Conroy, don’t keep the Internet filtering trials secret: Minchin

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 24 December 2008 07:35

IT Industry - Strategy

The raging Australian Internet filtering war keeps on hotting up, with the Shadow Minister for Communications demanding that the Internet filtering trial, already put back to mid-January, must not remain secret – and must have a totally independent audit.

Derided by Whirlpool commenters as “Senator Stephen Conjob” over plans to filter Australia’s Internet feed over opportunistic and unworkable claims that it will eradicate child pornography, Australia’s Minister for Communications, Senator Stephen Conroy, is still under enormous pressure – even on Christmas Eve.

The latest salvo comes from his old adversary, the Shadow Minister for Communications, Senator Nick Minchin, who yesterday scored a win over the Rudd Labor Government by seemingly forcing it to release a report on the “Feasibility Study of ISP Level Content Filtering”.

Senator Conroy released the report on his Department website http://www.dbcde.gov.au, but less than 24 hours later, the report has now been removed from the front page, and looking through the sections on reports and publications, and on broadband and the Internet, I can’t see the report anywhere.

Presumably it’s still up there somewhere, but it appears as though the report was published late afternoon yesterday, and is now gone from easy public view. There’s transparency for you... has the Internet censorship started already?

So, back to Senator Nick Minchin’s latest press statement, which is that “Conroy’s Internet filtering trials must not remain secret.”

Minchin is demanding that “Communications Minister Stephen Conroy must commit to a totally independent audit of his so-called 'live' trials of Internet Service Provider (ISP) level content filtering which have so far been veiled in secrecy, to ensure they have any semblance of credibility, Shadow Communications Minister Senator Nick Minchin said today.”

“This comes after public pressure forced the Minister to yesterday release a damning expert report of ISP-level filtering that he had kept hidden since February.”

Senator’s Minchin’s demands continue on page 2... please read on!