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)

So who destroyed any credibility left to NBN Co. and the Australian Federal Police?

On 19 May 2016 it was reported that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) used warrants to search an electorate office occupied by former Communications Minister and current Shadow Minister for Defence Senator Stephen Conroy and the home of one of Shadow Minister for Communications Jason Clare’s staffers looking for evidence of a whistleblower involved in leaking NBN Co. documents, which outlined cost blowouts as well as planning and delivery failures in the rollout of Prime Minister Malcolm Bligh Turnbull’s faster, cheaper, sooner national broadband network.

The ABC sighted a warrant and reported that it named Labor Senator Stephen Conroy, staffers, technology bloggers, and four major media organisations including the ABC and that It required the people subject to the warrant to hand over all documents relating to those people and organisations.

A number of NBN employees were also interviewed in relation to this matter on 19 May according to the AFP.

This is a redacted copy of the letter sent to AFP Manager Crimes Operations after the raid on Conroy's Melbourne office and the Brunswick home of a Labor staffer:

Letter (1) by Orietta

So who was this mysterious civilian “seconded assistant” who apparently snapped over 30 images of documents over which parliamentary privilege had been claimed and, sent them on to various employees of NBN Co?

An un-redacted screenshot was displayed on Twitter in the early evening of 20 May for those who missed the hint In The Australian the first time around:

On the same day this set tongues wagging on Twitter:

So the cat is allegedly out of the bag and it is rumoured that the man at the centre of the political furore at the end of Week Two of the federal election campaign is a former Frankston detective senior constable, former partner in a furniture business, former head of security at a casino and current works in security at NBN Co.

However, this rumour remains unconfirmed because neither Team Turnbull, NBN Co. nor the federal police are about to name names. Transparency and accountability are not concepts that would normally be associated with these three.

The AFP stated in a 20 May 2016 media release that the federal government and opposition were appropriately notified and advised of operational activity regarding this matter after it commenced yesterday.

The current Minister for Communications and Senator for Victoria Mitch Fifield has admitted that he knew about the complaint to the AFP and the subsequent investigation but denies knowing of the warrants or tipping off the media to the night raids.

Sky News reported that Malcolm Turnbull said he first became aware of the raids when notified by Justice Minister Michael Keenan on Thursday, after the minister had been briefed by the AFP chief.

To date Attorney-General George Brandis is not on the record as to what he knew.

As the raids on both Steven Conroy and one of two Labor staffers were filmed by mainstream media there remains a suspicion that a person within government or police circles told the media about the when and where of these searches (second raid seen in this video).

When it comes to the exact type and status of those documents allegedly improperly distributed by the AFP/”Mr.Steere”, one will have to wait and see what any post-federal election Senate inquiry on the parliamentary privilege claim reveals or if Labor makes a formal complaint to the Commonwealth Ombudsman or commences legal action.

UPDATE

First leaked 12 page document from NBN Co titled Overbuilding Optus and marked Commercial Confidential,second leaked 12 page power point presentation CTO Briefing: Fibre to the distribution point and marked Internal Use and Scale the Deployment Program – Fttx Design and Construction. Copy of NBN Corporate Plan 2013 not yet found.

1617 Warrant - redacted Australian Federal Police warrant to search premises dated 18 May 2016 by clarencegirl

The Register, 22 May 2016:

The staffer has been identified as Simon Lee-Steere, nbnTM's general manager for security investigations, although in the only public document (below) his name has been redacted…..

Later, in defense of the staffer's actions, nbnTM corporate communications executive Karina Keisler Tweeted that the company's staffer was acting with the authorisation, and under the instruction, of AFP officers.

Business Insider, 23 May 2016:

NBN Co has stood down two of its employees over alleged involvement in the leaking of documents which resulted in last week’s AFP raids on Labor offices.

A spokesperson for the company confirmed that two employees had been stood aside while the AFP investigation was taking place. NBN Co did not name the employees or wish to comment further.

This news follows a dramatic few days for the government and the NBN, after police raided the offices of Labor senator Stephen Conroy, the homes of Andy Byrne and Ryan Hamilton as well as two staffers of shadow communications minister Jason Clare…..

