lightning over tatura, originally uploaded by mattmc.

I found these images on Flickr, they were uploaded by MattMc on the 2nd of January 2010.

By letting policymakers know just what we think of the "clean feed" Internet filter, we can bring about a policy change. You can help by contacting your representatives and spreading the word about this campaign.

Sign the petition.

Although a petition signature is no substitute for personal contact, every bit helps. Sign the petition here.

Contact Senator Conroy.

Contacting the Minister will let him know that his constituents, the Australian public, are not on board with his impractical plan.

Call the Minister.

There’s nothing like a personal phone call to get the message across. Call the minister’s office on (03) 9650 1188 and let them know your objections.

Write to the Minister.

A personalised letter to the Minister sends a powerful message: We don’t like the policy, and we care. Letters can be sent to the Ministerial office:

Senator Stephen Conroy
Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
Level 4, 4 Treasury Place
Melbourne Vic 3002

If you’re not sure what to say, you might wish to use the following as a template:

Dear Minister,

As an Australian and an internet user, I have serious concerns about your mandatory Internet filtering initiative.

Given the importance your Government has attached to modernising Australia’s broadband network, pursuing a policy that can only slow down and increase the costs of home internet access seems misguided at best. Australian households are diverse, and most do not have young children, so mandating a one-size-fits-all clean feed approach will not serve the public well. I don’t think it is the Government’s role to decide what’s appropriate for me or my children, and neither do most Australians.

Given the amount of Internet content available, the Government will never be able to classify it all and filters will always result in an unacceptable level of over-blocking. I feel that the time and money could be spent in better ways both to protect children and improve Australia’s digital infrastructure. Australian parents need better education about the risks their children face online. Trying to rid the Internet of adult content is futile, and can only distract from that mission.

Sincerely,

Internet User

City, State

Email the Minister.

Although not as effective as a letter or call, every bit helps. Email Senator Conroy at: minister@dbcde.gov.au.

Contact your local representative.

Your local Member of Parliament is your representative and wants to hear about your concerns. Let your member know that you are unhappy with this policy.

Not sure who to contact? Find your local member’s contact information.

Contact your ISP.

Your Internet Service Provider is probably just as worried about this policy as you are, but letting them know your concerns will help in their own efforts.

Not sure how to contact your ISP? This list may help.

What is the Government’s plan?

Although the final details of the filtering plans have been kept under wraps, the Minister is on record as being firmly committed to a mandatory clean-feed internet to Australian homes, schools and public computers. A trial of filtering software by ACMA has already been performed, with a "live" field pilot to follow later this year. We must act fast before millions of dollars are squandered on this technically impractical and democratically unworkable solution in search of a problem.

What do we know so far?

• Filtering will be mandatory in all homes and schools across the country.¹
• The clean feed will censor material that is "harmful and inappropriate" for children.²
• The filter will require a massive expansion of the ACMA’s blacklist of prohibited content.³
• The Government wants to use dynamic filters of questionable accuracy that slow the internet down by an average of 30%.⁴
• The filtering will target legal as well as illegal material.⁵
• $44m has been budgeted for the implementation of this scheme so far.⁶
• The clean-feed for children will be opt-out, but a second filter will be mandatory for all Internet users.⁷
• A live pilot deployment is going ahead in the near future.

What we don’t know is just as important.

• What age level is the country’s Internet to be made appropriate for? 15? 10? 5 years old?
• Who decides what material is "appropriate" for Australians to see?
• How are lists of "illegal" material compiled?
• Who will maintain the blacklist of prohibited sites?
• How can sites mistakenly added to the list be removed?

All of us want to see children protected from content that could be disturbing or harmful. The clean-feed filter is not a good way to go about this, and could actually reduce the safety of children online.

What can I do to help?

There are technical issues.

