Conroy invokes Russian mob, human error and Moore's Law to support net filter

Stan Beer
Monday, 30 March 2009 02:36

Opinion and Analysis

What do the Russian mob, human error and Moore's Law have in common? They were all invoked in the space of 30 minutes to support Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy's drive to impose a mandatory Internet filter at the ISP level on the Australian public.

During a long awaited question and answer session with a selection of panelists and a live studio audience on an ABC TV program, Senator tried his best to explain why Internet censorship via an ISP filtering scheme is desirable.

According to Senator Conroy, false positives, such as dentists and dog breeders having their sites blacklisted by regulator the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) have nothing to do with the proposed Internet filter, He is of course quite right about that.

As the Senator pointed out, the blacklisting of those sites occurred under existing laws that have been in place for nearly a decade.

In the case of the dentist, Senator Conroy said, the Russian mob had infiltrated and attached porn to the site. In another case, an official within ACMA had made an error.

However, the question was not satisfactorily answered as to why these lists need to be secret. There was also no discussion as to the recourse available to the innocent affected parties.

Having established that pernicious websites are already being banned under existing laws and that the Australian public, including publishers, is not entitled to know what they are, the good Senator went on to explain why he thought his much maligned filter trial is a good idea.

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