The Australian Federal Police no longer have access to seized documents after the Labor party claimed parliamentary privilege.

AFP commissioner Andrew Colvin confirmed that the documents seized have now been sealed, and can’t be accessed until the matter goes before the Senate….

It's market failure, says Senator Conroy

Australian Minister for Broadband Communications and the Digital Economy says that the Rudd Government announcement that it will establish a national broadband network costing around $43 billion (financed by government bond issues) is due to "market failure"
From where I'm sitting it looks more like a Stevo failure to me.
The Australian rightly points to Telstra as the fly in the ointment but doesn't mention that the Conroy tender process didn't result in viable bids anyway.
Having Stephen Conroy as minister when the basic plan for creating the new national network is being put in place does not bode well.
Especially as home use on the new network will be limited and much more expensive according to one analyst - which if true will alarm the average blogger
When is Kevin Rudd going to shuffle this inept minister away from a sensitive portfolio and into the obscurity he so fully deserves.
Conroy is a living example of the Peter Principle; "the theory that employees within an organization will advance to their highest level of competence and then be promoted to and remain at a level at which they are incompetent."

Urge to filter gets Conroy into trouble

PERTH-headquartered ISP iiNet said it has sought legal advice on Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy's public commentary on its legal defence in a high-profile copyright case before the NSW Federal Court.
IiNet managing director Michael Malone said that the comments were a form of retribution against the ISP for pulling out of the Department of Broadband Communications and Digital Economy’s controversial internet filtering trial.
“We have sought legal advice on this. It's unheard of for a crown minister to try to influence the outcome of an active case,” Mr Malone said.
IiNet’s concerns orbit comments that Senator Conroy is reported to have made at a high-profile communications forum in Sydney.
Several media outlets reported that Mr Conroy ridiculed arguments in iiNet’s legal defence that it was not aware of what was being downloaded on its network as “stunning”.

What if you gave an Internet censorship party and nobody came?

What if you gave an Internet censorship party and nobody came?
This bad dream is coming true this month for Prime Minister Rudd and his Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

A lone Foad has belled the Australian Communications and Media Authority cat by making a 'complaint' which saw that body place an anti-abortion website page on its URL blacklist, issue a take down notice and threaten to fine a server host around $11,000 a day if it didn't immediately get one of its clients to remove the offending URL from a forum page.

Small problem though.
Partially obscured Wikipedia screenshots of the banned URL are on the web as I write and, using that meagre amount of information, major search engines in Australia and around the world not only still display this indexed site but the site can be opened, searched and the page reached. [please note that the anonymous researcher did not inhale when testing the suspect page status]

Oh, and until that single public servant (or small coffee klatch of public servants) decided to act on Foad's stand alone complaint no-one at North Coast Voices had any idea the site existed.

However, even if ACMA decides never to mention specific banned URLs when it replies to complainants, the complainant is likely to already know the exact Internet address because they made the complaint in the first place and I'm sure that twittering a friend or two will be almost irresistible.

As for placing certain Wikileaks pages on the ACMA blacklist - what do they say about horses and stable doors?
I swear that there would be many hundreds of home PCs across the country which have looked at those Wiki pages about overseas banned URLs and more than a couple of web surfers who have taken a screen shot for posterity. [and yes, before you ask, this was another case where our anonymous researcher successfully refused to inhale]

Can you hear the cynical laughter yet Messrs Rudd and Conroy?
Or is the sound of the ocean rushing in to drown your foolish policy too loud?

