it). In fact, our previous government provided free software filters for anyone to download at NetAlert.gov.au, and the website is still there, just one click of the mouse away.
Any adult looking for porn sites will find them, no matter what.
This interference with our internet would slow it down to a snail’s pace. How does 75% cut in speed sound? Dark-age stuff? Right.
Do we want to be aligned with the repressive countries? China, for instance, or Cuba, Iran and North Korea? Are we going to allow our Government to sink so low; let Big Brother loose in our – for the moment – democratic land?
How about this? You are Googling for a recipe for strawberry muffins. The search comes to an abrupt end with a new screen with the word FORBIDDEN‚ in large black letters, followed by “You do not have permission to view this site”. When this happens time and time again, as it will, axes will be applied to computers all over the land.
Minister Stephen Conroy, the man behind this con, is also responsible (silly as it sounds) for the Government’s $4.7 billion plan to deliver next year a national broadband high-speed network with speeds of 12 megabits per second to 98% of Australia’s population.
How is this massive contradiction to be accomplished? Is it to be done by the same Stephen Conroy who is about to undertake open slather on the net, thus cutting the current speed by 75%?
What will happen with the billion-dollar plan for high-speed broadband?
The head of Australia’s largest ISP organisation labelled Stephen Conroy as “the worst Communications Minister we’ve had in the 15 years the internet industry existed”.
Apart from ANU academic Clive Hamilton, support for the plan to censor the Internet is thin on the ground, while opposition comes from the Greens, the Coalition Opposition, internet industry, consumers and everybody who doesn’t want our Internet “made in China”.
Opposition also comes from Holly-Doel-Mackaway, adviser with Save the Children, the largest independent children’s right agency in the world, who claims the filter scheme is fundamentally flawed. “Any filter will be circumvented”, and “many innocent websites, maybe even our own, will be blacklisted because we reference a lot of work we do with children in fighting commercial sexual exploitation”.
Lab test results released by ACMA (the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the organisation that is in charge of the ‘Big Plan’) found that filters frequently let through content that should be blocked and “some sites will be incorrectly blocked”.
James McDougall, director of the National Children’s and Youth Law Centre, is against the plan. McDougall said concerned parents could easily install PC-based filters on their computers if they felt the need.
Civil Liberties Australia is concerned that filtering could produce an effect the very opposite of its aim. “Many pedophiles arrested around the world have been identified by their activity on the Internet. If they can no longer use the net, they’ll find other methods and thus escape detection.”
According to most IT experts, the Government’s scheme is pure fantasy and a waste of taxpayers’ money – $44 million going down the drain in a time of financial crisis. Filtering just won’t work. It takes only minutes to bypass (by using secure proxies outside Australia). Censoring the internet is about repression, not protection and it won’t work.
The experts again: “It won’t work because filters can’t block encrypted content (if they could, goodbye to all internet banking and e-commerce). Ten minutes after the filters – any filters – are put in place, you can get around them with a couple of clicks of the mouse. Alternatively, parents can do the blocking on their home PC. They just have to Google “open dns”‚ and follow instructions and all porn sites will be blocked from their PC without slowing down the internet.
The only supporters of the Government’s bound-to-fail plan are family and religious groups. GetUp, the political activists who helped to free David Hicks, said it had received more emails urging them to act on this issue than “any other campaign in recent history”. GetUp plans to go all out after this ill-conceived plan, running mainstream ads and offline action that will be as elaborate and effective as its ‘Free Hicks’ campaign.
…and for CDA’s own anti-mandtory internet filtering campaign, go to: http://www.censorfree.com.au/