Response to Jim Wallace’s puddle of misinformation

Jim Wallace is the Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby. His recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald drew much criticism from those closely following the ISP filtering debate for, at best using out of date information and at worst using outright lies.

Here I have reproduced his article and provided correction and commentary to his main points.

It will be the downfall of the internet, the end of free speech as we know it. It will lull parents into a false sense of security, and it doesn’t even work.

But just as students are taught not to believe everything they read on the internet, so should we not believe everything said about it. Some things are too important to leave to drown in a pool of misinformation, and internet filtering is one of them.

That is true Jim, let’s see why your article does nothing but add lies and misinformation to the debate.

The industry tries to tell us we don’t want this, but a national Newspoll commissioned by the Australia Institute in 2003 showed that 93 per cent of parents of 12- to 17-year-olds said they did. We can assume they would only want it if it worked, and current trials of automatic filtering of pornography are meant to see if it is technically feasible. The results of the two trials to date show that it is increasingly so.

The 2003 poll by the Australia Institute, despite being horribly out of date by any modern market research standards, framed a completely different system to the one currently proposed.

“Would you support a system which automatically filtered out Internet
pornography going into homes unless adult users asked otherwise?”

The 93% support quoted by Jim Wallace was in no way linked to the idea of an ISP level filter and framed a situation where parents could opt out of the filter. Imagine if the question had been worded to accurately reflect the current situation:

“Would you support a mandatory system which automatically filtered out any ‘unwanted content’ such as not yet classified foreign websites and anti-abortion sites such as abortiontv.com?”

I can understand that the government would want empirical evidence before judging the technical effectiveness of the filter, but the conduct of the trials has so far been incompetent and poorly managed by the DBCDE. So poorly managed as to ruin any chance of trustworthy results. Experts in the field would be less inclined to oppose the trials if they were run in accordance with some form of scientific method.

Our dependence on the internet makes us all very sensitive to anything that might degrade its performance, and opponents of filtering have mounted a shamelessly misleading campaign to exploit this fear.

The activist group GetUp!, for example, has raised a petition with the alarmist statement that filtering “will slow the internet by up to 87 per cent”, but the claim is based solely on the worst results of the products trialled.

That ‘worst result’ was in fact two out of the 6 filters that had worse than 75% network degradation and were also the only filters capable of only overblocking 3% of sites that shouldn’t have been blocked.

It conveniently omits to advise would-be signatories that the trial results released in mid-2008 showed another of the filter products tested slowed internet performance by less than 2 per cent, and three products slowed it by less than 30 per cent. As one commentator has noted, GetUp!’s selective use of figures is like reporting on the first trial of refrigeration and writing off the technology because one freezer failed to cool the meat.

The filters with less than 30% degradation were prone to block legitimate websites at a completely unacceptable level. Jim’s analogy of writing off refrigeration is cute, but would be more accurately put as writing off refrigerating your entire house to keep your meat from spoiling because it doesn’t keep it from spoiling, makes life remarkably uncomfortable for everyone in the house and there is this better technology called a refrigerator that is better in every way, shape and form.

Another legitimate test for any filtering system is that it doesn’t block an unacceptable level of legal material.

Internet service providers and the sex industry would want us to believe it would, and have commissioned at least one study full of expressions of woe. But isn’t that why we’re having a trial?

Jim, lumping advocates of free speech in with the sex industry in some vile conspiracy to maintain smut levels in Australian homes just shows that you have little to no respect for the intellect of Australian adults.

We would welcome a trial, if that’s what it was. Senator Conroy and yourself have both erroneously called this latest test of ISP level filtering a ‘live pilot’, when it is niether live nor a pilot. It is, again, a closed system prototype. The only difference between this prototype and the Enex prototype from last year is that this one will be using the equipment used by ISPs. It will not use real world internet traffic, it will not use real world internet conditions and it will not use the actual prohibited list.

The latest Australian Communications and Media Authority trial report, published last year, showed the proportion of illegal and inappropriate content that was successfully blocked averaged above 92 per cent. This was a significant improvement on the 2005 trial, and we would expect more improvements in future.

Just as importantly, the rate of “over-blocking”, or preventing access to acceptable material, was in most cases less than 3 per cent, also a dramatic improvement on the 2005 trial. And again, unless you are a technology sceptic, this is inevitably going to improve.