Update 21 March 2009:

Wikileaks issues its own legal threat:

Anti-censorship site Wikileaks has threatened Australian Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy with criminal prosecution if he attempts to discover the source of its leaked Australian Internet blacklist. Wikileaks says that under Swedish law it is a criminal offence to try to breach confidentiality agreements between the press and sources.
Senator Conroy yesterday issued a statement in response to the release of the Australian Internet censorship list by Wikileaks, saying that his department, "is investigating this matter and is considering a range of possible actions it may take including referral to the Australian Federal Police. Any Australian involved in making this content publicly available would be at serious risk of criminal prosecution."Describing Senator Conroy as the person "responsible for Australian Internet censorship", Jay Lim, the legal adviser of Wikileaks publisher Sunshine Press stated: "Under the Swedish Constitution's Press Freedom Act, the right of a confidential press source to anonymity is protected, and criminal penalties apply to anyone acting to breach that right. "Source documents are received in Sweden and published from Sweden so as to derive maximum benefit from this legal protection."Should the Senator or anyone else attempt to discover our source we will refer the matter to the Constitutional Police for prosecution, and if necessary, ask that the Senator and anyone else involved be extradited to face justice for breaching fundamental rights."

A lesson for Senator Conroy perhaps?

The Federal Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, likes to think that the world is on his side when it comes to the 'rightness' of Internet censorship.

However, the real world has a habit of intruding..................

According to Computerworld: the voice of IT management this week:

The US Supreme Court has refused to resurrect a law requiring Web sites containing "material harmful to minors" to restrict access based on age, presumably ending a 10-year fight over whether the law violated free speech rights.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to hear an appeal by former President George Bush's administration, which asked that the court overturn a lower court's ruling against enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 (COPA). In July, the US Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit struck down the law, saying it was a vague and overly broad attack on free speech......

Opponents of the law, including the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Nerve.com, Salon.com, the Urban Dictionary and the Sexual Health Network, argued the law amounted to government censorship and was so broad that it would affect many Web sites, including those that included information on sexually transmitted diseases.

Opponents of COPA have successfully challenged it in court several times. In 2000, the 3rd Circuit upheld a lower court's injunction against the implementation of the law, and in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the injunction but sent the law back to U.S. district court. In 2003, the 3rd Circuit ruled that the law violated the U.S. Constitution.

Inconvenient facts also keep emerging in Australia...............

According to Crikey on Friday:

"Freedom of speech is fundamentally important in a democratic society and there has never been any suggestion that the Australian Government would seek to block political content," intoned Senator Stephen Conroy on Tuesday.
Yet the very next day, ACMA added a page from what's arguably a political website to its secret blacklist of Internet nasties.
The page is part of an anti-abortion website which claims to include "everything schools, government, and abortion clinics are afraid to tell or show you". Yes, photos of dismembered fetuses designed to scare women out of having an abortion. Before you click through, be warned: it is confronting. Here's the blacklisted page.
Mandatory Internet filtering, says Senator Conroy, is only about blocking the ACMA blacklist. The blacklist, he repeatedly insists, is "mainly" child-abuse and ultra-violent material. He's protecting us from ped-philes, stopping terrorists, that sort of thing. It's like the regulation we have for TV, films and books. Except it's not. It's not even close.

Australia Uncensored blows the whistle on who Conroy is actually censoring on the Australian Internet

From Australia Uncensored on 27 December 2009:

The Rudd Government's not censoring the Australian Internet - it's censoring older people

If you read Rudd Government bumpf on the need for Internet censorship and all that nonsense which Senator Conroy mouths, it would be easy to believe that Australian users are mostly innocent children and evil paedophiles just waiting to prey on these sweet innocents.

Small problem with this premise though.

Australian Internet users are mainly adults over 35 years of age (66.3% in all and mostly female) and the biggest proportion of these adults are over 55 years of age according to one 2007 snapshot.

In 2008 Nielsen said that Australians were spending almost 14 hours a week surfing the Net (out of a total of 84.4 media consumption hours) with 94% of all users accessing the Internet from home, and by March 2009 it was reporting that our individual media consumption was averaging 89.7 hours per week with the biggest slice of this being our Internet use.

By 2009 the CIA World Fact Book calculated that over 15 million Australians use the Internet.

Now it's not hard to guess that techno-savvy, usually computer literate from an early age, individuals will be able to circumvent any national filter at will - the Enex report to the Dept. of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy even tells us so.

It's also not hard to realise that older users rely almost solely on the expertise of the big search engines (which are currently not universally filtered for Australian use) to find their way to online information and opinion.

