The Age on Thursday last: THE Federal Government is planning to make internet censorship compulsory for all Australians and could ban controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia.
Australia's level of net censorship will put it in the same league as countries including China, Cuba, Iran and North Korea, and the Government will not let users opt out of the proposed national internet filter when it is introduced.
Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy Minister Stephen Conroy admitted the Federal Government's $44.2 million internet censorship plan would now include two tiers - one level of mandatory filtering for all Australians and an optional level that will provide a "clean feed", censoring adult material.
and in The Australian IT section:
INTERNET speeds could slow by 30 per cent under the Government's proposed web filtering scheme, even though it will do little to block illegal content.
That's the warning from technical experts, who also say the plan could expose users' financial details during online banking sessions and see popular websites including Facebook and YouTube banned.
The warnings came after Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy Minister Stephen Conroy confirmed the Federal Government planned to introduce a mandatory internet filter, shelving plans to allow Australians to opt out of the scheme.
Internet service providers, who would administer the filter, have been asked to conduct live trials of the filter before the end of the year.
But System Administrators Guild of Australia president Donna Ashelford said the plan was deeply flawed and would slow internet access down by about 30 per cent according to the Government's own laboratory trials.
Despite this, the national web filter would only censor web content, Ms Ashelford said, and could not deal with the remaining 60 per cent of internet traffic, much of which occurred over peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent and LimeWire.
"The bulk of internet traffic is over peer-to-peer networks and the bulk of illegal content is trafficked is over peer-to-peer networks," she said. "There is no choke point at which they can block that material. I do not believe this is an issue that has a technical solution."
Electronic Frontiers Australia board member Colin Jacobs warned the web filter could also unwittingly make the internet unsafe for financial transactions by breaking the secure encryption used by banks online.
Five of the six web filters tested by the Australian Media and Communications Authority this year were able to filter websites using the secure protocol HTTPS, which would leave financial details exposed to the internet service provider in charge of operating the filter.
"If they sit in the middle and get between your web browser and the bank's server it really breaks open the security and leaves the details open to attack," he said.
The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy is reported:
"I will accept some debate around what should and should not be on the internet — I am not a wowser," Senator Conroy told The Age. "I am not looking to blanket-ban some of the material that it is being claimed I want to blanket-ban, but some material online, such as child pornography, is illegal."
In response to arguments that the proposal would affect basic civil liberties and the principle that households should be able to be their own internet policeman, he said: "We are not trying to build the Great Wall of China.
"We are not trying to be Saudi Arabia, and to say that is to simply misrepresent the Government's position." [my emphasis]
What a pity that Senator Conroy has already been exposed for lying to the Australian people on the matter of his national ISP-level filtering plans.
His present assurances are not worth a penny and, this can be confirmed by his evidence before the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communication and the Arts this month, where he and his department finally admit that nowhere in the free world has mandatory ISP-level filtering been legislated.
However, even before Conroy imposes the Great Wall of Australia we will have to endure his national pilot scheme which will censor as laid out in evidence to the same Senate estimates committee:
Senator LUDLAM—So within the constraints of not having briefed your minister yet, how much can you tell us about how you see that project rolling out in terms of timetables for the live trial and then what happens after that?
Mr Rizvi—At a very broad level, the purpose of the pilot is to look at two streams of potential filtering.
The first stream of filtering is in terms of just filtering the ACMA black list and different methodologies for filtering the ACMA black list. What we will seek to test is the impact of that type of filtering in terms of a range of criteria. We will also test more sophisticated types of filtering that go beyond just simply testing the ACMA black list through to filtering larger black lists and also looking at other types of filtering including dynamic filtering, filtering using key words—those sorts of methodologies—to see what the impact of that type of filtering is in terms of both the ISP and the customer.
Oh lucky, lucky Australians with Internet connections - every possible form of censorship (including it seems 'little black box' hardware) will be tried on hundreds of thousands of unwilling guinea pigs whose very livelihoods and businesses may grind to a snail's pace because the Internet servers involved are likely to have a collective technical nervous breakdown.
Australians are so impressed with Conroy's plan for a little digital bookburning that Courier Mail readers responded to Thursday's poll in this way by 4pm yesterday:
Poll Results
Q. Do you support the planned internet filter?
Yes 9% (452 votes)
No 90% (4493 votes)
Sum votes:
Total votes: 4945 votes so far **Poll was still open at time of time of writing**
** Thankyou to Michael Meloni at Somebody Think of the Children for posting the above new 'portrait' of the Minister which I cheerfully filched for this entry.
No comments:
Post a Comment