Today I received Senator Conroy's reply to my letter that I wrote to him, in which I decried the mandatory Internet filter that Conroy wants to install at an ISP-level for all of Australia. In short, the letter was patronisingly and almost offensively generic. I realise that sending out "standard words" to letters is general policy, but that doesn't mean I agree with it. These politicians are supposed to be representing us; it's their job to address the concerns of the people they represent. And my concerns were anything but addressed.

Unsurprisingly, considering how far this farce has got already, Conroy effectively ignored the arguments, concerns and alternatives I highlighted in my letter and spewed his standard line of misleading half-truths and misrepresentations back at me. As I have discussed before, I consider half-truths a form of lying, so this makes Conroy's letter particularly distasteful.

You can read Conroy's reply letter by downloading the PDF I made of it. Note that I have left my scribbles on the pages, where I highlighted various inaccuracies, misrepresentations and misleading facts that he asserted as I read it.

Of course, I can't let this issue lie. The Internet is a massive part of my life and I can't stand by and watch Australians' access to it be so damaged by Conroy's folly. So I wrote a reply to Conroy, in which I debunk his letter and again present the facts. This is what I wrote:

Dear Minister,

RE: Your response letter titled “Cyber-safety and internet service provider filtering”

I received your reply to my letter in which I highlighted the serious issue I have with your campaign to mandatorily censor and filter the Australian Internet and was extremely disappointed. Your letter was obviously a generic response and failed to satisfactorily address most of the issues that I highlighted.

In your letter, you again assert that this filter is for the protection of children; however you ignore the fact that there is plenty of material (legally rated X18+) that the filter will not remove and therefore children will be exposed to inappropriate material anyway. You note that you will encourage ISPs to provide optional filtering of this material to families, but this just highlights the inconsistency of the ISP-level filter being mandatory, since the optional filter would need to be enabled for it to even start to serve its purpose.

You fail to justify why this filter is needed mandatorily for 100% of Australian adults. There is absolutely no need to make this filter mandatory, if the idea is to protect those adults that would be offended by the inadvertent exposure to RC material; these people would be able to simply opt in to an optional filter if they felt the need. My experience, and the experience of my family, is that one does not just easily and inadvertently “run into” inappropriate material on the Internet, thereby making this filter more of a liability than a benefit. This is emphasised by the fact that those who wish to circumvent the filter and see inappropriate material can do so easily.

You assert that the blocking of Refused Content (RC) material is a good thing, and in many cases, most notably child pornography, this is true. However, the RC rating covers many areas that are morally and legally grey. One should note that an issue that is morally and legally grey does not mean that it is necessarily unacceptable behaviour. For instance, 50 years ago homosexuality was regarded as morally grey, but now is acceptable behaviour. An example topic of a modern morally and legally grey area that the RC rating would mandatorily block is euthanasia, which incidentally, is legal in the Netherlands (link). If Australians are blocked from accessing this sort of material, how are we as a nation supposed to educate ourselves about the issues? You cannot do that for us, as in a democracy you only represent us; you do not dictate how we should think.

You again misrepresent the results of the Enex Testlab report by claiming that the URL filtering technology is 100% accurate. This is, at best, a half-truth. You notably fail to consider the 5% of pages that report says will be blocked incorrectly and the 20% of pages that should be blocked that will be let through. Not only is your misrepresentation twisting the truth, but it also serves to lull those Australians less informed than I into thinking that your filter is a panacea. You assert that you have “always said that filtering is not a silver bullet”, but yet you say that it is 100% accurate.

You also fail to address how it is acceptable that, because of the use of a blacklist, entire websites may be taken offline for all Australians mistakenly. You cannot assert that mistakes cannot happen, as we all know that mistakes can and do happen. Case in point, a country that you assert “enjoys” filtering: the United Kingdom. In 2008, the UK was blocked from accessing the website Wikipedia (a key Internet resource) because it was mistakenly added to their blocklists (link). This is evidence that such a filter will harm our access to valid websites, and this is far too high a price to pay in light of the existence other, less damaging, solutions to child protection on the Internet.

As a trained IT professional, I was insulted by your patronising and misleading metaphor that dismissed the valid 5-10% performance penalties that Australians will mandatorily pay if you implement the filter: “the impact on performance would be less than one seventieth of the blink of an eye”. Your use of this metaphor indicates that you do not understand that at the time scales that computers operate, 1/70 of an eye blink is an incredibly long time. Although this time period may not be grossly evident to Australians using websites, many new technologies are starting to use the web and the Internet as a medium for their operation (for example, web services) and these products operate at a computer time-scale, not a human time-scale, and their operations would be negatively affected by this.

In addition, in the IT industry, performance is an important factor in deciding what technologies to adopt; something that is 10% faster will be used over something that is not. By effectively wiping 10% off Australia’s Internet speeds in one broad stroke for questionable gains, you make us less competitive in the IT market than the rest of the world that does not implement such draconian mandatory filtering initiatives. Australia is already an expensive place to run Internet services (compared to countries like the USA), and this makes us only more unattractive as a place to foster and run Internet technologies.

The idea behind the filter, the protection of children, is an admirable goal; however, the filter is an extremely ineffective and potentially damaging way of addressing this issue. My previous suggestion, the voluntary installation of filter software on home computers, addresses the problem in a way that solves the problem as effectively as your filter, but without the censorship, performance and mandatory enforcement issues. You may argue that technically competent children may circumvent the home computer filter; however, the same is true of your ISP-level filter.

