theducks | Dear Kevin07

What the fuck are you thinking?

Dear Prime Minister,

I write to you with regards to the plans of your Minister Stephen Conroy to attempt to force a mandatory “clean feed” of Internet access in Australia. As someone who works as a networking specialist and who has been an IT Security Manager for a Group-of-Eight University and a witness for the ACMA, I am concerned that your minister speaks to cross purposes, and proposes this plan without an understanding of the technologies involved. I am also disappointed that your party didn’t raise this issue prominently during the last election campaign.

In an article by the ABC, your minister is first quoted as saying that this plan is to stop access to illegal material, that which would be considered RC (Refused Classification) under Australian law, and then says this plan is to protect children online. These two are very different levels of filtering. However in neither case is the scale or impact of the endeavour taken into serious consideration.

In the article from the ABC, Minister Conroy then goes on to say that there aren’t problems with the filtering in place in “Scandinavian countries” and the United Kingdom. However, what is being proposed is not the same as in place in The United Kingdom, and as the other Scandinavian country is not specifically mentioned, I am unable to comment on authoritatively, but the method of filtering required to provide an ISP level “clean feed” for children is one only in place in China and some Middle Eastern Countries. The level the “clean feed” requires is far beyond the level of filtering even in place in Singapore.

Your Minister’s comments comparing those who disagree with this concept as supporters of child pornography is additionally quite unprofessional. If this scheme was to just block RC material, there would still be technological issues, but how far would this all saving filter to provide a "clean feed" for children go? The answer is, as far as your government wants. Blocking access to sites that encourage invalid voting, blocking sites that contain hate speech (yet I can still read Hitler's Mein Kampf in a library if I want), all of these would be fair game for a government run filter.

Your Minister is further quoted as saying this will not degrade the quality of Internet access in Australia, but this is a provably false statement. In engineering the Internet, just as designing a road network, every extra connection (intersection) add delays and thus decreases quality. In forcing interception, filtering and decision making, delays are added, and the service degraded. Managing and monitoring this interception and filtering capacity will increase costs to ISPs, and combined with government restrictions on Internet use, will not do anything to help Australia’s rank of 12th in the 20 OECD of Internet access quality .

The current method of stopping children accessing inappropriate material online relies on filters on the child’s computer. These filters analyse the content of material accessed on the Internet, and based on keywords and site information, restrict or allow access. This is a relatively computationally intensive process, and one impossible to cost-effectively do at the ISP level, a position taken quite correctly by the previous government . With the resources of a government acting as sole internet service provider, it is obviously possible, but this is not the situation in Australia and I doubt any government in our nation would consider this.

While it is true that media sensations have been made of the ability to get around filters installed on computers, it is important to remember that even ISP level filters will be able to be circumvented by sufficiently talented children and young adults, through the use of technologies such as anonymous relay services in other countries, of which lists can easily be found .

Importantly, no filter is 100% effective. With the size of the Internet and the speed of its growth, most commercial filters are estimated to only be 75-95% effective. One acceptable to implement for an entire country would always be on the lower end of that effectiveness range. As an Internet user since 1993, I feel quite confident in saying that the Internet is not a safe place for children to be left alone, even with filters in place. Parents shouldn’t be lulled into a false sense of safety by any type of filtering. Parents should keep computers with Internet access in public areas of the house, not bedrooms and talk to their children about what they do online.

I urge your government to abandon this misconceived program before ISPs are forced to waste time and money on it, and instead continue the previous government’s provision of filters for home PCs, along with continuing the cyber-safety promotions already in place.