Only a few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post, "Is the filter really dead?" Since that post was written in what now seems a simpler and gentler bygone political age, an update may be in order.

As of today, the ALP and the Coalition are neck-and-neck in numbers, and who forms the next Government will come down to winning the support of three of the four uncommitted independents. There are a few possible outcomes from here.

Firstly, if the country independents decide to support an Abbott government, then at that point the mandatory ISP censorship scheme we have been fighting for so long is well and truly dead. The Coalition have said publicly they would not introduce such a scheme in government. We shouldn't forget that the Liberal party's record on internet censorship is pretty terrible - they are responsible for the current scheme we have, which on paper makes Australia's internet amongst the most heavily censored in the world, with R-18+ content unavailable on Australian servers and a secret blacklist of prohibited sites. (The saving grace of that scheme is that hosting material overseas is cheap, easy and completely escapes this censorship regime, so the average user is very unlikely to be affected by it.) We have to trust that the Liberal party have learned from the last few years and will think long and hard before returning to their bad old ways. In any case, a new censorship push by them is just a hypothetical possibility for the future, which seems preferable to an actual government policy, which we have now.

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Internet issues appear to have finally gotten some oxygen in this election. The National Broadband Network and the Coalition's alternative broadband plan have gotten a lot of coverage in recent days. We'll have a breakdown of the two policies for you in our next update.

Let's turn, instead, to the issue of "cyber-safety", the banner under which the Government has been pushing its mandatory ISP filtering policy. If you follow the news, you might have heard that the Government first delayed the plan for a year in order to conduct a review of the "Refused Classification" rating. Since then, the Coalition have come forward and stated they will not support mandatory censorship and would vote against it even if they remain in opposition after the election. This means that the filter is very unlikely to pass through the Senate without some drastic modifications.

It's still Government policy, however, and they are sticking by it. See "Is the filter truly dead?" for some more information.

The Coalition's cyber-safety policy is now available. They are promising $100.4m over four years for a variety of initiatives aimed at protecting children online.

The Liberal party has a pretty shoddy track record when it comes to online civil liberties. One of EFA's biggest battles to date was against an onerous censorship plan pursued by the Howard Government, that - fortunately - was technically unrealisable. What we ended up with is the current system, whereby R-rated web pages can't be hosted in Australia but for the risk of a hefty daily fine and ACMA prepares a secret blacklist of "prohibited" pages. Fortunately, neither this restriction nor the blacklist have much affect on our daily use of the net to communicate, and so amount to little more than nagging affront to common sense and a considerable waste of money.

By knocking back Labor's filter, and proposing a policy focussed on options within the home, the Coalition appear to have turned over a new leaf. The key planks of their proposal are:

• $60m for home PC filters
• $30m for Cyber-safety outreach
• $10.5m to educate and "empower" principals
• A Ministerial advisory committee on social networking

Although it's hard to get too excited about this use of taxpayers' money, it appears the Coalition have abandoned the heavy-handed censorship approach of the past.

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Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today welcomed an announcement by Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey that the coalition will oppose any move to legislate mandatory internet censorship in Australia. On Thursday's Hack program on Triple J radio, Mr Hockey stated that "we believe the internet filter will not work and we believe it's flawed policy."

"We applaud Mr Hockey's announcement that the Liberal Party will vote against Labor's filter," said EFA Chair Colin Jacobs. "The Opposition are very welcome among the ranks of those many organisations and individuals that see the filter as a policy failure."

A mandatory censorship scheme remains Government policy. However, with The Greens long on record as opposing the internet censorship scheme, Mr Hockey's announcement means that Labor's legislation is effectively dead on arrival in the Senate.

"We call on Minister Conroy and the Gillard Government to now admit the mandatory filter policy is dead, and to move on to a debate more grounded in reality," said Jacobs. "The government must now listen to the experts, and get back to working on giving Australians access to better and faster broadband."

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It's an old chestnut, being bewildered at the "opposition to the governments plan to protect kids", and this time it was put forward by Dr Joe Tucci from The Australian Childhood Foundation .  When supporters of government proposals to censor the Internet run this line, they tacitly imply that those who disagree with them are supporting the abuse of children - or at the very least holding other matters in higher regard to the detriment of children.

To me this is very distressing, in my work with EFA I've had this one levelled at me by Brg. Jim Wallace (ret.), and now Dr Tucci on Sunrise this morning and in reality nothing could be further from the truth.  I understand how passionate Jim and Joe are about their causes, but they are wrong in how they approach them, and it's difficult to find any class in their painting of people who disagree with them as supporters of child abuse.

