Children's welfare groups slam net filters

Support for the Government's plan to censor the internet has hit rock bottom, with even some children's welfare groups now saying that that the mandatory filters, aimed squarely at protecting kids, are ineffective and a waste of money.

Live trials of the filters, which will block "illegal" content for all Australian internet users and "inappropriate" adult content on an opt-in basis, are slated to begin by Christmas, despite harsh opposition from the Greens, Opposition, the internet industry, consumers and online rights groups.

Holly Doel-Mackaway, adviser with Save the Children, the largest independent children's rights agency in the world, said educating kids and parents was the way to empower young people to be safe internet users.

She said the filter scheme was "fundamentally flawed" because it failed to tackle the problem at the source and would inadvertently block legitimate resources.

Furthermore there was no evidence to suggest that children were stumbling across child pornography when browsing the web. Doel-Mackaway believes the millions of dollars earmarked to implement the filters would be far better spent on teaching children how to use the internet safely and on law enforcement.

"Children are exposed to the abusive behaviours of adults often and we need to be preventing the causes of violence against children in the community, rather than blocking it from people's view," she said.

"The constant change of cyberspace means that a filter is going to be able to be circumvented and it's going to throw up false positives - many innocent websites, maybe even our own, will be blacklisted because we reference a lot of our work that we do with children in fighting commercial sexual exploitation."

Doel-Mackaway noted the claims by the internet industry that the filters would be easily bypassed, would not block content found on peer-to-peer networks and chat rooms and would be in danger of being broadened to include legitimate content such as regular pornography, political views, pro-abortion sites and online gambling.

Laboratory test results released in June by the Australian Communications and Media Authority found available filters frequently let through content that should be blocked, incorrectly block harmless content and slow network speeds by up to 87 per cent.

James McDougall, director of the National Children's and Youth Law Centre, expressed similar views to Save the Children.

He said the mandatory filters simply would not work and children should be able to make decisions for themselves. Concerned parents could easily install PC-based filters on their computers if they desired, or ask their internet providers to switch on voluntary filtering.

"This is called a child protection measure yet the vast majority of all serious child abuse does not occur on the internet, it occurs in the home," said McDougall.

"I take issue with the minister's perspective that children are themselves the danger in a sense that we have to make this decision for them because they are not capable of making it for themselves - I think there's very little evidence to support that and plenty of evidence to show that children are responsible decision makers given the skills and information."

On Thursday, as political activist group GetUp announced its plans for an elaborate anti-filtering campaign, 70 ISP filtering stakeholders converged on the University of NSW to examine the merits of the proposed censorship scheme.

"There seemed to be some consensus that the proposed mandatory filter model would not actually be directed at the real channel of child porn distribution, which is not the blacklist of known web sites, but via various other internet protocols and tools," said David Vale, executive director of UNSW's Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre.

"The idea of doing whatever was possible in stopping the problem at the source, including education of parents, kids, teachers and politicians, and serious law enforcement efforts at detection and prosecution of perpetrators and distributors, was seen as probably as, or more, effective than a filter initially aimed at preventing inadvertent browsing of child porn on the web by young people.

"Another aspect was the potential for the filter, once in place, to become the subject of a repeated bidding war, depending on which minor politicians had balance of power in parliament, or who had the 'moral panic of the day'."

Senator Conroy's spokesman, Tim Marshall, has consistently failed to respond to requests for comment on the issue.

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Activists target Rudd's net censorship plans
The political activists have now set their sights on the Government's plan to censor the internet, which is already facing a major backlash and a lack of political support. GetUp says a petition on its website has attracted over 22,000 signatures; GetUp said it had received more emails urging them to act on this issue than "any other campaign in recent history".

Activists target Rudd's net censorship plans

The political activists who helped free David Hicks and abolish Work Choices have now set their sights on the Government's plan to censor the internet, which is already facing a major backlash and a lack of political support.

GetUp says it plans to run mainstream ads and offline action that will be as elaborate as its free Hicks campaign. In just a day, a petition on its website has attracted over 22,000 signatures; GetUp said it had received more emails urging them to act on this issue than "any other campaign in recent history".

The Greens this week officially announced their opposition to the internet filtering plan, which critics like GetUp fear will slow the internet to a crawl and open the door to censorship of other material such as, political views and pro-abortion sites.

They join a chorus of dissent from internet providers, consumers, engineers, network administrators and online rights activists.

Despite the significant opposition, the Government is pressing ahead with live filtering trials, which it wants to launch by December 24. ISPs, which already offer free filters but on a voluntary basis, are reluctant to take part but fear they have no other way of showing the Government the deep flaws in its mandatory censorship plan.

"We're very, very concerned that there's going to be a unnecessary clamp down on the internet and it has to be watched," Greens leader Bob Brown said Tuesday.

GetUp campaign director Ed Coper said he was certain his organisation's "Save the Net" campaign would be "really big and ongoing".

"It's certainly one of the most ill-thought-out decisions of the Rudd Government so far," he said.

Laboratory test results released in June by the Australian Communications and Media Authority found available filters frequently let through content that should be blocked, incorrectly block harmless content and slow network speeds by up to 87 per cent.

The Government plans to impose a mandatory filter for all internet users that will block sites found on the secret ACMA blacklist and blacklists held by other countries. But only half of ACMA's list is child pornography, while the rest is mainly X-rated porn and sexual fetish material.

A second, optional filtering tier, which will also be tested in the trial, will block content deemed inappropriate for children.

The filters can easily be evaded by those using freely available tools.

Britain, Sweden, Canada, Norway, Denmark and New Zealand have 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.