What I had to say

Behind the cut is the full text of what I had planned to say at yesterday’s No Clean Feed rally. I differed from it a bit, leaving some sections out altogether, because I realised the crowd didn’t want a 15 minute political speech in the 30-something degree heat. If anyone’s got video of my speech, could they please contact me so I can get a more accurate transcript together.

I hate child pornography, I really do. Who here hates child porn? Anyone who is responsible for its production, dissemination or consumption ought to have the book thrown at them. Now that I’ve pre-empted Stephen Conroy’s characterisation of me as someone who wants to protect pedophiles, I can start talking about the issues at hand.

The ALP went to the 2007 election with a 2006 Beazley policy of an opt-out filtering system at the ISP level. Recognising that this could cause an increase in ISP costs, the ALP said that they’d work with the internet industry to make sure there was no additional cost for the end user. Prior to this, the ALP were arguing that the retail cost of internet filtering software ($60) should attract a 50% subsidy from the federal government to make it more affordable for Australians.

What we’re seeing now is quite different. Where we were previously told that it would be possible to opt out of the “Clean Feed”, we are now being told that there is no way to fully opt out. What’s more, the ALP government under Kevin Rudd have discontinued the NetAlert program and shifted the money towards introducing this mandatory filter. Unless the mandatory filter is up and running by December 31st, there will be no help from the government for parents wanting to manage their children’s internet use.

The current government is trying to put itself in charge of deciding what is and isn’t appropriate for law abiding adults and then forcing ISPs to filter accordingly. The Greens went to the 2007 election with a policy of supporting net neutrality, freedom of the press and having accessible communications networks. This filter is not compatible with net neutrality and the Greens are firmly against the filter.

Stephen Conroy’s behaviour throughout this entire ordeal has been absolutely disgraceful. Senator Conroy has treated those who question him in the Senate with utter contempt; laughing as he rises to answer questions on notice and completely failing to answer said questions. Any time someone points out that what he has just said contradicts what he said earlier or that he hasn’t answered the question, he goes into sales pitch mode and talks about how the government is going to consult with industry to protect kids. Senator Conroy has even accused his opponents of wanting to protect child molesters, a tactic which has been dubbed “Conroy Logic” and has its own website. Conroy has also claimed that other Western nations have mandatory filtering systems at the ISP level but those countries with ISP level filters are completely voluntary, customers have to choose to use the clean feed.

Newly elected Greens’ Senator from Western Australia Scott Ludlam is the party’s spokesperson on internet related issues and has asked Stephen Conroy if he’d be retracting what he said to a Senate committee based on the fact that what he said there was in stark contrast to what he said on the floor of the Senate. Whichever version of what he said is true, he has potentially misled the Senate on at least one of these occasions. Conroy, of course, dodged the question.

The government has stated that banning child porn is the motivation behind this filter, this is a noble goal. If we’ve got to have an internet filtering system at the ISP level it should be entirely voluntary, it should be opt-in. It is ludicrous to punish the rest of the nation with slow internet speeds and an ineffective filter in order to try and stop this threat. The Howard government’s NetAlert program may have been the object of derision with websites like “NetAlarmed” but home based internet filters where parents can set the level of access they wish their kids to have are the best technological solution out there. The Rudd government claims that the uptake of home based internet filtering sotware hasn’t been high enough to justify continued support of the program. Why not spend a fraction of the cost of the new mandatory filter on advertising the existing software?

The best way to ensure kids don’t come across nasty stuff on the internet at home is parental supervision and education about how to use the internet. In real life, parents educate their kids about sex with “the talk” and teach their children about how to live in the world without getting into trouble. Don’t take drugs, don’t accept lifts from strangers, don’t cross the road without looking, etc. There’s no reason why kids shouldn’t be taught about how to exist in cyberspace in a similar fashion. Don’t visit sites you don’t trust, don’t open email attachments from strangers, don’t give out your address in a chat room and so on. Of course, the human race has known about sex and life for quite some time. The internet is a relatively new development, though, and many parents simply do not have the wisdom of the ages to pass down to their children.

This is where government has a role, in providing tools to parents to enable and empower them when it comes not just to protecting their kids but teaching their kids to protect themselves. There’s a lot of trouble one can get into on the internet, just like in real life, but that doesn’t mean that one can’t protect oneself. By providing home based internet filtering software and information regarding safe practice on chat rooms, downloading email attachments, how to avoid viruses, etc. the federal government can contribute positively to peoples ability to safely use the internet. Implementing a mandatory filter, apart from being authoritarian and anti-democratic, will lead parents to believe that the government is taking care of everything and they don’t need to worry or do anything. While government support is indeed a welcome helping hand when times are tough, fostering a reliance on the government to solve one’s problems certainly isn’t healthy.