EFA's position on this matter is clear.

Mandatory Internet censorship, and for that matter voluntary censorship, will not protect children in any impactful sense. While voluntary censorship fixes some of the problems of the mandatory model, the overwhelming preponderance of content which it is illegal to possess is still not published on the open web but rather inside of secret networks of criminal associates.  While there is no benefit to censorship for children, a national censorship system represents a power over free speech that no western democracy has ever had - sure some have come close, with Germany even getting so far as to pass a law allowing it before deciding against it anyway, and the UK has attempted for seven years to make voluntary censorship work and has only really succeeded in breaking Wikipedia.  The "refused classification" category, unique to Australia,  is a mixed bag of illegal-to-possess material that police should be appropriately resourced to deal with (as in all crime), and perfectly legal material that an open government has no business stopping adults from accessing.

So what should we do?

We have options.  Rather than spend more than $40m on an Internet censorship system that won't work, we could take up the US Ambassador to Australia's offer for assistance in combating child abuse as I mentioned on Sunrise; offered by a country that can't censor the Internet because of constitutional rights.  This is an important thing to consider for two reasons, the first being that our long-history of alliance with the United States could benefit enormously from their expertise, and secondly it gives us a reason to stop and consider what  doing something that is impossible in a country with a legal right to free speech means.

We could take the approach of German anti-censorship campaigner Alvar Freude and contact hosting providers to advise them what their resources are being used for (Freude knocked 60 child abuse websites off the Internet in one day in this way), or we could apply a host of other crime prevention methods that police already use to track and deal with people who delight in the abuse of children.

What we shouldn't do, is implement a system that is illegal or abandoned in other countries, which won't protect children, will waste tens of millions of dollars and represent an unheard of intrusion into the lives of law abiding families.

While we do that, I'd appreciate no further inferences that I don't understand or care about the abuse of children.  Those inferences make me stare at the photos my sister sends me of my 6 month old niece, and question why we can't advocate online rights without becoming the subject of baseless attacks.

Friday's announcement by Minister Stephen Conroy that the filter would be put on the back burner pending a review seems like good news. In the sense that Australians' net connections will remain uncensored by the Government in 2011, this is indeed something to be pleased about. The filter remains very much alive, though, and the promised review is unlikely to make much difference.

The review will be run by an as-yet-unnamed party and will investigate whether the RC category of content remains in line with community expectations. Given that the logistics of coordinating such a review with the states, and the length of time a proper review that incorporated community feedback would take, it would seem further progress on getting the filter legislation through Parliament is at least a year away.

To our great surprise, the Minister appears to have endorsed several of the best ideas received in their review of filter transparency, by agreeing to several measures (including some suggested by us [PDF])  that attempt to lessen the corrosive effects of a secret blacklist. Conroy announced that:

• Australian site owners will be notified when their content is added to the blacklist;
• A standard block notification will be shown, making it clear the page was deliberately blocked by the government;
• The Classification Board, rather than ACMA, will decide on the RC status of submitted URLs;
• An annual review of the list will be conducted.

It's good that the issues have finally got some attention, but it is important to note that nothing has really changed here as far as the value of this policy is concerned. Firstly, the filter still has no clear policy goal; it will still neither help parents nor prevent the spread of illegal material. Secondly, a secret blacklist, the scope of which could easily increase over time, is always going to be a big worry.

Perhaps one positive outcome from the announcement will be a more critical look at how classification can be applied to the internet. The Minister has gone out of his way during this debate to draw attention away from the classification of web pages and towards the nastiness of material at the extreme end of the spectrum. This talk of the Classification Board and a review of the RC category highlights what the Government is proposing: to apply a system designed for books, movies and magazines to the global internet. Since it will never be possible to review a significant number of web pages (and they would in any case be out of date by the time the decision was published), classification can never achieve anything but the waste of a few million of taxpayer funds. The Government has missed an excellent opportunity to go back to the drawing board - instead, they are fiddling around with the details of a plan that is fundamentally ill-conceived.

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Electronic Frontiers Australia today welcomed the delay in the Gillard Government's internet censorship policy but expressed disappointment that it is still on track to be implemented in the Government's next term.

In an announcement today, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy indicated that the filter will be delayed until a 12-month review of the "Refused Classification" category is completed in conjunction with the states.

