A headline-grabbing election promise to crack down on internet nasties looks to be in trouble as Senate opposition grows.
As the proposed legislation cannot be passed by Labor alone, and the Opposition is against the plan because of its impost on business as well as that niggling little detail of it being technically impossible to actually block pornography files swapped through peer-to-peer networks etc, is the real story that Senator Conroy is being hung out to dry by his party to further another agenda?
Only two of the Senators holding the balance of power are in favour of the plan – Fielding because he wants to block pornography, and Xenophon because he wants to block offshore gambling sites. Predictable, and Xenophon can perhaps be persuaded of how ineffective the filtering will actually be and could conceivably be persuaded withdraw his support.
The Greens are against it because of the civil liberties aspects and the impost on all net users of the slowed speeds that ISP-level filters would inevitably create (plus the false positives), and in particular because of the unanswered technical questions about security for encrypted transactions such as every internet-banking transaction in Australia: how is the security of all our banking details going to be maintained when it’s not just the banks who have access to that data, but every ISP will as well through the filter technology?
The Nat-Libs are against it particularly because of the aforementioned costs to business of slowed networks plus most of the same reasons as the Greens.
All Conroy does in response is bleat about blocking illegal child pornography, which is a noble aim that on its own would be laudable, IF WHAT SENATOR CONROY PROPOSES WOULD ACTUALLY DO THAT. It won’t work, as has been discussed here several times.
The rest of the Labor front bench are not stupid. They must know that the proposed filter won’t actually do what Conroy says it will do. So what’s the real agenda here? I doubt that those accusing the government of a simple wowser agenda are seeing the full picture: what happens when the Senate won’t pass the bill? What are the government’s options then? Dropping Conroy from the front bench in disgrace would be one, but the other is far more interesting. They could send the bill to the Senate again after three months elapse…
Categories: culture wars, Politics, technology, work and family
Hoyden About Town 
Hm. Why would the Fed Govt want a double dissolution?
Perhaps they think they could end up with a Senate composition more to their liking?
Not being a political analyst, I will have a go at answering that question anyway. It is possible that the Govt could take the gamble, given Rudd’s popularity, of trying to get the numbers in the Senate and get rid of Fielding and perhaps Xenophon, or at least turning the tables in Labour’s favour. Plus, giving the Libs another smack in the chops. As to whether it’s a good idea? I have no idea.
K08 might be popular at the mo, but unnecessary elections never are. Goodwill would vanish. DD’s are for hinting darkly at, not actually doing much and on a question of this relative unimportance (as opposed to say, budget bills) the bluff would not work, not to mention giving the Greens a free kick. This filter idea is harebrainded in the extreme, but I can’t believe they’ve entirely lost all their political nouse between last Nov and this one.
Bold prediction: this whole clusterfrack gets shelved before chrissie.
Hope so. I can’t really see them going to a DD over this either, but unless the idea is to have an excuse to drop Conroy after he keeps on making a mockery of himself I can’t see what else could be in the wind.
I think the occam’s razor explanation here is that they just made a an ill-conceived election promise and now have to make a show of going through with it.
Supplementary explanation: Conroy’s a bit of a prat in general and wants a big ticket item to his name. Things are a bit quiet on the cross-media and Telstra front, typically the stoushes the Communications Minister gets allocated, so this is it.
Le mot juste! Prat is exactly the word I was looking for.
Perhaps I’m slow and I’ve missed something, but surely if Conroy needs something big and awesome to his credit as a minister, wouldn’t a high speed broadband connection bloody well be good enough???
Yeah but they’re still taking tenders and whatnot for that so he won’t get his mug on the telly until next year sometime.
A double dissolution would only help more minor parties and independents get into the Senate because it’s easier to reach a 7% quota than a 14% quota, so I doubt that would help Labor at all on this issue (much as I’d love the Greens to have the balance of power).
I’m just still trying to get over the wierdness of preferring the Lib’s position on an issue to Labor’s position.
As things stand it is such a lose-lose for the government that I really don’t see any bill that would effectively legislate for a slower internet ever seeing the senate. Perhaps Conroy is making all of the noise now, before the testing, so that he put his hand on his heart and tell senators Fielding and Xenophon that he really gave it a red hot go but unfortunately there is no filter adequate to the task that won’t totally clog up the tubes. But even if he is in deadly earnest (and has a political death wish to boot) I think that this thing will be crash tackled long before it makes its way into legislation. We could still end up with some kind of opt-out, vastly expensive, totally useless white elephant filter though.
While the other speculations are tempting and fun, I’m not discarding out of hand the possibility that they simply do have a bumbling wowser agenda. All the “binge drinking” alcopops drama, the mess they made of the Henson business – even when they have a core of a point on these sorts of issues, they seem to manage to go about things in entirely the wrong way.
We knew Rudd was a social conservative when we took him, purely because he was less bad than Howard. Now he’s living up to that.
At least this seems to be polling very badly amongst the populace – I see very, very little support out there, Australian Women Online excepted – so a DD would seem, at this point at least, to be a bad idea, no?
This has been my theory. Also that Conroy is a prat.
I would be very surprised if Rudd was going for a double dissolution, especially as it wouldn’t happen in the key “good weather” election period of early November!
Australian Women Online’s stance at first glance seems to be ignoring the techical aspect of the internet design of routing around ‘damage’.
And if I, with little technical knowledge, know about BitTorrent and similar P2P technological ‘fixes’, those who want to get their hands on stuff that AWO find objectionable will know about that sort of thing far more intimately than I do.
I am also of the opinion that because these proposals will drive this material “underground”, it will be that much harder to find and prosecute those who want to see the ‘yucky stuff’.
