Initial response to Conroy's response to Q&A

Senator Stephen Conroy's appearance on ABC TV Q & A program last night was either a masterstroke of political obfuscation or a demonstration of just how little understanding the Minister for Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy has of his own portfolio.

Conroy was given ample opportunity to put the case for national mandatory ISP-level filtering.

In the course of doing so he inadvertently made a few matters abundantly clear:

• Lists of banned URLs compiled by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) are open to human error.
• These errors can and do exist for sometime before being corrected.
• The owners of banned URLs are not made aware that they are on any blacklist.
• Once on the blacklist it is unlikely that a banned site will be removed, even if the offending material is removed from the website in question.
• The official ACMA blacklist contains more than just content that has been refused classification or is unlawful under Australian legislation.
• The blacklist can and does contain political content, using a commonsense definition of the term political.
• The ACMA list of banned URLs is not monitored by an independent agency and has little or no ministerial or parliamentary oversight.
• On their own initiative ISPs are capable of further expanding the blacklist provided to them by ACMA. Such expansion is not monitored by the Department of Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy.

Unfortunately Senator Conroy made something else abundantly clear.
He is willing to tell a great many glib half-truths to the electorate in an effort to defend the Rudd-Conroy plan to censor the Australian Internet.

Q & A espisode for Thursday 26 March:
download episode WMV MP4 (average size 200MB)