"While we welcome a review of the RC category, this is just tinkering around the edges of the filter's problems," said EFA Chair Colin Jacobs. "Applying a classification scheme designed for books and movies to the internet was never going to work. Altering the definition of one category won't change the fact that the government will never, ever, be able to review enough web pages to make any difference to anyone."

The Minister also announced that Australia's 3 largest ISPs will be implementing a voluntary filter targeted only at child abuse material. "The industry has been trying to engage with the Minister for a long time, and we're glad he finally decided to listen. It's still not clear who will be helped by taking the next step to a compulsory government filter," said Jacobs. The Minister also announced several measures designed to improve transparency, but indicated the blacklist would remain secret.

"The Minister had an excellent chance today to let the filter die a natural death. Instead they've left the ailing policy on life support for another year. We still urge the Government to listen to the experts, drop the filter, and focus on improving broadband access for all Australians," said Jacobs.

- Ends -

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"You can’t walk into a cinema in Australia and see certain things and we shouldn’t on the internet be able to access those things either." Does this sound reasonable to you, or does it sound a bit nonsensical? In either case, it probably won't surprise you to know that  the speaker was a politician - in fact, our new Prime Minister. With those words, the PM dispelled the thin hope that a change in leadership might lead to a welcome rethink of the internet filter policy.

Speaking on Darwin radio yesterday, the PM said in full on the subject of internet censorship:

But there’s also a set of concerns about the dark side of the new technology, if I can use that expression, and, you know, clearly you can’t walk into a cinema in Australia and see certain things and we shouldn’t on the internet be able to access those things either. So, Stephen Conroy is working to get this in the right shape.

By invoking the dark side, Gillard has no doubt unleashed a torrent of Yoda-themed jokes. Unfortunately, a change in rhetoric from a newsagent to a cinema hardly represents a revision in policy. What it really represents is a continued failure of imagination.

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In mid March this year, Senator Stephen Conroy launched a bizarre attack in the senate on Electronic Frontiers Australia.  In an accusatory tirade, he declared myself, then-vice chair (now chair) Colin Jacobs and then-chair Nic Suzor of misleading the Australian public through our efforts against the government's mandatory Internet censorship proposal.

Members of the EFA board dedicate themselves to being leaders on the facts of technology policy in Australia and what the effects are on Australians.  It would not have been appropriate for the senator's outbursts to go unchecked - we were obligated to correct him.

Last night the text of our response was officially published online on the privileges committee website at http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/priv_ctte/report_145/e02.htm and has been entered into Hansard - Australia's permanent record.

Public interest in the Conroy Curtain is still high. With election season almost in full swing, Australia's political parties will be making their positions known.

In advance, we're getting together to discuss the facts, make some better suggestions for the pollies, and give a few hints on how the filter might be avoided if it eventuates.

If you're in Melbourne on the 25th of this month please come to our free forum event. Due to the fondness of politicians for pretending the internet is a lawless jungle where libertarian nerds roam free, we're going with a "wild west" theme. Panelists including Senator Scott Ludlam will discuss the politics of the matter, nerds such as EFA's Colin Jacobs will discuss fun ways to get around it, and Catherine Deveny will weigh in with her educated opinion on the value of free speech...

iWe'll also be taking questions via Twitter for those interstate who can't make it.

Check back later as we may add to the speaker lineup and agenda for the evening.

For more details, please visit the event page.

EFA's "Time to Tell Mum" campaign continues to go well with over 42,000 people reporting that they told their mums about the Government's dodgy internet filter policy. There's still a lot of people to reach, but we're very pleased with the impact the campaign has had so far. Overall, the feedback from the public has been great; we've had plenty of feedback along the lines of "it's about time you got the message out there to the families."

EFA vice-chair Geordie Guy, who has been running the campaign, posted some comments a few days ago. Once again, I'd like to thank Fnuky, the creative agency who put it together for us.

Of course the reception hasn't been entirely positive - a few people thought it unfunny or merely unnecessary, but some thought it was a bit sexist with all this focus on Mums. So why are we exhorting Australians to dob Conroy in to their mums?

Firstly, it's not because we think mums are too clueless to understand technology, and need things explained to them in simple words. Nor because we think mums only care about their kids and need matters of public policy rendered to them in these terms. If that was true, the campaign might indeed be described as sexist.

