When you can't even believe what you read about the Internet censorship debate

On Tuesday 31 March 2009 the SBS TV program Insight ran a debate/group discussion called Blocking the Net.

Whirlpool forums in their turn have been discussing this program with surprising results:

Conroy, McMenamin and Pillion simultaneously popped arteries and started shouting when I pointed out that Norway, Denmark, Finland, Thailand and Australia had all had their lists leaked and the UK had been shown to be vulnerable to reverse engineering; then asked what kind of idiots would take that data then say, "I know! Stunning idea! Lets make an extra-special-uber-bad list of the worst of the worst child porn material! This time we'll be able to keep it secret for sure!"

I think they edited it out because Insight likes to present reasoned debate and the debate became distinctly unreasonable for about ten seconds after that point. Total meltdown from the "pro" side.

– mark (Newton)

It was an unfortunate and rather ironic lapse on Insight's part to censor the discussion on Internet censorship.

However, it was sheer idiocy for Senator Conroy (probably the most monitored federal minister in the Rudd Government right now) to blank out parts of his CommsDay Summit 2009 speech as delivered and post an amended version on his ministerial website.

This is a ZNet report on what Senator Conroy decided to omit:

"I saw iiNet's defence in court under oath ... they have no idea if their customers are downloading illegally music or movies," he said today at the Commsday summit in Sydney. "Stunning defence, stunning defence," he continued in what appeared to be a sarcastic comment.

"I thought a defence in terms of 'we had no idea' ... belongs in a Yes Minister episode."

As for the Minister's assertion reported on Monday:

Senator Conroy said other forms of technology could be used to crack peer-to-peer pedophile rings.
"If I stood up anywhere and said 'hey, this filter will block peer-to-peer' then rightfully I should be ridiculed,'' he said.
"I've never said that ... it is not designed to deal with peer-to-peer.''

That flatly contradicts what he said officially on the short-lived official DBCDE blog:

The Government understands that ISP-level filtering is not a 'silver bullet'. We have always viewed ISP-level filtering as one part of a broader government initiative for protecting our children online.

Technology is improving all the time. Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial.

On Insight Senator Conroy complained that he was misunderstood and his intentions misrepresented.
If that were to be the case he would only have himself to blame.

Sadly, the fact of the matter is that the Minister is erratically surfing a strong public opinion wave and desperately trying to avoid a wipe-out.
He tweaks his narrative whenever it suits or whenever the debate becomes politically uncomfortable for him.
There is no truth reliable information coming from his office.