The filter is very paternalistic, very “Big Brother”. The government is saying that we’re not smart enough to look after our kids or that we can’t be trusted to not look at child porn. This idea that people can’t be trusted to make their own choices is what censorship, and this filter, is all about.

The government has stated child pornography as the motivation behind this internet filter. An internet filter, though, doesn’t stop the production of child pornography. No matter how damaging it is for a child to see child pornography, it is far more damaging to a child to actually be part of child pornography. An internet filter can not bust up a child porn ring. An internet filter can not lay charges. An internet filter can’t confiscate equipment. The Australian Federal Police have a unit which deals specifically with child pornography and liaises with police units from other countries in order to bust up child porn rings. Just this week, 19 men (including a Victorian QC) were arrested as part of a global Peer to Peer child porn network after receiving information from Brazilian police. Conroy’s proposed internet filter could not have caught these men because they were using a peer to peer network rather than the world wide web.

Does Conroy think that people who want to trade illicit material just type “www.childpornography.com” and download it as you would a YouTube video? Does he think that there are open websites with child pornography lurking around the corner of kids’ favourite websites like Runescape, YouTube and sites with Lolcats? Child pornographers are a sneaky bunch who will actively circumvent things like internet filters in order to distribute their material. They use up to date technologies such as Peer to Peer networking and encrypted Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) in their attempts to escape detection. The government must either admit that it can’t capture this communication or spend a lot of money on R&D to be able to break the encryption and to distinguish between what’s legal and what’s not, no mean feat.

There are other problems on the internet such as cyberbullying and predation, credit card fraud, identity theft, copyright infringement, viruses, trojan horse attacks, etc. which simply can not be dealt with by an internet filter. Combatting these is part of the government’s plan but implementing a filter risks instilling in us a false sense of security. A filter can lead us into believing that the government has made the internet a safe place for our kids and we can let them use the computer unsupervised.

The government’s first trial of the filter on web-based material showed that at least 3% of material that should have been blocked wasn’t, and that 1-6% of websites that shouldn’t have been blocked were. Given that there are millions of Australians surfing the internet and the staggering number of sites visited, the incorrect blocking of one to six in every hundred websites is just unacceptable. The trial also found a slowdown in internet speeds when the filter was installed but not running. When the trial filters were running, speeds decreased by anywhere from 2% to 87%.

This trial was undertaken in Tasmania using a Tier 3 ISP and doesn’t give us any real indication of the impacts on a network the size of Telstra or Optus. The government have committed themselves to a live trial but it’s quite telling that Telstra and Internode have said they’re not getting involved, Optus wants to scale back its involvement and iiNet are only on board so they can give the government figures which show how bad this idea really is. If we’ve got 1-6% overblocking in the sandpit environment and at least 3% underblocking, how effective is this filter really going to be?

Given that the blacklist will contain a list of websites containing child pornography, it is understandable that it won’t be made publicly accessible. Why would the government hand over a list of websites which contain illegal material, particularly child pornography?

Australian Communications and Media Authority is responsible for regulating “prohibited content”, which includes anything which, offline, would be rated above R (that is, X-rated pornography and material refused classification). R rated content which exists online without a restriction mechanism, and therefore available to children should they visit the site, is also listed as “prohibited”, as is MA15+ rated material available on mobile phone networks without age based restrictions.

The ACMA blacklist contains about 1300 sites at the moment, but the federal government’s blacklist wishlist would bring the total to 10,000. That’s an awful lot of material to block. The ACMA’s list is currently provided to commercial filter vendors for inclusion in their software. Conversion to a mandatory filtering system at the ISP level would no doubt see these extra sites added to the list and blocked automatically.

The ACMA’s blacklist doesn’t just contain child pornography, despite what Stephen Conroy says. ACMA publishes statistics regarding the makeup of the blacklist without revealing what the list actually is. The Electronic Frontiers Association have applied a bit of elementary mathematics and statistics to what is known about the blacklist and determined that the ACMA blacklist is currently 30-50% “child related material” which covers actual child pornography among other things. The rest of the blacklist contains information regarding terrorism, extreme violence, drug use and how to commit certain crimes.

