17 December 2009 in Jamie’s View
Net filtering 'plan' is a fraud
In August this year I wrote a punch article about the lunacy of the Rudd Government’s proposed mandatory ISP internet filtering.
At that stage it was a trial but on Tuesday this week Minister Conroy announced his intention to proceed with legislation to enact this mad idea.
This is a policy that is based on a fraud so much so the Minister could barely explain it with a straight face yesterday.
Not that I’m cynical about the Labor media machine but this announcement was dumped out the week before Christmas in the middle of a massive international negotiation on climate change when even the Minister admitted it was ready to go in October. But I digress.
The fraud is that Stephen Conroy and Kevin Rudd want you to believe that you ‘protect’ our kids from the ‘nasties’ of the internet by ‘filtering’ inappropriate websites at the internet service provider level.
The truth is that you can do no such thing. You see the proponents of this ridiculous idea say that those opposed to this want to expose ‘your’ children to the worst of the nasties on the internet. This is an unadulterated lie.
I don’t want my kids (and yes I have two who are nearly at internet using age) watching hard core porn on the internet or for them to be exposed to paedophiles looking to get their rocks off and I will take measures to ensure that they are protected.
But for the government to suggest, which it is, that this will ‘protect’ kids is to provide an assurance they can not deliver.
This will provide false cover to parents, fraudulent reassurance that their children are ‘safe’ from ‘predators’ on the internet. It will not.
There is already a blacklist. There are already tools for parents to instigate protective measures in both the home and through the ISP. As I said in August…
There are a range of home based filters that are either provided or commercially available. They are not fool proof but neither is ISP based filtering.
Home-based filters are by far the best and most effective weapon against internet nasties and the grubs who roam cyberspace preying on children.
Proponents of ISP filtering claim it will make it safer. Rubbish. Indeed the ISP filter systems work by closing down access to web addresses after they have been launched. Some claim that this will be as little as 24 hours after the website is launched. Even in the best case scenario it is going to be the old dog chasing its tail.
The ISP filters fail to address online chat rooms, peer to peer connections and emails.
What we have to ask ourselves here is how much are we sacrificing for additional ‘protections’?
To make this mandatory is to take us down an extremely dangerous road of censorship. Not to put too finer a point on this, if the government is successful in introducing this legislation it will be able to list any site it considers inappropriate.
We have already seen that Kevin Rudd is more than happy to attempt to censor, he even tried to censor Members of Parliament from criticising his government.
There are some of my colleagues and many concerned parents and grandparents who like the idea that we can protect kids on the net. I respect and understand their desire absolutely. But this so-called filter does not do that.
Finally any credibility that Kevin Rudd may have had on his claimed belief in the benefit of fast broadband must now surely be thrown out the back door. This is nothing other than a blatant attempt to buy votes based on mums and dads greatest fears.
This policy is a fraud that will not work and I for one will not support it.