We can indeed expect improvements in the future, that is the nature of technology. We can expect improvements in the technology used by paedophiles to circumvent the filters as well. We are not chasing a stationary target. What these trials fail to acknowledge is that they are completely reactionary, they can only filter something that the authorities are aware of.

Every time a new technology is released, the government will need to pile money into trying to filter it, and every time they do, they will be starting from square one again. It has taken 10 years for the filtering of simple http traffic to come this far; what about more complex traffic? ISP level filtering is a Band-Aid, it can be as efficient as it likes and still not be nearly effective enough. The only real solution is law enforcement.

Realising that the trials are likely to prove them wrong, opponents of filtering have thrown in something sure to get everyone animated: “censorship”.

The trials could only prove us wrong if they were conducted in a scientifically rigorous manner. Since we have made calls for the trials to be conducted in a more transparent and thorough in their use of scientific method, we are plainly not worried about what the trials could prove. All we ask is that the trials prove something, anything, that can be relied on. So far this has not been the case.

From the outset, it has been clear this system is not going to stop any adult from viewing anything that is legal. They can “opt in” to do so. Child pornography would be blocked to all, but the benefit of the initiative is not just in terms of how well it deals with child pornography, but how well it meets the aspirations of the 93 per cent of parents of 12- to 17-year-olds in protecting their children from both legal and illegal pornography.

Time and time again, the assertion that ‘this system is not going to stop any adult from viewing anything that is legal’ has been debunked by close analysis of the relevant legislation. The ACMA black-list bans content that, while illegal to broadcast, is perfectly legal for an adult to view. For instance, where the ACMA receives a complaint about foreign internet content. The content isn’t even forwarded to the classification board; if the ACMA ‘thinks’ it might be prohibited, it is classified as ‘potentially prohibited’ and thrown on the ACMA black-list. It is not illegal until it has been classified as such. Only Australian hosted content is forwarded to the classification board.

A clear example of this occurred only a few days ago. An anti-abortion web site was added to the ACMA black-list despite two things. Firstly, there was no pornographic or child exploitation material on the website, and secondly, the DBCDE had previously claimed that political content would not be blocked.

Contrary to some of the dubious claims, there is a very real problem with children being exposed to inappropriate material on the internet.

How is a report backed by 49 Attorney’s General in the United Stated a ‘dubious claim’? Even if it was a very real threat, how does abrogating the role of parents solve the issue?

In their 2003 report for the Australia Institute, Clive Hamilton and Michael Flood said: “Eighty-four per cent of boys and 60 per cent of girls say they have been exposed accidentally to sex sites on the internet and two in five boys deliberately use the internet to see sexually explicit material, with 4 to 5 per cent doing so frequently …

“There are special concerns regarding violent and extreme material on the internet including depictions of non-consenting sexual acts such as rape and bestiality.”

A PC based filter would deal with all of those. There is no need for the filtering to be ISP level.

Concerned parents do not view filtering as interfering with their parental responsibilities; they welcome the help. There is no substitute for parental supervision, but parents cannot be everywhere. They expect governments to help provide a protective environment.

The government was helping until they took away the funding from the Net Alert project. If parents welcomed the help, why is nobody but the free speech lobby upset that PC filters were ditched? One of those filters currently works fine on my computer and circumvention is easily preventable by anyone willing to take half an hour to set it up properly.

The internet is a fabulous resource for everyone, including our young people, but it has the potential to cause great harm if reasonable safeguards are not put in place. The real story here is not the dreadful repercussions of having internet filtering, but the dreadful repercussions of not having it.

The repercussions of not having ISP level filtering include:

• More money for law enforcement
• More money to subsidise optional ISP offered filtering schemes
• More money to subsidise and develop PC based filtering options
• Australia maintains a hope of having a competitive digital economy in the future
• We do not have in place the infrastructure required to instantly quell freedom of speech by future governments
• We do not have an ISP level choke point that can be exploited by internet hack groups.

The ‘dreadful repercussions’ you mention are easily solvable by technologies that do not pose such a threat to freedom of speech. Keep in mind, Jim, some Christian doctrine runs afoul of anti-villifycation laws in many states. The irony is that if a Christian website was blocked for vilifying homosexuals, I would be one of the first people to defend your right to free speech.