Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The Minister’s statement notes that this funding will allow the AFP Child Protection Operations Team to expand its capacity to detect and investigate online child abuse.
It will allow the AFP to establish a victim identification and support capacity, to aid in the recovery of child abuse victims in Australia and internationally.
Funding will also be provided to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions to handle prosecutions and related activities arising from the increased investigations of online predators flowing from the AFP’s investigations.
The Minister specifically noted that: “The internet offers a wide range of opportunities for all Australians, but for the nation to truly benefit we need to ensure a safe online environment.
“The Rudd Government recognises that there is no silver bullet solution to cyber-safety and is investing $125.8 million in a comprehensive range of measures, including law enforcement, education, content filtering, research, international cooperation and a youth advisory group,” concluded Senator Conroy.
We can only hope, however, that the Australian Government’s plans to filter the Internet en masse at the ISP level does NOT come to pass, lest Australia follow the path of China In filtering whatever it wants to.
Filtering of the Internet should be done at the discretion of families, businesses and government in their own homes, offices and organisations, not imposed on the general population as a whole.
Filtering has also reportedly been shown to be ineffective at stopping child pornographers who use much more secret and difficult to filter mechanisms than simply downloading child porn from publicly available websites.
In this case the technology used wasn’t even secret or difficult, it was simply peer-to-peer software. The AFP successfully infiltrated this network using its own special technology.
So, I too heartily join the Minister in congratulating the AFP and its efforts in shutting down the abhorrent child porn criminals who will now face the full force of the law.
However I would be very disappointed to see a content filter forced on the entire population of Australia using “stopping child porn” as an excuse.
This is especially so given the fact the type of filter the Government proposes has been reported as being ineffectual against hardened child porn criminals for whom an ISP filter is simply no barrier whatsoever.
The proposed filters simply make life difficult for honest people instead of stopping the criminals, and if that’s the case, what’s the point?
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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