Australian Mandatory Internet Censorship
If you are not Australian, don’t use the Internet or are living under a rock, you may not be aware that the Australian Federal Government has plans to implement mandatory Internet censorship, ostensibly to block child pornography. Needless to say, I believe this to be a terrible idea for a number of reasons which I spelled out in a letter I sent to my local Member of Parliment, Kelvin Thompson:
Dear Mr. Thompson,
I am writing to express my concern at the government’s proposals for mandatory Internet censorship. As an Internet security professional of 10 years experience, I know that the proposed scheme cannot fulfil its stated goals but has the potential to do a great amount of harm in the process. The technology required to perform this filtering simply does not exist - the incomplete solutions that do exist will degrade Internet speeds, will fail to block some child pornography, will misclassify harmless pages as child pornography, will make the Internet less reliable and will cost an exorbitant amount of money.
Furthermore, it would be possible to trivially circumvent any system that has a hope of being implemented in Australia. The price of building a circumvention-proof censorship system would be breaking many legitimate uses of the Internet that individuals and businesses rely upon daily. Even the so-called “Great Firewall of China” does not go that far. People seeking paedophillic content will therefore be able to find it, despite the mandatory filtering.
Any filtering approach is doomed to be incomplete. Therefore, as a parent, I would not be able to rely on such a system to keep paedophillic material from my child (nor would I). As a crutch to absolve parents of their supervisory responsibilities, the proposed system fails here too.
Finally, as someone who cares about our fragile civil liberties, I am deeply concerned that such a system would rapidly grow in scope beyond its original remit of blocking purely illegal material. Already there are calls to block legal material that some senators simply find objectionable. In the future, these calls and the political temptation to yield to them will only grow stronger. It does not take great leaps of cynicism to see how such a system could be abused once it is in place.
Hopefully I have made a convincing argument against mandatory Internet censorship. If you are interested in further discussion on any of the technical issues relating to this subject then I am happy to assist. Thank you again for your time.
Kind regards,
Damien Miller
If you feel the same way, I suggest that you email your local member to inform them of your concerns as soon as possible.