In reality, we liked the idea of telling mum for the opposite reason - because our families can understand the policy and make a rational decision, if only they can get adequate information. In contrast, the Minister has treated Australian parents with contempt by trying to scare them with misleading rhetoric about protecting children from internet nasties. By substituting alarming statements about bestiality for actual information on what the filter would do for children (nothing), Conroy himself has not given mums the respect they deserve.

It's been suggested that it's offensive to behave as if mums only care about technology if it affects them or their kids. Far from being an inaccurate sterotype, I think this is actually true - not just about mums, but about most people. Unless you're a nerdy technophile (like me), you aren't going to be particularly interested in technology for its own sake, but what it can do for your life and that of your family. This is the core of the campaign - reaching out to people who wouldn't take an interest in technical things, and educating them about a government policy and how it affects them directly.

Finally, the campaign was never meant to exclude non-mums. "Time to tell mum" has more of a ring to it than "Time to talk about policy with the wider community". Everybody has a mum, and most of us talk to our mums on a regular basis. Who better to start with when spreading important news?

So contrary to reports elsewhere, like this piece in ZDNet, we aren't apologising for the campaign - we're happy with the way it turned out. Of course, we'd rather nobody was offended, and sincerely regret it. But offending nobody is only possible without any risk-taking, and a risk-free campaign is unlikely to break any new ground.

However, we welcome your feedback. How can we make out next campaign even more successful at reaching the ears of ordinary Australians?

Just 24 hours after the Time To Tell Mum campaign has launched it can be declared a massive success. Everywhere you look there is evidence that this is one of the most impactful initiatives we've ever undertaken, with over 14,000 people telling their mums that Internet censorship is bad so far. We know from recent research this means 14,000 fewer supporters of the proposal.

The campaign has been covered in The Australian, ITWire, iT News, ZDnet, Gizmodo and other outlets, bloggers have blogged, the announcement was an #openinternet "Top Tweet", hundreds of Facebook users have shared and liked the site and in a one hour radio show this morning the campaign was discussed on Dr Katherine Albrecht's radio show and syndicated across the entire United States, and around the globe online.

We're back to working on the next steps, but I'd like to personally thank everyone for their support.  From Fnuky Advertising in Adelaide to the guy who donated $3 to the Open Internet drive, we've had a heap of assistance to get this launched.

We're excited to announce that EFA have today launched a new campaign to raise public awareness of the Government's internet filter: "Time to Tell Mum."

The campaign features well-known comedian Akmal Saleh and exhorts Australians to tell their mums about the filter plan and what it won't do for Australian families.

One of the big challenges in the debate so far has been combating the myth that the filter is - or ever was - a cyber-safety tool designed to keep kids safe online. It's not. It's designed to "harmonise" censorship laws, not protect children from inappropriate content. It's censorship for its own sake.

We know that the more people understand the proposal, the less there are that support it. This is an opportunity for those 'in the know' to help in educating the wider community, with a focus on parents who are the most worried about cyber-safety issues, but won't be helped by the policy. We hope this campaign will reach some new people, and further highlight the myths about Conroy's Filter.

You can watch the video and share it with your friends here at http://www.timetotellmum.com

Oh... and tell your mum.

Many people do not know that the internet in Australia is already heavily censored, even before the Rudd Government's plan for mandatory ISP filtering is implemented. In fact, Australia almost undoubtedly has the most restrictive internet censorship regime in the Western world. Under amendments made to the Broadcasting Services Act in 1999, material rated as low as MA-15+ can be prohibited. More details are available here. In particular, material is prohibited if:

(a) the content has been classified RC or X 18+ by the Classification Board; or
(b) both:
(i) the content has been classified R 18+ by the Classification Board; and
(ii) access to the content is not subject to a restricted access system;

The penalty for hosting prohibited material, or even linking to it, can be a fine of $11,000 per day.

The saving graces of the system are twofold. Firstly, that the Australian Communications and Media Authority do not proactively go looking for such material, but respond to complaints from the public only. Secondly, if content is not hosted inside Australia, the material goes on a blacklist but this blacklist is not enforced in any real way. Thus, despite the millions spent every year on the system, it's pretty ineffective at accomplishing anything but occasionally causing somebody to sign up with an overseas web hosting company instead of one inside Australia.

Nevertheless, the system can have consequences. EFA recently tested some of those consequences.

