Words sometimes do fail me. Previously I have called the person given the task of managing and administering the Australian digital economy a prick, a moron, a dullard and a die-hard right wing Christian mouthpiece. I am at a loss to describe how this person has managed to fall even lower in my opinion of his actions as an elected representative.
He don't care
Despite many, many expert opinions, despite no small public outcry, depite the counter-productive nature of his actions he has stubbornly persisted in making Australia one of the most censored countries in the world.
We are now similar to Iran and China, many of the Emirates, not even the US has a Government imposed firewall.
Yet in the next sitting of our Parliament this man who seems to have some mental defect will introduce legislation forcing Internet Service Providers to filter each and every request for a web-site and only allow a successful connection for ‘approved’ sites. This has been loudly, and often, procalimed by the proponents for the protectio of Australian children from the evils lurking on the internet. What I cannot understand is how he hopes to achieve this noble aim.
Surely he doesn’t think that 12 yr old boys will gather around a PC when their parents aren’t watching and try searching for child pornography – does he ? (can he be that thick?)
Or does he think that paedophiles will get a bit bored of an afternoon and try to link up to a bit of kiddy porn via a search engine.
I somehow suspect that that neither of these two possibilities are in any way likely. Kids don’t like looking at degrading images of other children. Adults would be quite stupid trying to find any places similar to http://www.kiddyporn.ru (this isn’t a kiddy porn site, it’s just an example I made up as an example of a place a paedophile wouldn’t go for sexual satisfaction and an example of the sort of site that the filter will be able to deny access to) using a simple web-search – that would be just as unbelievable.
So if filtering out sites that kids won’t want to access and criminal child-molesters wouldn’t need won’t “protect Australian Kiddies” what good is it ?
None at all.
It will drive pedophilia into places that will be harder to detect and harder for police agencies to gain access to and seek evidence for obtaining a prosecution
But
It does have some advantages for the censors, the legislation makes ‘the list’ secret, the citizenry won’t know what it’s being denied, and this means that they can add or remove any site they feel like without telling anyone. There is supposed to be an independent quango looking after the list of blocked sites, but I don’t beleive that they’re competent, they’re censors, it’s there job to stop people from looking at things that they find offensive. Movies, books magazines, computer games and now they are tasked with looking at the gazillions of web-sites and blocking those sites that are refused classifiacation.
This is where I get a bit confused, do they expect that the body in charge of the site restriction will look at every site that pops up and give it a classification, will they develop some ‘yay or nay’ algorithm to automate the task, will they be relying on hordes of Christians who will be complaining about any site that mentions ‘breasts’ ‘boobs”bosoms’ and ‘butts’ and start putting them on the list until they get complaints from the other spectrum who might like to look at womenfolk’s bare chests and buttocks and some of the bans might be lifted. All male porn will be banned – that goes without saying no more sculpted male bodies with exposed penii – banned, no lesbian porn – all banned. Despite the Minister saying ‘it’s only going to be the illegal stuff that’s going on the banned list’ I don’t believe him, because he always goes on to say that it’s going to be the sites that have been refused classification. I’m going to guess that this piece of shit will be closing down sites that advocate euthanasia for people suffering agonising terminal illnesses, sites discussing abortion, safe drug use, AIDS prevention strategies and the like because this tool is a functionary for the Christian Lobby and they don’t like none of these things.
Consider a person who is not literate in any sense and has almost no anatomical knowledge, they find a lump growing where no lump should be and are a bit embarressed to ask an actual doctor about the thing growing on or near one of their private parts, I’m pretty confident that I can describe most parts of my body without using slang, others might not be and get caught by the trap set for sites that may contain otherwise swollen cocks and balls.
And another thing, it’s going to slow down my internet, the filter will have to consume bandwidth, and that’s bandwidth I’m paying for. I don’t want to pay to protect other people’s kids, I don’t mind helping them protect their own with domestic level filtering but this is something that’s going to slow down everyone’s connection I wonder if I can renegotiate with my provider ? Probably not, if the ISP promises speeds of “up to 20mB/s” and the filter bumps this back to around 10 then they haven’t really broken their end of the bargain, but I’m being shafted by only getting half of what I paid for.
I’d write to the Minister but he is a complete moron and won’t listen to reason I dropped the clown a few notes saying my position was that censorship is always bad, regardless of noble reasons, that it won’t work, the web is designed in such a way that makes this kind of filtering easily by-passed and that he should listen to the many experst who have said that his stated aims and objectives won’t be satisfied by a simple http filter.
I got the same form letter back each time saying that it wasn’t censorship and that it was what the vast majority of the community expected of this Government. Sadly I can no longer support a Government that misleads and obfuscates to such an extent that it covers up their pandering a conservative minority of the popualtion then it’s time to take a few steps to the left and get a few Greens elected to the Federal lower House.