Another, less optimal solution, is to have ISP-level filtering, but to make it optional for those who wish to have it. However, this is less optimal than the home computer filter solution since it would be much more expensive to implement an ISP-level filter than to offer a free home computer filter. The Howard Government did just this, although they should have been more effective about educating families as to its existence and usage.

I hope this makes it clearer as to the fatal flaws in your mandatory ISP-level filter scheme and presents you with some viable alternative solutions. I would prefer to see my tax dollars spent more effectively and in a way that improves Australia for Australians, not weakens it.

Yours sincerely,

Daniel Chambers

Of course, Conroy is almost religious in his support of the filter, meaning that he will likely ignore this letter as blindly as he ignored my previous one. I think this quote fairly accurately describes Conroy at this point:

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
--James Baldwin

So, in addition to sending this letter to him, I will print a copy of my previous letter, Conroy's reply, and this letter and send it to Tony Smith, the Shadow Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy along with a brief cover letter explaining my displeasure. Credit goes to burntsugar on Twitter for this idea. This is the cover letter:

Dear Sir,

I am writing to you to inform you of my extreme displeasure with the Labor party’s attempts to mandatorily censor and filter the Australian internet at an ISP-level. I have sent two letters to Senator Conroy and one to my local Member of Parliament (Anna Burke of Chisholm) expressing my views and suggesting viable alternatives. I have attached my letters to Senator Conroy and his reply to my first letter so that you are able to understand my concerns.

I am disappointed to see how little the Liberal party has argued against Conroy’s ineffective filter scheme. I hope that by informing you of my concerns, which are replicated by almost every person that I have discussed this issue with, you will assign a higher priority to fighting against this absurd waste of taxpayers’ dollars by voting against the introduction of this legislation in Parliament. Certainly, this issue will be a key point for me when deciding whom to vote for at the next election.

Yours sincerely,

Daniel Chambers

Hopefully, this will help kick the Liberals into gear when it comes to fighting Conroy's folly in Parliament.

As you can see, the fight to preserve the Australian Internet continues unabated. In this war, your silence is taken as acceptance of the filter, so please, if you haven't yet written to your local Member of Parliament, Senator Conroy and Tony Smith and told them that you find this censorship scheme abhorrent, take the time to do so. Your few hours now will help to save you much grief in the future. The only way to make our voices heard by the politicians is for us all to shout.

Also, spread the word about the filter around your social circles. I've been surprised at the number of people I've talked to that had no idea that this was even going on. The more people that know about this, the harder it will be for the politicians to slip this under the radar. So, keeping this in mind, and in the same fashion as my last blog on this issue, I will leave you with a pertinent quote:

I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth.
--Molly Ivins

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

Its been a while since the last blog as I am ridiculously busy with university work. Anyway, just to keep the raving masses at bay, I'll chuck in something that I found very funny and very, well, right.

Here's the story: The Inquirer published a story that took a jab at Dubya and the Americans. They got this reply from an angry redneck reader:

The folks in Europe should be damn happy that the U.S. is willing to protect your asses from the many rogue nations who can reach your country with missiles. When the time comes to prove our mettle - and it will, the U.S. will stand and fight to protect the world as we have done for centuries, unlike the rest of the western nations who pander to political agendas.

A European reader (I assume he's British) replies:

I wonder idly, just which are those "rogue nations" that "can reach your country with missiles"? Most of the "rogue nations" denounced by the US administration are conspicuous by their lack of missiles. The "Axis of Evil" - from memory, Iran, Libya, and North Korea - don't have a single ICBM between them. Nor, AFAIK, a single functioning nuclear "device". On the other hand Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and France have nuclear weapons and missiles. Which of them is a "rogue nation" in the eyes of Americans? Oh, and which is the only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons on another country's civilians?

I wonder, if push came to shove and someone decided to turn these isles of ours into smoking ruins, if the Americans would really lift a finger to stop them? Especially if that involved risking any of their own tender pink skin.

They certainly didn't lift a finger to help us fight Hitler and Mussolini, until those blokes declared war on them... two years, three months, and a few days after the real war got under way. They looked on calmly (and safely) through Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the evacuation of Greece and Crete, and the invasion of the USSR.

I wonder how many Americans nowadays know that:

1. The USA remained neutral for the first 27 months of the great war against Fascism.

2. The USA did not enter the war until the Japanese sank its fleet at Pearl Harbor, and Hitler personally declared war on it. After those events, they were at war whether they liked it or not.

3. Britain paid in full for everything the USA sent to support the war effort - even the retired WW1 destroyers that the US Navy didn't think were good enough to send its own sailors to sea in. Actually, we finished paying either last year or this year, depending on which government department you believe.

It was interesting to hear Randy tell us how the USA has protected the world "for centuries". Hmmm, that would be all two and a quarter centuries, since it came into existence. In the 20th century, the USA protected about 25 nations - for instance by killing 3 million people in South-East Asia, and bombing more countries than the Luftwaffe did in 1939-45. It also protected the Philippines, where its forces killed only about a quarter of a million people while liberating them from the Spanish (who had actually left some time before).

How about the 19th century? There was the protection of the Native Americans, which reduced their numbers by over 99 percent and caused them generously to hand over all their land to the USA. There was the protection of Texas, California, and what are now several other states of the USA, which were forcibly stolen from Mexico against the wishes of their Mexican inhabitants. Then there was the invasion of Mexico itself, which led General Grant to say: "The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times".

All this was admirably summed up by H. L. Mencken (himself an American):

"All [of the Americans’] foreign wars have been fought with foes either too weak to resist them or too heavily engaged elsewhere to make more than a half-hearted attempt. The combats with Mexico and Spain were not wars; they were simply lynchings".

Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35261