In May 2009, EFA published this blog post discussing the current censorship regime in the context of the new filtering system soon to be introduced. As part of that discussion, we included a link to a page on American website abortiontv.com that we discovered was on ACMA's blacklist. Abortion being a sensitive political issue, we felt it illustrated the dangers of internet censorship in general and a secret blacklist in particular. Furthermore, since discussion site Whirlpool had received a notice instructing them to delete the link, we thought it highlighted the serious way in which internet content in Australia is already regulated.

Shortly thereafter, EFA's web host at the time, Sublime IP, received a "Link Deletion Notice" of their own, for the link contained in the EFA post hosted on their servers. They contacted us, and given the fines involved, EFA complied. (The post in question is still redacted.)

Despite removing the link, EFA felt that there were several problems with the way ACMA proceeded to issue the notice, and we encouraged Sublime to request a review of the decision before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT). Because Sublime, not EFA, were the recipients of the notice, we couldn't directly appeal ourselves, and although we wrote to ACMA inviting them to issue the notice to us instead, they declined to do so. Sublime, with advice from EFA, took the case to the AAT and argued the case before Deputy President Handley in April this year.

Our case was twofold. Firstly, given the article was political in nature and the content that was linked to was done as a demonstration of the political effects of censorship policy, we argued that the decision contravened the implied right of freedom of political communication in the constitution.

Secondly, it was argued that EFA, not Sublime, should have been issued the notice as EFA were the authors of the content, controlled its delivery, and met the definitions under the law of the responsible party.

Last week, the AAT handed down its decision, upholding ACMA's decision to both issue the notice and to issue it to Sublime instead of EFA.

On the issue of freedom of political communication, Schedule 7 of the Broadcasting Services Act, which details the censorship system in question, has a specific exemption in cl 121, which states:

(1) This Schedule does not apply to the extent (if any) that it would infringe any constitutional doctrine of implied political communication.

This right has been recognised by the High Court in several landmark decisions in the 1990s. In order for a law to contravene this implied right, it must effectively burden speech while not having a constitutionally appropriate and legitimate end of its own. Considering this, in his decision Deputy President Handley wrote:

In the Tribunal’s view, imposing restrictions on access to the internet, in some instances, could effectively burden communication about government or political matters. It is common knowledge that the law concerning the practice of abortion is a sensitive political matter. It is possible that opponents of the practice might wish to use material including pictures or images of aborted foetuses as a means of educating (and shocking) members of the public about the results of the practice. Thus, an executive decision that restricts access to such material could effectively burden communication about government or political matters.

However, the tribunal found "any constraint on communications was, in our view, minor and left the words penned by the author of the article untouched." Furthermore, because the page in question was rated R-18+, we could have put the link behind an elaborate "Restricted Access System" to identify web users, and that - since Australian citizens need to be 18 to vote anyway - this would not have restricted political discussion either.

As to whether the Link Deletion Notice should have been issued to EFA instead of Sublime, we argued that it would be very unlikely that most web hosting companies would take the trouble to appeal any such content removal notices by ACMA, thus depriving the material's authors (their customers) of the right to contest a decision that affected their speech. Indeed, the Tribunal did find that there was some merit to this argument and that EFA qualified as a "Links Service Provider" under the Act, and could have been the recipient of the notice. However, since Sublime also qualified, ACMA had acted in accordance with the law in issuing the notice to them.

We are disappointed but not surprised by this decision, which we feel highlights many issues with the current system. Those who choose to can simply move their content overseas or change the address of the web page in question, leaving those who abide by the spirit of the law to remove their material, or have it removed for them by their provider. From the leak of the blacklist, we saw that many of the sites on there were far from obscene, but contained all manner of harmless, controversial and borderline political material. This raises enormous concerns. Could debate and culture thrive in Australia if all R-rated material was effectively blocked?

Finally, we note that compared to the announced plans of the Government to require their censorship to move to mandatory, real-time blocking of RC-rated prohibited material, even the current system is relatively benign. When the material blocked is hosted overseas, nobody will even receive the courtesy of a letter from the Government informing them of the decision. It will simply go on a secret blacklist, with as yet unknown remedies for appeal and rectification mistakes. We hope that despite the Tribunal's decision, this case has highlighted the need for extreme caution in censoring material in a medium as dynamic and important as the internet.

Wearing my EFA Board Member hat, I spoke today at an event at Parliament House hosted by the Menzies Research Centre in a debate with Tony McLellan of the Australian Christian Lobby. The audience was primarily members of the Australian Liberal Students Federation; young Liberals destined for jobs as political staffers and politicians.

