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Just in case Punch readers believe what people tell them, here are some of the things that have been said about internet filtering…and exactly why they shouldn’t be believed.

Lie # 1: The filter will help in the fight against child pornography.

I wish this were true. But it isn’t. Even child protection group, Save The Children, has come out exposing Conroy’s plan as unworkable and the wrong way to protect children online. The filter will not (and Stephen Conroy admits this) work for the areas where unwanted material actually lives, namely: peer-to-peer networking, instant messaging, torrents, direct emails and chat rooms.

Continue reading "Top 10 internet filter lies" »

Journalists tend to adopt a natural default position whereby censorship is deemed to be one of the purest forms of evil, and that we should fight any government which tries to curtail the freedom of adults to make up their own minds on what they say, watch and read.

Over the past few months I’ve found that my personal default position has been challenged, oddly enough, by the anti-censorship lobby. Lobby is a bit of a loose term - there is no formal lobby as such - it’s a pretty diverse and disorganised conglomeration of humanity, containing authors, artists, journalists, information technology experts, social media enthusiasts, twitterers and the like.

Large - and in my view, largely stupid - sections of this group have had the surprise effect of turning me into a closet fan of Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. Not because his internet filtering plan is a work of genius. Far from it.

Continue reading "Vacuous critics give censorship a good name" »

Alcoholics call it a moment of clarity. Oprah calls it an “ah-ha moment”.

Whatever you call it, a penny dropping is a wondrous thing, and yesterday amid the rabid brouhaha of Stephen Conroy’s Clean Feed catastrophe, I banked some vital coin.

Perhaps I’m slow, perhaps I’m a bit thick, but it wasn’t until reading the key findings of Catharine Lumby’s document on the proposed Internet filtering, that I realised I was operating under the false assumption that the web should be subjected to the same scrutiny as any other creative product.

Continue reading "The time has come for an Internet Bill Of Rights" »

As we expected, there has been considerable online discussion about our announcement to introduce ISP-level filtering.

For those who missed it, the Government announced legislation that will require Australian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block web pages that under the National Classification System are rated RC (Refused Classification). RC-rated material includes child sex abuse content, bestiality, sexual violence including rape and the detailed instruction of crime or drug use.

The Government has always maintained there is no silver-bullet solution to cyber-safety and this new measure is one part of a comprehensive suite to address the range of challenges online. For example, we have funded 91 Australian Federal Police officers to the Child Protection Operations Team, as well as extensive education programs for parents, teachers and children.

Continue reading "The truth about net filtering" »

In August this year I wrote on this site about the lunacy of the Rudd Government’s proposed mandatory ISP internet filtering.

At that stage it was a trial but on Tuesday this week Minister Conroy announced his intention to proceed with legislation to enact this mad idea.

This is a policy that is based on a fraud so much so the Minister could barely explain it with a straight face yesterday.

Continue reading "Net filtering ‘plan’ is a fraud" »

I once stumbled into a child porn chatroom. I was working at a magazine and having one of those “Hey, does anyone know if…?” conversations beloved of journos where we meander into oddball topics, debate them vigorously and call it work.

On this day, we were trying to remember whether Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of The Boy Scouts, was a confirmed paedo or whether it’s just that the organisation itself has the sour whiff of the kiddy-fiddler about it and we were wrongly maligning him. I Googled (or possibly Yahooed – this was a good seven years ago) something along the lines of ‘scouts, paedophilia, Baden-Powell”.

And before I knew it I’d clicked though to a site flooded with hundreds, possibly thousands of posts and replies from men defending – and describing - their lust (both imagined and enacted) for pre-pubescent children.

Continue reading "Child welfare is more important than net freedom" »

Computer nerds hate Senator Stephen Conroy’s plan to filter the Internet so that material which is refused classification (RC) becomes harder to access. But instead of moaning about how it might slow the Net or limit freedom of speech, they should just build a better filter that actually works.

Don’t doubt that geeks can do it. Napster, the late-90s phenomenon that shocked the music industry by enabling music piracy on a vast scale was written by a lone teenager. BitTorrent, the protocol currently used by millions of people around the world to share illegal copies of films and TV shows, was also created by a lone geek. Twitter was whipped up in few days of frenzied programming.

Sadly, some of the tools that geeks have created are now favourites of the perverts, criminals and hatemongers who want to access the vile material that Senator Conroy wants Internet Service Providers to block. Perverts uses these tools because they are far harder to detect than other methods of finding Internet nasties, leading to entirely justified criticism that the filter is a largely futile exercise that will drive creeps underground.

Continue reading "Hey geeks, stop the whining and build a better filter" »

Australia has an international reputation as visionary for the way we managed the HIV epidemic in the 1980s. While countries like the US were being sidetracked by extremists claiming the virus was a sign God was venting his wrath on homosexuals, Australians acted rationally.

Our governments, our health experts and our media got the message out: HIV was primarily spread through blood and semen. Safer sex and injecting practices could stem the tide.

If you go online today you’ll find countless websites devoted to that message. Many of them are hosted overseas. Many of them give detailed instructions on drug injection and describe, in necessarily explicit language, sexual activity that would be deemed illegal to show in a film made for entertainment purposes under Australian law.

Continue reading "Sex, drugs, and other things you can’t read about" »