This was written for an assigment for university and was originally published here at the blog I created for the unit.
The current governing political party of Australia, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) is seeking to introduce mandatory ISP level filtering, dubbed “Clean Feed” or the “Great Firewall of Australia” with the stated intent of blocking access to content that has been refused classification, specifically singling out child pornography and abuse material as its target although refused classification content covers far more than this. There would be no opt-out although it had been mentioned early on that there would be.
This filter has a of number issues that make such an attempt to filter en masse the internet use of Australian’s unpractical. These include that it could be easily bypassed using proxies and VPN, and a possible performance penalty that varies with the implementation. The filter would only target web-related content doing nothing to target content that goes over other protocols such as newsgroups and BitTorrent. The blacklist is tiny in comparison to the number of sites that would need to blocked in order to meet the Governments stated target. Perhaps worse, it could possibly create a false sense of security for parents who believe that the filter will protect their children from what has been deemed harmful but due to issues with internet filtering systems, manages to let undesired content through and into the eyes of their children.
With a mandatory filtering scheme, Australia would be following in the footsteps of other countries such as the People’s Republic of China, and Iran. The United Kingdom and select other European countries have also introduced filtering however these are different in the fact that the stated intention is only to block child pornography. This mandatory ISP level filtering would be the first of its kind in a western country. There is fear that this could set a dangerous precedent that could be used to promote internet censorship in other western countries.
The Electronic Frontiers Australia organisation has started the nocleanfeed.com campaign website that seeks to educate Australians and spread the word of the proposed mandatory filtering scheme. Activist organisation GetUP Australia has provided a way for Australians to contact the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. Additionally, there is a planned day of protest happening in March that will hopefully send the message that Australian’s don’t want nor need their internet access to be filtered.
Posted January 19th, 2010 in Internet
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