It's come to light, via an ISP insider, that even if the Government honours its promise to make the Clean Feed opt-out there will still be a second level of censorship mandated for all Australians.
We haven't heard much from the Government involving the phrase "opt out" for a while, so this is indeed pretty worrying. It confirms a long-held suspicion about the voluntary nature of the Clean Feed - it would be too tempting for the Government to keep everyone inside their censorship corral. It seems they are giving in to this temptation.
To be fair, under some circumstances it would be possible for "Blacklist 2" (the illegal material) to be administered with less of the performance hit than Blacklist 1 (not child-friendly). This would be true if Blacklist 2 is a true blacklist of URLs, and not a set of filtering criteria, which, as has become plain, is the plan for the Clean Feed as a whole.
However, it seems unlikely that the ISPs are going to want to maintain two separate systems. From a cost point of view, it makes perfect sense to use the mandated filtering software for both blacklists. It makes even more sense cost-wise to simply refuse to honour opt-out requests, notwithstanding any customer rebellion. This is bad news, because the performance degradation that the Goverment's own trial found was 20-30% under the most optimal circumstances. Unless things change, this is a vision of the future for every Internet user in Australia.
The problem in all of this is a lack of technical expertise and direction by the Government. Mostly, we have had assertions that filtering can be done without slowing the Internet down, but these don't seem to be backed by any credible implementation details. If the Government intends to simply legislate and let the ISPs sort out the technical issues, all manor of chaos will ensue. In any case, the Australian broadband user is not going to come out a winner.
It's no exaggeration to say that this model involves more technical interference in the Internet infrastructure than what is attempted in Iran, one of the most repressive and regressive censorship regimes in the world. That should give anyone some pause - if the Iranian morality police think real-time content filtering is too onerous technically, where does this leave our ISPs, who have their hands full already trying to roll out new services?
Thursday, October 2, 2008
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3 comments:
AARGGGH!!!!
I have posted my email to the minister, and the OCR'd letter of response I received today on Mactalk here: http://forums.mactalk.com.au/20/56127-coming-soon-censored-internet-18.html#post673811
I want to start out by saying how glad I am to see a campaign taking form here. Absolutely right, the momentum is gathering.
But I have to say, as an experienced Activist and political organiser, the current alotted protests will not work in favour of the Campaign.
When you organise a protest, it really needs to be built up over a longer period of time. These protests set for this Saturday wont harm the campaign at all, but they wont be benefiting it, as their size will not be substantial enough - with such short notice - to be able to create attention of substance.
More so, the point of a demonstration should always be to raise awareness and to draw people into the cause. With little numbers this becomes extraordinarily difficult.
So in my opinion it would be better to organise another date for the protest. Or at the very least, start a campaign of awareness building up to the next protest.
You'll be guaranteed a greater presence if you build for it over the span of a month or two.
Also, in Brisbane at the same time as the Internet Censorship protest there are Aboriginal Rights in defense of Lex Wotton protests. These will be going for about 2 hours, and will be substantially bigger than the presence for Internet Censorship - thereby it will overshadow the Brisbane protest.
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