Government porn filter poses greater risks

Family First Senator Steve Fielding. Time to stop the pork barreling and time to start preaching responsible parenting instead of government intervention.

The Federal Governments plan to force all internet service providers (ISPs) to filter online pornography and violent content will see Australian’s access to the internet controlled in the same manner as users in China, Burma, Vietnam, North Korea and Saudi Arabia experience.

In other words, the plan, aimed at protecting children from non-childlike content, will see the rights of all Australian internet users eroded to a level that equals the worst levels of internet censorship in the world.

While internet users not wanting their service filtered will be able to contact their ISP and opt out of the pornography filter feature, the plan has the potential to dramatically impinge peoples ability to use the internet and will give the Australian Government an unprecedented level of internet censorship power.

ISPs are also warning that such a plan to filter internet pornography will see internet access speeds reduced to a crawl.

For an industry that already suffers from considerable criticism from users over high pricing and slow access speeds the compulsory internet pornography filtering and resulting slow down in network speed is sure to see increased dissatisfaction from “clean feed” users forced to subscribe to higher cost service plans to achieve even moderately acceptable internet access speeds.

Online civil libertarians are concerned that the Federal Governments’ online pornography filter places the freedom of the of the internet at stake, while a large question mark hangs over how successful such pornography filtering will be.

Dale Clapperton from the internet user group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said mandatory ISP filtering of internet pornography will not only erode internet freedom but also will not improve online safety for children.

According to Mr Clapperton the internet pornography filter will lull parents into a false sense of security. If parents are concerned at the content their children will be exposed to online they “should not allow their children to use the internet unsupervised,” he said.

Under the plan the Australian Communications and Media Authority will prepare a blacklist of unsuitable sites and all ISPs will be required to block access to these sites on internet services provided to households and schools.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the “clean feed” will prevent users accessing prohibited content. Everything possible has to be done to shield children from violent and pornographic online material.

In reality the dangers posed by the government plan are considerably greater than just censoring internet pornography access and has much wider ramifications.

More importantly, the danger to children doesn’t come from them accessing internet pornography sites and viewing images of people having sex, but rather from online chat rooms – something the Governments pornography filter plan will not and cannot control.

In addition, what at the beginning starts off as a pornography filter to prevent children having access to “unsafe websites”, can easily later be expanded to filter and censor access to other online content according to whatever the government of the day dictates.

For example, access to news and information sites a future government deems unacceptable could be blocked if the government doesn’t like the content.

The internet pornography filtering system could also be expanded to stop content such as movies, music and software from being downloaded.

The software, motion picture distribution and music industries will, I am sure, be quick to rush off to the courts and say if the Government can stop internet pornography from being accessed then ISPs can also stop the illegal downloading of their copyrighted products as well.

In addition, the requirement for users having to apply to have their internet service unfiltered sets a dangerous potential for them to be unfairly labelled as aficionado’s of internet pornography, when in reality many may just be desirous of faster internet speeds.

Internet access and content is something democratic governments should keep their hands off. There is ample software products already available to prevent children accessing unacceptable content such as internet pornography and it is only a matter for parents to bother taking the time to find them out and then have the willingness to purchase and install.

For Macintosh users the parental controls built into Apple’s OSX 10.5 Leopard operating system allows parents to not only limit access to pre-defined sites, but also to restrict email and online chat to a list of pre-approved addresses and accounts. Parents can also limit the times that children can access the internet and the time that they spend online.

The parental controls also keeps a log of all sites visited, websites that have been blocked, applications used and can automatically sends an email to a pre-determined account if the child attempts to exchange email or chat with someone not on the pre-approved list.

While the compulsory ISP pornography filtering might give people like Family First Senator Steve Fielding, who has campaigned heavily for ISP pornography filtering, a nice warm and fuzzy feeling, the move is one that has far greater ramifications than what many people are presently considering.

More importantly, as was seen during the recent pro-democracy protests in Burma, internet filtering does not work. The only way the government there was able to prevent news from getting out was to shut down all international telephone lines.

Today human rights activists in China, Iraq, Vietnam, North Korea and other countries manage to circumvent strict internet censorship policies imposed by their governments to get their messages out to the world.

Having worked in countries with internet filtering systems in place I can say from first-hand experience that it does not work. I have always been able to access whatever content I want, despite whatever internet filters were in place.