One would hope that this is what falls under the category of “unwanted material”. Senator Scott Ludlam has asked Conroy about what “unwanted” actually means yet no concrete answer has been provided. Conroy has stated that the filter would enforce current Australian laws. That is, pro-suicide sites would be blocked, shutting down any attempt at discussing euthanasia. Sexual material of the sort currently sold in brown bags at newsagents would be blocked. Material inciting terrorism would be blocked, which means you’d better hope you’re on the government’s side on the issue of Israel-Palestine. With the power to add keywords invested in a government agency we may see the blocking of websites that make MPs, bureaucrats or political donors uncomfortable. If we’re not careful, we could end up inadvertantly restricting access to Wikipedia like they did in Britain.

So we’re going to have this megalithic blacklist of material which is “unwanted” which won’t be publicly viewable and will not be subject to Freedom of Information requests or judicial review, unlike the Office of Film and Literature Classification’s censorship list. So what are you going to do when your favourite political blog is blocked because it contains links to the Bill Henson photographs or even talks about the issue? What are you going to do when the filter accidentally lists a suicide counselling service as being pro-suicide? How are political parties like “Help End Marijuana Prohibition” going to reach potential voters? Are we going to end up in a situation which Lawrence Lessig describes in his book “Code 2.0″ where a particular filter blocks criticism of that filter?

What sort of online world are we creating when touchy subjects are filtered out? How are we meant to move forward as a society and discuss the pressing issues of the day when the government deems them too controversial? This isn’t China under the Communist Party.

The ACMA aren’t affiliated with any law enforcement agency (such as the AFP) or the Classification board. It’s not an outlandish idea that material which would be available legally if printed would be banned online. One only need look at the lack of an R rating in video games to see that our classification regimes need a lot of work. Further to that, if the material’s not illegal, why is it being blocked?

Every ISP in Australia will have a copy of the blacklist if this filter gets approved. With 10,000 websites listed, and a large number of those likely to contain child pornography, there’s the very real risk that if the list is leaked, the government will have just handed over the holy grail of child pornography to pedophiles. This will only make things worse, especially in the event that someone accessing this material online is able to use an encrypted VPN to download the material and then a Peer to Peer network to distribute it. We may not know that the list has been leaked until it’s too late and the banned material is being circulated inside Australia in a way we can’t detect it, let alone stop it.

There are so many unanswered questions about this filter. Will circumvention of the filter be illegal? Will information about circumventing the filter be blocked? Will there be any way to get your website removed from the blacklist? Will the filter be expanded unreasonably to include politically difficult issues for this or any future government? How will this impact the National Broadband Network? Will the filter be expanded to deal with Peer to Peer traffic? Instant Messages? IRC? What about the issue of the filter attacking the security layer that provides the backbone of secure online shopping, banking and paying of bills? Just how far will the filter being implemented by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy actually hold back broadband, communication and the digital economy?

If you haven’t already written to Senator Stephen Conroy about your thoughts on his internet filtering scheme, do so. Even if you think you don’t know enough about it, write to him expressing your apprehensions about the plan. If you want to include technical information, the No Clean Feed, EFA and Somebody Think of the Children websites have plenty of information which you can include in your email/letter.

Talk to your friends, family and colleagues about it. The only thing that can really stop this is a massive backlash from the public. Things like opposition to the Vietnam War and the movement for Voters for Women started out as small groups that grew bigger and changed the tide of public opinion. Internet junkies and political bloggers have been concerned about this proposal from the start but it’s only recently that the mainstream media have picked it up and stated their outrage. The Greens, particularly Scott Ludlam, have been standing against it in the Senate.

Write to your federal MP, especially if you live in Griffith, and let them know that you disagree with the internet filtering plan. Write to our twelve Queensland Senators, regardless of which party they belong to.

The world around us is changing, especially the technologies we have access to. The federal government hasn’t really got a good grip on the issues surrounding digital rights. Rather than seeing the massive potential the internet has to positively transform our world, Conroy sees it as a threat to be neutralised. Ideas like Net Neutrality, that is, that the control of content is to be exercised at the ends of the network (such as in your home) rather than within the network, are fundamental to the continued existence of a free, open, innovative internet. Net neutrality is to the internet what democracy is to the modern nation. This government needs to wake up to the fact that we live in a liberal, 21st century democracy and our laws need to reflect this.