Which leaves the planned mandatory national ISP-level filtering scheme censoring people rather than cyberspace and most of those people with artificially limited access to information and free speech will be middle-aged and older voters.

Potentially making at least 10 million Australians very ticked off with Kevin Rudd and the Labor Government ahead of the next federal election.

I'm one of these, Senator Conroy! I'm not impressed that, having fairly successfully spanned technology which moved from sloping school desks with ink wells and nibbed wooden pens right through to today's cyberspace, you and your Labor Right cronies are trying to tell me that I'm to have restricted access to the world.

Guess where my vote won't be going?

* What Rudd & Conroy attempt to censor now on the Australian Internet

Australian Foreign Minister chides China over internet censorship - talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

According to ABC News yesterday, Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith is hot under the collar about the International Olympic Committee agreeing to allow China to impose certain website restrictions on access to the Internet by the international media during the Beijing Games.

What was that again, Stevo? Open internet good, restricted access bad.
Thought that was what you were muttering.

Well this view of China and internet access doesn't exactly jibe with the fact that the Australian Federal Government has installed Websense filters on almost every parliamentary PC it can get its hands on and senators have had trouble researching political and social issues.

It certainly doesn't sit easily with the fact that four days ago that other Stephen, one Senator Conroy, was reported in The Australian on the progress of his national ISP filtering scheme:

"THE Federal Government will embark on the next step of its internet filtering strategy after initial trials proved successful, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said.
Senator Conroy today released the findings of a recently concluded ISP-level internet filtering trial conducted in Tasmania by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in a closed environment.----
Senator Conroy said the tests proved that the web filtering technology could be expanded to a wider base. "The next step is to test filter technologies in a real-world environment with a number of ISPs and internet users."
An expression of interest seeking participation in the live pilot will be announced shortly."

Come on, Stevo. Say it again for the laughs - open internet good, restricted access bad!

Senator Conroy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation

Remember way back when (January 2008) Senator Conroy's spokesperson was quoted:

Senator Conroy's spokeswoman said the blacklist would be expanded through liaison with the Australian Federal Police, and international agencies such as Interpol and the FBI.

Then, it was a little worrying that the super-conservative Federal Bureau of Investigation would presumably have some input into Conroy's expanded blacklist.

It became all the more worrying this month when the Bureau formally entered communication partnerships with the following faith-based organizations:

• Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas, under the leadership of Dr. Tony Evans;

• The Potter's House in Dallas, Texas, under the leadership of Bishop T.D. Jakes;

• The First Baptist Church of Glenarden in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, under the leadership of Pastor John Jenkins;

• The Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship in Decatur, Georgia, under the leadership of Bishop Paul Morton;

• Greater Mount Calvary Holy Church in Washington, D.C., under the leadership of Bishop Alfred Owens; and

• Ever Increasing Faith Ministries in Los Angeles, California, under the leadership of Dr. Fred Rice.

The rolling blacklist is dead and our online privacy is once more protected - or is it?

 

The Age 9 November 2012:

 

Conroy has backed down but there's no shortage of people still pushing to invade our privacy and censor the internet.

It's almost five years since communications minister Stephen Conroy embarked on his crash-or-crash-through campaign to introduce mandatory ISP-level internet filtering for all Australians……

From the very beginning of the debate, outspoken filtering opponents such as Electronic Frontiers Australia and Mark Newton data retention to keep records of everyone's internet usage for two years. There's already a push to expand the scope of this plan.

Meanwhile anti-piracy lomade it clear that the real concern about the planned filter was its broad scope and veil of secrecy which left it open to abuse by those with an agenda.

It didn't take long for calls to expand the proposed filter. Family First Senator, Steve Fielding, called for the filter to cover legal hardcore pornography and fetish material, while Senator Nick Xenophon wanted it to encompass online gambling. The Australian Christian Lobby was also pushing to expand the scope of the filter to cover a wide range of sins…….

"Blocking the INTERPOL 'worst of' list meets community expectations and fulfils the government’s commitment to preventing Australian internet users from accessing child abuse material online," Conroy says.