Below is the text of my part of the debate.

Let me begin with a short anecdote.

On Monday night as we watched Four Corners and Q&A, my not-quite-13 year old daughter, Hannah, made a particularly interesting observation. “Gee, Dad,” she said, “I think I’ve just seen more rude pictures in that story than I’ve ever seen on the Internet.”

Hannah has been using the Internet since she was four.

Certainly, much of that time it has been under our supervision, but increasingly it’s not. When Hannah uses the Internet, she uses a connection at home that is completely unfiltered, neither by the router we use nor by activating the fairly comprehensive parental controls that come as a standard part of modern operating systems. She has administrator access to the machine she uses and she also knows and understands how to access and manage the home network.

Knowing I was coming here today, I conducted something of a straw poll of that observation amongst friends and acquaintances with kids of a similar age. I deliberately avoided asking only “‘Net savvy” parents.

Universally, the experience was the same; none of our children had ever inadvertently encountered pornographic or other offensive material on the Internet, let alone material of the kind that falls under the umbrella that the National Classification Code defines as Refused Classification. None of the children had filtered or managed Internet connections. All of them used computers placed in public spaces in their homes and several had their own computers in their rooms.

The most recent research into public opinion on the filter, carried out by the Safer Internet Group consisting of Google, Internet Industry Association, iiNet, Australian Council of State School Organisations and the Australian Library and Information Association and others shows a marked increase in doubts about the filter amongst parents.

There is significant opposition to the government’s filter as proposed. Rather, parents first want greater education options and at-home filtering and as a next-best option, an opt-in filter. Mandatory filtering runs a long last.

So too, our friends internationally, including most notably the US Ambassador to Australia, Jeff Bleich, speaking on Q&A have come out publicly against the filter as it stands. Ambassador Bleich, an internationally recognised authority on human rights, was particularly clear, when he said:

“We have been able to accomplish the goals that Australia has described, which is to capture and prosecute child pornographers … without having to use internet filters. We have other means and we are willing to share our efforts with [the Australian government].”

The arguments of the government and its supporters in favor of the filter regularly hang on the matter of RC material. On this, I’d like to first highlight two matters of interest that seem to cause some real confusion.

First, is the myth that all RC material is illegal. This is simply not true.

The fact is that of all material classified RC, it is only material depicting the sexual abuse of children that is that is illegal to own. For good reason. No reasonable person in today’s society believes that such material is suitable for adults to access, let alone children.

Material that falls under the RC umbrella is unquestionably sometimes distasteful or controversial or contains or depicts concepts of an adult nature; drug abuse, explicit material about abortion, guides to assisted suicide, violence. Whether you personally approve of such things or not, none of this material is illegal to possess in this country; it’s perfectly legal for me or you to own a copy of Baise Moi or The Peaceful Pill, just not to make it available for sale.

Yet the filter seeks to change this. Our classification system in Australia is something that largely works and is designed to empower adults and minors alike to make appropriate, relevant choices. When implemented, and have no doubt, the government’s plans for the filter are far from abandoned, it will take away adults’ ability to decide for themselves whether or not to access material that is by-and-large, legal in this country.

Second, is the fantasy that stumbling across material that is RC on the public web is something that occurs with frightening regularity. It’s not even easy to stumble across R- or X-rated material, not all of which is pornographic in nature and none of which will be targeted by the filter. You have to go looking for these things very deliberately. Looking for material that is RC is even harder.

The material the government proposes to filter is, in some cases, completely appropriate to access. For that which is not, child sexual abuse material, it is well known that the criminals who trade in this matter do so using tools and protocols that will not be managed by this or any other filter. Rather criminals trade their materials in private networks.

Additional dollars and human resources for law enforcement by the Australian Federal Police ought to be supported. It is only through the diligent and successful efforts of the AFP and its overseas collaborators that those people purveying child sexual abuse material are apprehended and put in jail where they belong.

Let’s look in turn at a number of the other issues around the proposed filter.

First, the matters of cyber-safety, education, self-determination and digital citizenship.

There is no question that as adults and particularly as parents, we wish to protect our society and children from danger and from exposure to deeply offensive or inappropriate material. Certainly, as a father, this is paramount in my concerns.