The end result of the Australian Government sticking its nose into internet content is that people will do the same as they did before the internet became so popular in the last 10 years and sign up with ISPs in other countries.

This will have the dual effect of not only taking money away from the local ISP market but also tie-up international telephone circuits being used for data transmission instead of being available for voice calls.

In fact, given the charges offered by some private telecommunications companies around the world today many users might find the data transfer speeds faster and the costs on a par with what they pay now, while not having the concerns as to who is looking at what data they are sending or receiving.

Though this last point is somewhat of a moot one, as the Defence Signals Directorate has long been able to monitor every single telephone, telex, facsimile, radio and data transmission coming into and going out of Australia.

As owners of the Australia’s largest, most powerful and fastest supercomputers, capable of processing billions of bits of data every second, nothing is transmitted by any electronic format that the Defence Signals Directorate cannot intercept.

What at first blush sounds like a wonderful idea, is one that is fraught with dangerous possibilities and is a path Australia should not head down in too much or a rush.

Rather than introducing legislation and potentially onerous requirements on ISPs to filter internet pornography, what is really required here is responsible parenting and parents who either take more of an interest in what their children do online, or are responsible enough to inform their children of the potential dangers of internet use.

It’s about time the Australian population took responsibility for itself, instead of continually shirking personal responsibilities and looking to government for solutions.

The good senator Fielding should get off his pork barrel and look for more worthy issues to campaign on,
lest Australia becomes the first country in the world to voluntarily give its government the right to censor the internet.

Internet pornography is not a government problem. It is a problem for those people who don’t want to look at it or who don’t want their children to look at it. In any event, paedophiles don’t troll for victims on pornography sites, they lurk in chat rooms.

In response to posts on the blogsite this story previously resided on the following facts emerged:

Porn only accounts for some 12 per cent of the pages on the internet.

US revenue from internet porn was $US2.84 billion in 2006.

There are an estimated 266 new internet porn sites put on the internet every day.

70 per cent of porn site visits occur during the 9 to 5 working day when children are at school.

To ad some perspective, the number of Chinese web blogers in 2006 went from 17.5 million to 47 million people. If each person writes eight blog pages this will exceed the number of porn web pages that are estimated to exist on the internet (estimated at 372 million porn pages).

All of the responses can be read here: http://jlefevre.bigblog.com.au/post.do?id=186822#currentPostComments

More information and why the compulsory internet pornography filtering by the Australian Government will be infective can be read here: http://www.efa.org.au/censorship/mandatory-isp-blocking/#SS_2

ENDS:
© John Le Fevre, 2008

Censorship; Internet; Internet filtering; Internet porn

AFL slays Australian media

The club channel seven named at the center of the drugs controversy

When Melbourne’s Channel Seven network broke the news last week that players at a Melbourne based AFL club were receiving therapy for illegal drug use and that a leading player from the same club had been investigated for drug trafficking they rapidly became the pariah of the Australian news media.

Not surprisingly, the AFL and the AFL Players’ Association (AFLPA) both strongly condemned the actions of the station, with the AFLPA slapping a ban on the station, and injunctions being sought and granted to prevent the network from revealing the names of the players or further identifying the club.

Rival media organisations and commentators looking to gain favour with the AFL quickly whipped themselves into a frenzy in their attempts to use the most condemning superlatives they could think of to criticise the actions of Dylan Howard who broke the story, as well as the network.

While some journalists supported the network, others were pathetic in the way they bent over backwards to endear themselves to the players and the AFL.

Of particular note is Herald-Sun columnist and ultra conservative puritan Andrew Bolt, who waxed lyrical in his column arguing against the publics right to know and labelling the Channel Seven story as “shabby.”

According to Mr Bolt, Seven’s “duty” lay “in seeing that private medical records stayed private, and in returning them to their owners.”

What an absolutely ridiculous statement for a journalist to make. Perhaps Mr Bolt would prefer to write his news from press release handouts or interviews organised by PR spin-doctors. That’s sure to give the Australian public an unbiased perspective, not.

The broad condemnation of both the story and the reporter behind it only serve to highlight the degree to which the “news” that is dished up to Australians is sanitised and manipulated, and the lack of independence the news media has.

The fact that the story had supposedly been offered to three rival media organisations and they declined to run it only further highlights the sad state of affairs of the Australian news media.