The clean-feed, if attempted, will be a technical disaster. The Internet does not work in a manner that would let a filter be effective, and the World Wide Web contains far more content than could ever be effectively rated by a Government organisation. The host of technical hurdles include:

• Like asking Australia Post to filter out objectionable letters, a filter would require ISPs to examine all web traffic, causing enormous expense and technical headaches.
• A filter will slow Internet access down by up to 80% according to a Government report.⁴
• Even the most accurate software the Government has tested would incorrectly block 10,000 sites in every million.⁴
• The ACMA would be overwhelmed with the task of maintaining a blacklist. Millions of web sites, with the list changing on a daily basis, would need to be monitored by Australian bureaucrats – an impossible task.
• Only illegal material published on web sites could be targeted, completely missing other methods of distribution such as BitTorrent.
• Any determined user – including children – could bypass the filter quickly using an anonymizer service, open proxy, or VPN connection.
• The clean feed would be less customisable and effective than a PC-based filter.

In short, as the best experts in the country unanimously agree, Conroy’s plan does not make sense technically.⁸

What can I do to help?

There are free-speech concerns.

Although the initiative is intended and marketed as a tool to help protect children from the dangers of the Internet, this paternalistic scheme raises some troubling issues that affect all Australians. As a source of daily information, the Internet increases in importance every day. Do we really want the Government of the day deciding what Australian adults can and can’t see? Do we want Australia to join a censorship club in which Burma, China and North Korea are the founding members?

• The list of prohibited sites will probably be secret, so it will be hard to know what content the Government has effectively banned.
• Filtering will be compulsory in all homes, even where there are no children.
• It is unknown whether there will be any way to have content removed from the prohibited list.
• How far will the list go, now and in future? Will it filter out material on sexual health, drug use, terrorism… even breastfeeding? Euthanasia and anorexia have been touted by Government MPs as topics worthy of filtering.⁹

What can I do to help?

The Clean Feed is bad policy.

In short, even if it worked the filter would be terrible policy. By censoring the entire country’s Internet access down to the level of a child of indeterminate age, it robs Australian adults of ability to make their own decisions about what content they view.

• Most Australians don’t want the filter.Support for this overly broad policy is virtually non-existent, even from child-protection organisations. A recent survey shows that 51.5% of Australian net user strongly oppose the plan, while only 2.9% strongly support it.¹⁰
• One size doesn’t fit all. A single filter list can’t deliver results that are appropriate for all parents, teens and children, with no way to customise the filter for your household.
• The protection for children is minor at best, an illusion at worst. The clean-feed does nothing to protect children from real threats like cyber-bullying, online sexual predators, viruses, or the theft of personal information. It may provide a false sense of security to parents, reducing effective monitoring of their children’s online activities.
• The money is better spent elsewhere. The filter will cost tens of millions of dollars to attempt. Yet the Government’s own studies admit education is more effective than filtering in protecting children, and that "content risks" are less dangerous than other risks.¹¹
• No other democracy has a scheme comparable to the clean-feed. Comparable systems in Europe only filter a handful of illegal sites, and then only to prevent accidental access. ¹²

Further Reading

Websites

• Electronic Frontiers Australia
• SomebodyThinkOfTheChildren
• Libertus.net
• Defending Scoundrels
• Broadbanned revolution
• ACMA
• DBCDE
• NetAlert

In the News

• No opt-out of filtered internet
• Conroy announces mandatory internet filters to protect children (ABC)
• Australia’s plans to filter Internet under fire (The Age)
• Filtering out the fury: how government tried to gag web censor critics
• Net Filters "required" for all Australians (Ars Technica)

Analysis of the policy

• EFA analysis of mandatory filtering
• Libertus.net policy analysis

Further documents

• Labor’s Plan for Cyber-Safety
• Developments in Internet Filtering Technologies and Other Measures for Promoting Online Safety

What can I do to help?