In order to do this, I have a responsibility. As a parent as and a member of society, it is incumbent on me to educate myself, my child and those who I come into contact with about issues such as good digital citizenship and appropriate online behaviors. Doing so helps us, particularly, to protect ourselves from threats the filter will not even address such as cyber-bullying (and bullying in the flesh-and-blood world), from online predators, from identity theft.

These issues are certainly much higher in the minds of the parents, teachers and students I speak to regularly as a part of my work than are matters like RC.

Despite the marked increase in this country of policy that erodes our freedoms, pushing back against personal determination and our ability to make decisions for ourselves, the fact is that the vast majority of Australians are not complete dullards who need the Nanny State to tell them how to run their lives. Rather, they are perfectly normal, intelligent people who are capable of self-determination, of critical thinking and decision-making.

Australian parents are largely not irresponsible and incompetent at bringing up their kids. Most of them are entirely the opposite, doing a fine job of parenting and making appropriate decisions about child rearing. They are perfectly able, as parents and adults, to decide what is and isn’t appropriate for their children to see online and elsewhere. Equally, they are able to teach their children, with help from educators, law enforcement and others, how to behave as reasonable digital citizens.

The millions of dollars the government proposes to spend on the filter, a technology that will not actually work as advertised and will be easily circumventable, would be far better spent on law enforcement and on thorough programs for teachers and parents to educate themselves on risks, on teaching how to manage their own and their children’s access to the Internet, on appropriate online behavior and, where they wish to, how to filter their own computers directly and by choice; provably the most effective form of filtering and placing the power to conduct themselves firmly in the hands of individual people rather than in the hands of a government.

In more than one research study, both here and overseas, strong evidence exists that the risks to minors of exposure to unwanted, by which I do not mean only illegal, material, are considerably overblown. Children are not irreparably damaged by seeing things that may be distasteful or inappropriate online, particularly if they are surrounded by a framework of parents, mentors, educators and other support services that can help them make sense of these things.

Even if some form of filter is ultimately introduced, it would be far better if such a thing was opt-in rather than mandatory, as it was in Labor’s original pre-election policy. This leaves the decision-making in the hands of parents, where it belongs. Indeed, many opponents of the current filter scheme have stated that their objections would largely be mitigated of opt-in was the choice.

I don’t want to spend a great deal of time on the technology, as the concepts here have been argued at length and in detail by others. Suffice it to say that, in spite of Senator Conroy’s arguments to the contrary, there are major technical issues with the filter that remain unanswered or lacking in enough detail to be satisfying:

• secure web sites, such as we use for online banking and e-commerce cannot be filtered without making them less secure
• there remains a risk that if a popular and culturally valuable sites such as Wikipedia, the National Gallery of Australia or YouTube were subject to a filtered URL, overall access to those sites may be measurably degraded
• the introduction of the NBN and networks running at those speeds have not been tested under filter conditions at all
• only material published on the web will be subject to the filter, other distribution methods such as BitTorrent, email and instant messaging, often used by criminal networks to distribute offensive material, will not be subject to the filter
• bypassing the filter is, as admitted by Senator Conroy on more than one occasion, a trivial exercise, even for relatively non-expert users
• mandatory filtering is less flexible and customisable than home-based, on-router or on-computer filtering

All of these issues require evidence-based, thorough answers.

The blacklist itself is problematic on a number of fronts. These too have been discussed at length, but let’s look at them briefly.
The list is secret. In a world where open government in modern democracies is receiving significant attention, this is, at the very least, interesting. We hear arguments that a secret list protects us from exposure to the URLs that contain the offensive material. However, if the URLs are filtered, in what way do we risk exposure? The argument fails its own logic. Beyond that, it’s simply offensive to me to think that any government believes that I am incapable of enough independent thought to determine what URLs I do and do not visit.

By its very secrecy, if my website ends up on the blacklist, I am unable to know how and why it got there. It’s also unclear how I get off the list if I’m there unjustifiably. What happens if someone opposed to your political views or faith manages to get your site on the list?

Secret things have a tendency to leak through the cracks. The blacklist has already been leaked once. It’s not inconceivable that it will happen again. And again. And again.

The list is tiny. In a world where the public web is now in the trillions of pages, a list of something around 10,000 URLs barely scratches the surface of any pool of offensive, let alone illegal, content that may exist.

Which brings us to criminal networks distributing child sexual abuse material – I’ve already mentioned this, but it bears repeating – these networks do not use the public web to distribute their wares. The technologies they do use – private networks and peer-to-peer – will not be filtered.

