Australian Government Trying To Gag Internet Filter Critics  

The SMH reports that Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is trying to censor critics of his internet censorship plans, noting the Australian regime will be more intrusive than Iran's - Filtering out the fury: how government tried to gag web censor critics.

The Federal Government is attempting to silence critics of its controversial plan to censor the internet, which experts say will break the internet while doing little to stop people from accessing illegal material such as child pornography.

Internet providers and the government's own tests have found that presently available filters are not capable of adequately distinguishing between legal and illegal content and can degrade internet speeds by up to 86 per cent.

Documents obtained by us show the office of the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, tried to bully ISP staff into suppressing their criticisms of the plan.

Senator Conroy has since last year's election victory remained tight-lipped on the specifics of his $44.2 million policy but, grilled by a Senate Estimates committee this week, he said the Government was looking at forcing ISPs to implement a two-tiered filtering system.

The first tier, which internet users would not be able to opt out of, would block all "illegal material". Senator Conroy has previously said Australians would be able to opt out of any filters to obtain "uncensored access to the internet".

The second tier, which is optional, would filter out content deemed inappropriate for children, such as pornography.

But neither filter tier will be capable of censoring content obtained over peer-to-peer file sharing networks, which account for an estimated 60 per cent of internet traffic.

Senator Conroy said Britain, Sweden, Canada and New Zealand had all implemented similar filtering systems. However, in all cases, participation by ISPs was optional and the filtering was limited in scope to predominantly child pornography.

Colin Jacobs, chair of the online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia said: "I'm not exaggerating when I say that this model involves more technical interference in the internet infrastructure than what is attempted in Iran, one of the most repressive and regressive censorship regimes in the world."

Critics of the ISP-level filtering plan say software filters installed by the user on their PC, which are already provided by the government for free at netalert.gov.au, are more than adequate.

Mark Newton, an engineer at Internode, has heavily criticised the Government and its filtering policy on the Whirlpool broadband community forum, going as far as saying it would enable child abuse.

He said the plan would inevitably result in significant false positives and degrade internet speeds tremendously. Those views were subsequently widely reported by technology media and blogs.