• ¹ See Conroy announces mandatory internet filters to protect children, also Labor’s Plan for Cyber-Safety
• ² See above.
• ³ See Labor’s Plan for Cyber-Safety: "…the Current ACMA blacklist under the Howard Government is inadequate. It does not contain enough sites to protect our children from harmful and inappropriate content… Labor’s ISP policy will prevent Australian children from from accessing any content that has been identified as prohibited by ACMA…"
• ⁴ Some analysis of the filtering trial here, see the report itself for more detail.
• ⁵ As above, "harmful and inappropriate". Also, from this Labor article: "What category of material will be banned under Labor’s plan? Labor will require ISPs to filter out R, RC and X rated material as part of a clean feed for home internet connections."
• ⁶Some info on the budget here
• ⁷The mandatory black-list – see Computerworld or Conroy’s own statements here
• ⁸For instance, some comments by Internet network engineer Mark Newton can be found here.
• ⁹Labor MP calls for banning of pro-ana web sites: here or here. Some discussion of euthanasia here.
• ⁵ Developments in Internet Filtering Technologies and Other Measures for Promoting Online Safety p. 48: "‘level of performance degradation… [ranging] from 18% through to 78%’." Also see Education the Best Filter for Young Australians on the Internet "Findings from recent NetAlert research into the use of filters in the broadband environment confirms that accessing the Internet through a content filter at the Internet Service Provider (ISP) level leads to a significant reduction in network performance."
• ¹⁰ Whirlpool Australian Broadband Survey for 2007
• ¹¹ See above report, also Education ‘as effective as internet filtering’ or Education the Best Filter for Young Australians on the Internet, see also Developments in Internet Filtering Technologies and Other Measures for Promoting Online Safety for more discussion of Internet risks
• ¹² For a description of BT’s system, see this Register article. See also ISP "Voluntary" / Mandatory Filtering

What can I do to help?

DOWNLOAD TRACK 

‘Watch Me Disappear’ is the title track from the follow up to the bands 2006 breakthrough, Moo, You Bloody Choir. Which of course spawned the all-encompassing single ‘One Crowded Hour’. Recorded in New Zealand with US producer Joe Chiccarelli (The Shins, White Stripes, Beck) and mixed in LA, Watch Me Disappear is set for release October 11.

Springing largely from a driving bassline, the five minute track is uncharacteristically bare for the band. Not to mention positioned amongst their "best set of songs to date". Explains Glenn Richards on the band’s site:

"Funny track, wholly written with bass and drums not unlike a lot of the Dark Satanic Mills EP. Quite distinct from the rest of the album structurally. Thematically a return to the Eden subject previously explored in the Sunset Studies track ‘There is no Such Place’.

However, in place of trembling dilettante, now find shivering buccaneer on last voyage, minus sea legs. Driving on Paradise? Or one way ticket to Narragonia? You decide, (or don’t!)"
- Augie March songwriter Glenn Richards

In the remote town of Paraburdoo in Western Australia, life is tough. The orange dirt gets in your hair, you’re miles away from the nearest town and your streets apparently have walls of tyres blocking the way.

View Larger Map

Or – in a hypothetical place a lot closer to reality – the town is so tough that it gave the Google StreetView car that was photographing its streets a flat tyre. Funnily though, the camera decided to document the experience of getting its tyre replaced, including photographing the workshop that it pulled into for a quick repair job.

While I fully expect the images to be pulled down and some outlets of the media (and privacy groups) jump on this as a gross invasion of privacy into the tyre repairman’s workshop, I say we should go out of our way to congratulate the workman for helping a StreetView driver in need.

So if you ever happen to be driving through the small town of Paraburdoo in WA, make sure you swing by to get your tyres checked – let’s use this as a chance to grow a man’s business in a small, outback Australian town.

Losing his best friend in a freak boating accident was bad enough.

But Google’s Street View has made a bad situation worse for Bill, from Victoria.

Bill – not his real name – had been drowning his sorrows over the weekend after the Friday funeral of his friend and felt worse for wear when a taxi dropped him off at his mother’s home early on Monday February 4.