This is compounded by Channel Seven and the Herald-Sun’s decision on Tuesday to abandon the challenge to the late night injunction gained by the AFL and the AFLPA after the story broke.

The comments and actions of Channel Seven’s rivals is also interesting, if not bewildering.

Drug use in the AFL has been an ongoing story for the last three years. Despite broad criticism of its three-strike rule, the AFL and its patronising AFLPA has steadfastly refused to adopt a zero tolerance stance similar to that taken by other Australian sporting codes including the NSW NRL.

According to the AFL and the AFLPA, the Seven network breached the players’ privacy by purchasing documents that had allegedly been found in the street.

This stance by both the AFL and the AFLPA is self serving and nothing more than an attempt to protect those who have broken the law, protect the revenue stream for the forthcoming finals series and to deflect the increasing negative publicity the sport is attracting over players using illegal drugs.

While both the AFL and the AFLPA freely lambasted the network, neither condemned the actions of the players or the club involved.

When the Victorian Health Minister weighed into the matter, also criticising the network, she joined a growing group of people who dodged the primary issue.

Channel Seven is not responsible for protecting the rights or privacy of anyone. Its job is to report on news.

The person who breached the confidentiality of the players and the club are the owners of the clinic administering the treatment. They are the ones with the duty of care to ensure patient records are kept securely.

While Seven identified the club, it didn’t reveal the names of the players. So where is the breach of personal privacy?

It also sought and gained confirmation from the Victorian Police that a leading player from that club had been the subject of a drug investigation earlier this year.

While media organisations in Australia are happy to splash the names of international sporting stars detected of drug abuse across their pages or in their broadcasts, when it comes to the AFL many rapidly back away.

If drug abuse is a problem in any sporting code it ought to be a concern to everyone, not the least being the AFL.

The AFL’s actions in this latest matter have been extraordinary to say the least. Instead of investigating the club and its players, it chose to shoot the messenger.

Perhaps because the revelations by Channel Seven served nothing more but to highlight that the AFL’s much-lauded drug screening program isn’t adequate enough.

Whether Channel Seven paid for the documents or not is also immaterial. The network obtained the accusing documents, verified the information contained in it to the best of its ability and ran the story.

An examination of the online FairfaxDigital Australian rules football blog-site, www.realfooty.com.au, along with several other bulletin boards, shows that many people believe drug use in the AFL is an issue that ought to be brought into the open.

Many of the posts show that football followers of all codes were interested in the story, with many supporting the networks right to broadcast the news. Many also took the view that professional sports-people, who are held up as role models, loose the right to privacy in matters such as drug use.

The most strident and vocal opposition to the Channel Seven story on the www.realfooty.com.au blog-site came from members/supporters of the Hawthorn Football Club. These same people were no-where near as vocal earlier this year when West Coast Eagle Ben Cousins’ drug rehabilitation treatment was front-page news.

The charging of the people who sold the documents to Seven with “theft by finding” is another interesting twist to the story. It would be interesting to find out when the last such charges were laid against anyone.

It will also be interesting to see if any action is taken against the owners of the clinic who failed to keep the records safe and secure in the first place.

One can only wonder if the same actions would have resulted if the medical documents had referred to a politician, a judge, lawyer or school teacher.

Would a ban by school teachers, judges or lawyers on speaking to a specific news organisation have seen so many news commentators falling over themselves in an attempt to condemn the actions of those who broke the story?

Would people then have argued so passionately that what Seven had done was wrong?

One can’t help feeling not.

In the meantime, Australians should feel safe and secure in the knowledge that their daily news diet has been well scrutinised and sanitised so as not to offend.

And if you happen to walk down the street and come across a draft of John Howard’s resignation speech, or a police or medical report with details that your children’s’ school principle is a suspected crack-smoking paedophile, don’t expect any support from the media. Your duty is to protect the privacy of that person and return the documents.

This whole episode has shown that ‘freedom of the press” is just another outdated catch-cry that even many who work in the industry don’t subscribe to anymore.

Big business, professional associations and spin-doctors take note. Prepare your press releases carefully and diligently deliver them to news organisations. The people who select the news Australians read every day welcome them.

And if anything negative should happen to be written about your group or clients, just impose a ban on the news organisation concerned and race off to the Victorian Supreme Court to have your rights to privacy protected and the role of the Australian news media hamstrung further.

ENDS:
© John Le Fevre, 2007