"Given this successful outcome, the Government has no need to proceed with mandatory filtering legislation."

Only a politician could label such a backdown a "successful outcome", considering it's exactly what he should have done five years ago. Senator Conroy has been gradually backtracking on filtering for some time but only now does it seem safe to declare the plan officially dead. But that doesn't mean that free speech and privacy advocates can rest easy. Right now Australia is debating the proposal for blanket data retention to keep records of everyone's internet usage for two years. There's already a push to expand the scope of this plan.
Meanwhile anti-piracy lobbyists are threatening to bomb the internet back into the stone age with draconian plans which keep emerging under the guise of various proposals such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA)….

In November 2012 Australian citizens still struggle to get a definitive response from the Federal Attorney-General as to how law enforcement and intelligence agencies will ensure that they are not inappropriately gathering personal information on individuals when they wish to access to the following data without having to automatically apply for a warrant before each request to Internet Service Providers.

Definition of Telecommunications Data

From the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security

 Inquiry into potential reforms of National Security Legislation

Is the Rudd Government going to be the new cyber bully?

I'm at a loss to understand exactly why the Federal Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy is so hot for Internet filtering at service provider level, if his aim is actually to protect children with PC clean feed access but not to impact on other users.

From 1999 onwards the Federal Government has been told that this preferred method of filtering has problems.

 

A September 1999 CSIRO commissioned study outlines what appears to remain ongoing problems with Senator Conroy's current plan to apply blanket internet censorship. 

 

"The disadvantages include:

• Performance impacts including increased delays and reduced capacity.
• Costs of installing and administering suitable filtering systems.
• Limited effectiveness.
• Potential impact on all Internet users.

ISP-based filtering may prove to be difficult to implement on a large scale because of the very nature and size of the Internet. Any delays or access restrictions imposed by ISP filtering mechanisms can have an impact on all Internet traffic, on e-commerce and business as well as on educational or recreational Web browsing."

 

"ISPs are concerned not only with delays imposed on individual messages as they pass through the filter but also with any associated limitations that the filtering workload will place on total system capacity. Excessive delays will degrade the overall useability of the Internet and may make some delay-sensitive Internet applications, such as Internet telephony, infeasible altogether."

 

"There is no single, 'good' technology that could be adopted by all ISPs to filter Internet content."

 

"ISPs implementing content filtering also have to be concerned with introducing instability into their networks and reducing the overall reliability of their services. Reliability and availability are critically important to ISPs and their customers, especially as the Internet takes on the role of providing the data communications infrastructure for the nation. ISPs currently use 'telecommunications grade' equipment designed to be exceptionally reliable (99.999% availability). The kinds of standard computers and software used to implement filtering are more general-purpose and complex, and are unlikely to be as reliable. The computers will, in many cases, be directly in the path between users and the Internet and the failure of a filtering computer would then have the effect of blocking access to the Internet rather than temporarily allowing access to prohibited material."

 

These same problems were still found to exist according to the February 2008 ACMA study, commissioned by the previous Coalition Minister for Communications and on which Senator Conroy now relies.

 

It is looking suspiciously as though, in Senator Conroy's case, ideology is outweighing commonsense when it comes to a desire to censor the world wide web.

 

This push also appears to be at odds with the Rudd Government's boast that it will supply a faster broadband service.

Indeed, Senator Conroy is beginning to come across as a bit of a cyber bully in his approach to telecommunications companies.

Where's the blanket opt-out clause, Senator Conroy?

Now the Federal Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy is quite welcome to consider me lacking in grey matter, but I am still puzzled by his announcement of federal government internet censorship at ISP level.

 

Senator Stephen Conroy talked of a mandatory system but also mentioned an opt-out clause.

"Conroy said Internet users would be able to access uncensored material by opting out of the service".

AFP:

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jV6oxYm5XnWf5WcGysJhPn0fY8Vw

 

This censorship regime appears to begin on 20 January this year and I cannot for the life of me find any mention in relevant documents of a blanket opt-out provision for those not wishing to participate in this brave new world.