But then, I have recently discovered just how ignorant most people can be when it comes to how stuff gets on the internet too
*still shaking head in disbelief*
I’m sitting on a fence right now. On the one hand there is so much smut on the net and I can’t see removing it as a bad thing and anyone who wants to keep illegal sites online probably has issues of some kind. On the other hand there’s talk about security issues, how filtering will slow us down and that some ‘good’ sites will also be banned. There’s talk about privacy issues but if you’re not doing anything wrong and by foregoing some privacy others may not get exploited, so be it.
I read the article someone mentioned from the Australian Women Online website. Thanks for the link. It’s actually a good article and I’ll go back and take another look at the site later. They, like me are interested in the live tests. If the technical difficulties are sorted out I’d certainly be leaning a lot more for the filtering.
Don’t bite the messenger but ISP filtering already happens. How do you think their spam filters work and the government is filtering traffic as we speak. To believe otherwise it to be burying your head in the sand. To what extent they filter we don’t know obviously so it’s not to say it hasn’t already slowed us down.
Su I think you’re right and I too “don’t see any bill that would effectively legislate for a slower internet ever seeing the senate” Ultimately I don’t think we have to panic. The Government do not want to muck this up. They’ve spent millions already talking (too much) about the fast Internet. They will fail at the next elections abysmally if they don’t get some of this stuff right in the next couple of years, and Rudd does not want that to happen.
This law will not remove any “smut” from the net. Zero.
Kindly refrain from implying that your interlocutors are child porn fans, or whatever else you’re trying to get at here. That was Conroy’s tactic, it’s a very common tactic for people who have no other substance to their argument, and it is both wrong and insulting.
What are you defining as “illegal”? As has already been said in this discussion*, viewing adult porn, fetish material, euthanasia information, or engaging in online gambling is not illegal. Nor is accessing the other sites that will be blocked by false positives.
Again, we’re all child porn fans here, or do you think that we’re up to some other nefarious activities that we don’t want curtailed? There are very serious privacy _and security_ concerns with this legislation, and they are valid concerns for law-abiding citizens. “The innocent have nothing to fear” is not a valid excuse to erode rights, though again, it’s a commonly used tactic by those in favour of nanny-statism.
Anyone who has been paying attention over the past few years, especially to USAn impositions on human rights, you would know very well that the innocent do have something to fear from inappropriate governmental surveillance and privacy invasion.
I strongly suggest that you get your technical information on this issue from the people linked who have technical expertise and know how computer networks work, not from AWO. There are dozens of them in my Roundup thread. Start with Mark Newton’s letter, perhaps.
My ISP does not filter world wide web traffic. I really don’t care whether yours does; that’s between you and your ISP. What I don’t want is for the government to take away that choice for you or for me.
What traffic is the government filtering?
* ETA: When I say “this discussion”, I don’t mean this particular thread; I mean the ongoing discussion of censorship plans on this blog and on linked sites. Again, my roundup thread is a good place to start.
@ Lea:
As lauredhel has said, I suggest you do some more research from more technically savvy sources. Spam filters work on the frequency of messages originating from a single IP, they don’t need to filter content to do that: if a single IP is sending hundreds of messages a minute it is obviously unsolicited traffic i.e. spam.
Sure, some spam filters exist that use a keyword-based algorithm, and they have to do content filtering for that. Do you have any idea how slow those services are? And they don’t catch images that are sent with innocuous keywords ever.
Content email spam filters can be very effective and the good ones are much better than simple IP or keyword filtering. Some ISPs do offer email filtering as an opt-in service and from what I’ve seen they generally work pretty well.
For email the load is not that great (I run one so I don’t see most of the spam my email account receives), but its a very different matter when it comes to general internet access like the govt is proposing, especially intercepting encrypted (https) traffic.
Chris: even the content filter I have trained for several years to do exactly what I want it to do gets plenty of false positives and false negatives. I scan the Junk folder several times a day to check for missed messages.
Gmail’s off-the-shelf filter does far worse, with a lot of false positives on mailing list mail especially.
A keyword-based content filter imposed by the government on web traffic would be an unmitigated disaster whichever way you slice it. Are you aware of the spectacular failures content-based web filtering has inflicted in the past? Check out the previous posts in this series on Hoyden, Peacefire.org, and read about The Scunthorpe Problem (I’m on one mailing list where we can’t talk about “socialism” or “specialists”, as the words will cause the emails to get blocked.).
Lauredhel – I use spamassassin which has a low enough false positive rate for me that I don’t bother checking the junk folder – its not like email is a reliable transport mechanism anyway 🙂 Without spam filtering I think my email addresses would be unusable . btw one thing which *really* helps reduce spam is if you can enable it is grey listing. You configure your mail server so it when a unique from/to combination is received for the first time it tells the sending email server there is a temporary failure. Real, properly configured email servers retry later, spam software rarely does.
btw am not arguing that the web content filtering proposed is stupid (they’d have to filter images as well which is even harder). Just didn’t want people to have the impression that email spam filtering is pointless – its a very different situation. And just to be clear I’m not advocating compulsory email spam filtering either. All these systems should be opt-in.
Web content filtering belongs on the client not on the network.
I meant to say I think server based compulsory, web content filtering is stupid…..
I use my email provider’s spamassassin for spam tagging, and I fish false positives out of that, too. I have a really low tolerance for false positives, hence using tagging and not blocking!
It’s still useful, of course – much easier to scan a Junk pile for a falsely tagged item than it is to have it sorting in with all my wanted email. Though there are plenty of false negatives in there, too.
Totally agree that it should always be opt-in, of course!