Feeling ill, he lay on the grass, and fell asleep.

The next thing he knew was being woken up by police in the morning.

He wasn’t aware that Google’s camera-equipped car had driven by earlier and snapped his picture.

Last week when Google launched its Street View tool for Google Maps, that picture was on display for anyone with an internet connection to see. It has since been taken down after it was flagged by users.

"I’m not too happy about it – I mean, I shouldn’t have been there in the state that I was in but I wasn’t really thinking there would be someone driving past with a video camera on the roof filming me either," Bill, who spends around 10 months of the year fishing off Darwin, said via satellite phone.

The issue highlights some of the concerns voiced by privacy activists, who say that while Street View is a great tool for armchair explorers, people are not given the choice of whether they or their houses appear on the site.

A form inside the "Street View Help" page allows people to report images they see as inappropriate or invasive, but the Australian Privacy Foundation said the form is not visible enough and Google was too slow to remove images reported by users.

Street View has already exposed a cheating spouse, uncovered a lying neighbour and snapped a man sleeping on the job.

On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday last week, "street view" was entered into Google’s search engine more times than "olympics", according to Google’s Insight tool.

Despite Google’s commitment to blur faces and number plates, people can still be identified by location and their appearance.

The weekend before Bill was snapped by the Street View cameras, his best mate was killed when his 5.4 metre fibreglass runabout smashed into a compass pylon in waters at Lakes Entrance, Victoria, around 1am.

It was Australia Day weekend and Bill, a 36-year-old skipper who leads a crew of five fishermen in the Northern Territory, had just returned home to Lakes Entrance for a much-needed break.

For five months prior to the accident, the pair had been planning a motorbike trip around Tasmania.

With that plan in tatters, after the funeral Bill and some friends decided to drown their sorrows all weekend and "come Monday morning, I got out of the taxi and rolled over on the grass and went to sleep on the footpath".

"What do you do when you lose a mate like that, you know?," he said.

"I know what he would have done if I left – he would’ve partied too, that’s what I would’ve wanted him to do so that’s what we did."

Bill said he understood that he could not expect complete privacy in a public street but did not expect his embarrassing moment to be broadcast over the internet.

He was fearful that those living in his area would log on to Street View to check out their neighbourhood and stumble across the image of him passed out on the footpath.

His mother, asked for her reaction upon hearing of the Street View images, said: "I was absolutely horrified – I was horrified that anybody had even heard about it."

A letter writer in last weekend’s Herald, Janice Creenaune, was similarly mortified after logging on to Street View.

Both her parents were pictured outside their house but her dad had passed away a month ago.

"While recognising that Google-time is never real-time, the image renews the raw loss," she wrote.

But another letter writer, Elizabeth Maher, had a more positive experience: "While others may have legitimate complaints about Google publishing pictures of their house, I was delighted to views ours, with me pictured hard at work in the garden, complete with broom and bucket, thereby dispelling any uncertainty as to who is the gardener in the family."

The Privacy Commissioner, Karen Curtis, has said her office continued to monitor Street View and would be meeting Google representatives shortly to discuss recent privacy concerns.

Google Australia spokesman Rob Shilkin said Google could not comment on specific images but noted the positive side of Street View, such as the fact that it has already been integrated on property sites like Domain.com.au as a way for home buyers and renters to research suburbs and addresses.

He said the company had taken significant steps to protect the privacy of individuals, including face blurring and tools for people to flag sensitive imagery for removal.

But in Bill’s case, having the imagery taken down promptly would have been difficult without third-party assistance as he does not have internet access on his boat and his mother does not have a computer.

Here is the famous Donkey Courtroom sketch, starring Ed Kavalee, Tony Martin & Richard Marsland. It originally aired on Tony Martin’s “Get This” program on Triple M in 2007.

Scooter from Kevin Perry on Vimeo.