 

To ensure this super net nanny did not obstruct totally innocent sites, limit search engine results or slow down a home PC, it seems that an individual would have to approach (in writing or electronic form) every ISP, proxy or mirror site he/she uses, in order to obtain a content exemption by request and provision of hardcopy proof of age or other required document.

 

What is all the more galling for my one computer, one person, child-free household is the fact that Senator Conroy is merely acting as the former Howard Government's barrow boy in this matter.

The ACMA began to look at mandatory Australia-wide internet censorship before the November 2007 federal election.

 

So, if the senator has an explanation it's time to air it.

 

The Australian article on the nanny-state:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22999432-16741,00.html

Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA):

http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_310905

Restricted Access System Declaration:

http://www.acma.gov.au/webwr/_assets/main/lib310563/ras_declaration_2007.pdf

RAS Explanatory Statement:

http://www.acma.gov.au/webwr/_assets/main/lib310563/es_ras_declaration_07.pdf

Conroy cleans up without a universal Internet censor

Excerpt from Stephen Conroy's 11 December 2008 media release:

Today the AFP announced the identification of 22 Australian men following a 12-month investigation into an online child abuse image and video-sharing network. The AFP's Child Protection Operations Teams seized more than 15,000 videos and 500,000 images of child abuse.

I'm willing to hazard a guess that this sting would be more effective than the Minister's plan to impose mandatory national ISP-level filtering to censor the Australian Internet and, probably didn't cost as much as any proposed implementation phase of Conroy's mad scheme.

With his national 'live' trial now in tatters, as Australian ISPs realise just how many problems he is wishing on their commercial business, Senator Conroy appears ready to conduct another 'closed' trial (this time without any ISP customers involved) in order to save face an push forward with the Great Firewall of Australia.

Has the Prime Minister considered that perhaps the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy is becoming tired and emotional?

One aspect of the Streisand Effect - Conroy now outranks Goebbels in Australia

A week in politics is certainly a long time as Australian Senator Stephen Conroy (Federal Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy) can now attest.

His name and silly antics over Sweden-based Wikileaks' publication of an alleged Australian Communications and Media Authortiy blacklist has seen Google Trends searches using the term "stephen conroy" outstrip searches based on the name "josef goebbels" or "paul joseph goebbels"

Give the intransigent senator another week and he might then outstrip searches using the better known version of the name of another popular propaganda minister, the Third Reich's Joseph Goebbels.














So intense has been the world-wide interest generated by those clumsy Rudd-Conroy moves against freedom of speech in Australia that the sheer volume of its site visitors swamped Wikileaks and it was virtually uncontactable for much of last week.

What Senators Conroy and Fielding (as well as Usher of the Black Rod Brien Hallett) don't want Parliament to see?

The Australian Protectionist Party (APP) has declared itself and states it will be applying for status as a registered political party.
A quick look at its website points to the possibility that this is yet another far-right group which would be fairly comfortable with everyone from Howard to Hanson and perhaps even the late, unlamented Oswald Moseley.

However, it appears on first glance to avoid defamation, sedition, hate speech or incitement to violence as defined by legislation.
So in a democratic society it would normally expect to be tolerated as political opinion or dissent, even swimming against the tide as it does with a platform opposing multiculturalism and political correctness.

Or would it?

According to ABC Radio National Background Briefing on 15 March 2009 this potential political party URL is on the Australian Parliament/Websense blacklist.

Also reported to be on the blacklist is E-evolution, an online news site for the gay community.

It seems that Australian MPs are such delicate flowers that they must be protected from news about a significant group of citizens in many electorates.

The Federal Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, has baldly stated that national mandatory ISP-level filtering will be installed (whether the majority of Australians want it or not).
He is also on record as including what he terms 'unwanted' and 'inappropriate' material in content which would be subject to mandatory filtering by secret blacklist.

His lack of transparency in relation to the introduction of national Internet censorship does not impress and, his attempt to 'blame' the larger ISPs for their non-inclusion in his live filtering test and his calls to have faith in government integrity are falling on deaf ears in this house because I'm old enough to remember the prolonged fall-out from political witch hunts in the decade after World War Two.