The only effective way the distribution of this illegal material can be stopped is through active law enforcement. The AFP has a highly competent cybercrime unit that could be more effective if it was the beneficiary of additional funding and resources.

Last, to matters of filtering and free speech.

Senator Conroy, on Monday night’s Four Corners, stated clearly that for the purposes of the filter, his government’s policy was to filter RC content only and that he would be amongst the many voices raised in protest should some subsequent government decide to broaden the scope of the filter.

The filter covers material legal in other forms and media. It lacks accountability and appelability which are at odds with our open democracy and markedly different to equivalent decisions that are open to scrutiny when subject to other media.

While the Senator’s and the government’s hearts may certainly be in the right place, we cannot be so certain about unknown future governments and their thoughts on the nature of what could and should be subject to filtering. It is entirely possible that over the long term not only material that is RC will be subject, but perhaps dissenting political voices, matters of taste or voices belonging to certain faiths may be censored.

So, here’s a summary of the issues as I see them:

• there’s no serious Internet content problem to solve – you just can’t inadvertently stumble on RC or child porn on the Internet
• even if there was, few want the government to solve it this way – there are better, more effective, more workable and more societally acceptable options
• the technology presents a real risk – we’ve seen the trial results and the extensive analysis which points out the flaws
• the blacklist itself is a problem – it’s secret, unappelable, deals with material that remains legal, it’s already been leaked and will again (you’ve heard of the Streisand Effect, right?)
• the filter will not address criminal distribution of illegal material – it’s far better to ensure funding and resources for law enforcement, who are the only people equipped to deal with this problem properly
• the filter impinges on the freedom of Australians to determine for themselves  – it represents a real shift in the ability for Australians to determine what is and isn’t appropriate for them to view online and significantly changes a fairly workable classification system in other media to cope with a medium that is changing rapidly
• the filter will be administered by governments ill-equipped to do so – the technology and policy are complicated and problematic. We’ve seen several policy and program stumbles lately, do we want one over this?
• there is no guarantee that future governments will not change the scope of what is filtered – the suppression of material based on moral or political grounds is anathema to what Australia is about

This is far from a simple issue.

I’d like to close with a few words from Will Briggs, an Anglican priest from my wife’s home town of Somerset, Tasmania. Will is a strong voice in the discourse on the filter. He said:

“[This issue] is best [addressed] through clear information, balanced argument, reasoned debate…[on the] multiplicity of issues… [it is] a debate which is not simply about sexual ethics but about freedom of speech, the reductionism of morality, and the role of government in society… by… simplifications in this case [we] look like simpletons.”

Greens Senator Scott Ludlam yesterday rose to address the Senate specifically on the subject of the Rudd government's mandatory internet filter. The speech is easily the most substantial given in Parliament to date, and was withering in its assessment of the merits of the scheme.

Calling the filter "an inappropriate and off-target attempt to engage with a series of problems that deserve a much more serious and nuanced response", Senator Ludlam outlined three major areas in which the policy was a failure. Firstly, it doesn't achieve its policy objectives such as protecting children online. Secondly, it "establishes the architecture" for future censorship, as the list is expanded in future. The third line of attack deals with the technical unworkability of the system.

Summing up the policy failures, Senator Ludlam said:

If the government has its way and if it is passed through this parliament none of the issues that parents grapple with, that teachers are concerned about, that child safety and protection advocates worry about will have disappeared as a result of the enactment of this filter. It will not result in a single prosecution, it will not close down a single illegal website and it will not result in the removal of a single harmful image from the internet. So let us be very clear about that.

Many of us in the community have long noticed that what was presented as a "cyber-safety" policy, applying to internet connections with children, has since become a plan to "harmonise" our censorship and classification scheme by targeting material only adults would see. Clearly the Government did not get a mandate from the electorate to introduce a new censorship system for its own sake.

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Senator Conroy's office today provided answers to Questions on Notice asked by Greens Senator Scott Ludlam some months ago. Among the dozens of answers reiterating standard positions were some welcome details that have been frustratingly hard to come by before.

You can download the entire exchange (see below), but here are a few pieces of information we think are interesting.

On Circumvention:

Ludlam:
Will an ISP be allowed to offer a service or product that aids in the bypassing or circumvention of the filter if;
(a) the product or service is solely for the purpose of circumventing or bypassing the filter; or (b) the product or service has other uses apart from bypassing or circumventing the filter.

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