Today, Senator Conroy, Australian Minister for Broadband, Communications, and the Digital Economy declared that he would be putting in a law that requires a mandatory Internet censoring filter to be installed at the ISP-level. He also released the study on which he made his decision (the Enex Testlab Internet Service Provider Content Filtering Pilot Report).

However, the results in the study clearly show the filter is unworkable and cannot solve the problem of people accessing illegal and unwanted material online. Disregarding this, Senator Conroy is blithely pressing forward with getting it implemented.

As this fiasco has unfolded this year, I have sat back, signed two petitions, and assumed that when the results of the trials the government were performing on the feasibility of this filter came back, they would see that it is stupid and impossible and would drop the idea.

Now that the results are back in the form of the study report, Conroy is flying in the face of logic and implementing the filter anyway.

So enough is enough. I can't sit on my laurels any more and watch Australia go to hell in a handbasket. I want my voice heard. I decided to write to Senator Conroy and my local Member of Parliament personally, to declare my complete contempt for what they are trying to do. I didn't want to re-use one of the canned letters that various sources provide, since I thought that would diminish the value of the message I am trying to communicate.

Below is my letter to Senator Conroy, which I will mail to him in hard copy. I ask that you do not copy it verbatim and send it as your letter. However, you are more than welcome to use my sources and facts and reword its message as your own letter. In fact, I encourage you to do so. Note that in my letter I referred to a lot of sources and below these are marked with (link) for hyperlinks and (hover) for textual sources (hover over it with the mouse for the description), but in the actual printed letter they are done as footnotes. I wanted to source as much stuff as I could, so it didn't seem like I was just asserting stuff.

Dear Minister,

I was very much disturbed to find today that you have decided to go ahead with your mandatory Internet filtering initiative.

Although you declared that the ISP-based filter system is “100% accurate” (source), a look into the report that you commissioned shows that, in fact, 3% of legitimate websites will be erroneously censored (hover). This seems like a small percentage until you apply it to the total number of sites on the internet (233 million (source)); when you look at it like this, your filter scheme will incorrectly censor 7 million sites.

The same report states that 20% of inappropriate content will be let through the filter unblocked (hover). This shows that it is technically infeasible to censor the internet effectively and completely, which means that no matter what you do, the filter cannot supplant proper parental supervision and therefore the children that you are worried about are still at risk. If the idea is to protect Australian adults from accessing inappropriate materials, the same argument still applies.

Australian households are diverse; many of them do not have young children, so mandating a one-size-fits-all filter will not serve the public well. In addition, I do not believe that it is the Government’s role to parent my children for me, especially considering your approach will not work 100% and I must do what I would have had to do before: supervise my children on the Internet.

Even if families wish to protect their children from unsuitable content (a noble cause indeed), much more cost effective solutions already exist: for example, the Howard Government’s free home computer filtering software. A large argument against this technique is that skilled children can work around the software; however, as the Enex report indicates, this is still possible with the ISP-level filter, rendering it as flawed as home filters, but much more expensive.

If the filter’s purpose is, in fact, to deny access to illegal material that the tiny minority of deviant Australians want to look at (such as child pornography), the report also says that for every single filtering strategy there is a way around it (hover), rendering the filter useless at blocking anyone who genuinely wants to access the illegal material. The money spent on this scheme would be better spent funding the police so they can catch these deviants.

The report also declares that 80% of users surveyed said the filtering “either entirely or generally met their needs”. On the face of it, this may seem like a positive response in favour of the filtering system. However, I submit that this result is likely skewed in favour of filtering, as the survey was only completed by those who opted in to the filtering in the first place. Those who disapprove of the filtering (such as myself) are unlikely to have voluntarily signed themselves up for it and therefore are not represented in this survey.

The opponents of your filtering program are many: ISPs have protested against it (link), child protection groups such as “Save the Children” have cried out against it (link), and many many Australian citizens disagree with it, as is evidenced by the many petitions signed by Australian citizens (link & link), and the storm on Twitter today protesting the filter that occurred after you announced it (link) (remember that Twitter was used to get the message out about the Iranian elections (link), which highlights its importance in sourcing peoples’ opinions).

Your policy towards the transparency of the ACMA blacklist also disturbs me. You have indicated that you will not publicly display the contents of the ACMA blacklist, which is a worrying lack of transparency. In a democracy, the Government governs on behalf of the people and a cornerstone of this is accountability. How can the public hold the Government accountable for the contents of the blacklist if it is not in the public domain? I know you assure us that it will not be misused, but with all due respect, you will not be in Government forever. We need accountability mechanisms, if not for you, then for future Governments.

In conclusion, I strongly believe that your proposed ISP-based filter system is functionally ineffective, unwanted and a cost inefficient solution to the problem of inappropriate content on the Internet. The fact is that if it is used to protect children (or adults), it will not, since it is only 80% accurate and cannot replace parental supervision, which is 100% accurate. Also, if it is used to stop deviant adults accessing illegal material, it will not, since it can be worked around. The only way to protect children fully is through parental supervision (perhaps augmented by optional local computer filtering software), and the only way to stop deviants is to fund the police so they are able to do so.

I ask you, as you are an Australian leader who leads on my behalf, to please take my arguments into consideration and reassess your ISP-level filtering scheme.

Yours sincerely,
Daniel Chambers

I reworded it slightly for the version I will send to my local MP, Anna Burke, but that version is essentially the same.

I hope you agree with the points I have put across in my letter. I strongly encourage you to write a letter to your own MP and to Senator Conroy and let them know that you disapprove of the filtering scheme. At the very least, use a canned letter and send that, but I think what you say would be given more weight if you wrote your own.

Remember, what is decided next year when Conroy's law goes into Parliament will be binding. If it gets through, you will be censored. This is not a bad dream, and it will not go away if you ignore it quietly and trust others to get your message across for you. I will leave you with this very appropriate quote:

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"
-- Edmund Burke