There is nothing that Senator Conroy has put forward so far which gives me any confidence that the Rudd Government (or subsequent federal governments) would resist turning mandatory censorship to their own political or socio-economic ends.

Conroy's Clean Feed [producer/presenter Wendy Carlisle]:

Listen Now - 15032009

Download Audio - 15032009

Cleaning up the Net: see how easy it is to removal illegal content, Senator Conroy

As late as last Friday the media were still questioning Senator Conroy and the Rudd Government's motives for seeking to impose mandatory censorship on Internet access from Australia and Perth Now was giving a somewhat tongue-in-cheek example of one of the most common forms of the unintended consequences of such censorship.

The Dept. of Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy informs that the upcoming trial of national ISP-level filtering will have funding for those ISPs participating.
The Minister tells us that the Rudd Government is committed to spending many millions in establishing this national censorship.

It seems that taxpayers will probably pay thrice over - for conducting the live trial, for the Australia-wide implementation of the filtering system and as an additional service charge to cover ongoing costs in every monthly account they receive from their ISP after that.

What Conroy is careful not to point out is that for the cost of an email, the Rudd Government and ACMA can get search engines like Google to remove illegal and/or offensive content, as these snapshots from Chilling Effects clearly demonstrate.

In total literally thousands of take down notices have been received over the years by search engines, web sites and blogs in relation to illegal/inappropriate content, copyright infringement or defamation. I have yet to hear of a serious complaint about pornographic or offensive content not being acted on.

NB: the NSW Parliament is now in possession of its own November 2008 E-brief on Internet filtering which raising many of the concerns expressed elsewhere about the Rudd-Conroy Great Firewall of Australia.

May I speak with the Labor Minister for Fascism......pleez

From www.stephenconroy.com.au (now stephen-conroy.com) commenting on the Rudd Government's plan to censor the Internet.

Since I first placed this in North Coast Voices' post queue for next week, The Orstrahyun has commented on the fact that the Minister for Fascism appears to have struck again. Hat tip to Darryl Mason.
So I'm bringing this forward just in case the second version of this protest site goes off line:

auDA, the .au Domain Administrator is trying to take us offline. Earlier today they issued a notice giving us 3 hours to provide evidence of our eligibility to hold the 'stephenconroy.com.au' and related domain names. Normally registrants are provided with approximately one week to provide this information on request. We asked for reasonable time to prepare and submit representations on our eligibility but auDA refused to grant this. Accordingly we've moved the site to 'stephen-conroy.com' - please update your bookmarks. Conroy's office must have been busy this afternoon! {Thursday 17 December 2009 - 15:22:10}

I suspect it's not really the protest site's original name and URL (obviously the subject of either a complaint from Team Conroy or preemptive removal by the server after all the online publicity) which caused the problem.
It was the likes of this on the home page:

This protest site is hosting discussion; Forums are now active SIGN UP and post your thoughts/opinions/comments.

Hey Google, you're banned! Wikileaks has published an alleged Australian Government URL blacklist

Prime Minister Rudd and Senator Conroy continue to pretend that they are still in control of the proposed national mandatory ISP-level filtering of the Australian Internet.

However, with Wikileaks publishing an alleged Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) blacklist from mid-2008 and new mirror sites becoming available (as Wikileaks sites and known mirrors become difficult to access due to congestion), it is apparent that they are beginning to get some small idea about what users of the Internet can accomplish when they put their minds to it.

Having read an online article, which linked an article, which linked an article et cetera, I finally found the hard information as it were and immediately collapsed in a gleeful heap - a Google group was on the list right near the top.
Not only that, the discussion group listed was mainly all about the technical difficulties associated with Mozilla/Sea Monkey/Firefox/Linux.

Now that's the worst sort of p#rn in the world. Shame, Google, shame!

Sharing the honours with Google, I also found a legal betting website, a consortium of design consultants, a site that comments on Internet culture and a very Internet savvy dental practice.
Other reports indicate that the list also contains a tour operator and a boarding kennel.

But the true laugh of the moment was this brief report:

The list was originally believed to be the ACMA blacklist, but Communications Minister Stephen Conroy issued a statement within the last hour or so which said it was not, despite having some URLs in common.

Conroy has also condemned the leaking of the list, threatening criminal prosecution to the person who originally made it public.

Which would mean that Conroy would be instigating prosecution based on a fake blacklist?

The lesson in all this for the Rudd Government is fairly straightforward. Although Australians are generally law-abiding and infrequently given to demonstrating social unrest, at heart we harbour an almost anarchic response to being told to obey for the sake of obeying (our betters).

Senator Conroy still following Howard Government's old ISP lead

With a much smaller than expected take-up of the former Howard Government's free home PC filter software (probably because it also randomly blocked legitimate sites and slowed download speed), Federal Labor Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, is now ploughing ahead with his plan to impose a national filter at ISP level.

 

He has been repeatedly told by industry experts that a filter of this type will not stop inappropriate material coming via social networking sites, chat rooms and instant messaging.

That the technology doesn't exist yet which could successfully filter these sites.

 

Even the former Liberal Communications and IT Minister was forced to admit to these difficuties.

"At its best, mandatory filtering by internet service providers was an expensive and ineffective way to limit children's access to online pornography, Senator Coonan told The Australian.

At its worst, mandatory ISP filtering was ineffective and seriously degraded the internet's performance, she said."

 

While one plaintive cry on the Web says it all about ISP filters:

"This host was good to me for the first half, but during the last few months, i've been experiencing numerous problems.
Support, although responsive, could not fix my problems. Website constantly give me errors, they said it was due to my ISP's filters, etc... "

 

But Senator Conroy, with one eye on his first kindergarten teacher, is intent on ignoring all the danger signs and has granted the tender for a trial which is expected to take place in Tasmania.

Poor Tassie. First in was the guinea pig in Hockey's smart card experiment - now it gets the chance to be annoyed by the Labor Right's absurd paternalism.

 

It will be interesting to see if Enex Test Lab lives up to its own hype about being a first rate testing facility when it undertakes the evaluations of available filter programs.

 

And what of the ISP filter programs which will be run by servers if Conroy's plan comes to fruition - will we find US filters such as this from the Christian right being commonly used?

If Conroy filters the Internet online banking may grow riskier

In Securify This! by Liam Tung at ZDNet Australia on Tuesday the spectre of Conroy's internet censorship weakening data security raised its ugly head.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has welcomed "improvements" in ISP filtering technologies, but will a broad-scale roll-out make ISPs a thief's favourite target?
The great success of the ISP filtering trial was that current technologies impose far less interference on an ISP's network than similar tests done five years ago.

Improvements like this give the impression that yes, the government has its collective head around the challenge of making the internet a safe place.

But after an interesting chat with Internode's core networks and infrastructure group team leader Mark Newton, I came to the conclusion that any concerns about network degradation are peanuts compared to security worries around what could happen if the technology is implemented — in particular to the protocol used to conduct secure Web sessions with your bank or the tax office — HTTPS.
Newton raised an interesting idea: for an ISP to filter HTTPS sessions it would have to engage in a Man in the Middle attack, where the attacker intercepts and changes information being transmitted between two parties...
Normally HTTPS means that data streams pass unfettered between your computer and the bank's servers, but ISP filtering would see that data unencrypted at the ISP, inspected, re-encrypted and then forwarded on to you and the bank.
Now, I don't use Dodo, Exetel or TPG, but these ISPs don't seem to be able to afford call centre staff, so can we rely on these ISPs to implement whatever technology the government approves?
And if the filtering products run on Windows operating systems, what happens if and when those systems become infected with a trojan or virus that siphon information to cybercrims?
Let's hope we find out a little more about the security and privacy implications in the "live" trials the government plans to run in the coming months.

Unfortunately for Liam and the blogosphere, it is highly unlikely that Senator Conroy or his staff have even given this issue a passing thought.
From where I am sitting, the progressing of this national ISP filtering scheme is principally about a narrow, faith-based, ideology ridden agenda.