Conroy’s Curtain or The Great Aussie Firewall

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
“Who watches the watchmen?”
- Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347

The Rudd Government’s plans to begin compulsory content control for Australian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) this year (with the stated aim of preventing the spread of child pornography) have been met with shock and disbelief by technical experts, FOI lawyers, and civil libertarians alike.
On 10 November last year Senator Conroy released an Expression of Interest seeking participation of ISPs and mobile telephone providers in a live pilot of the forethcoming mandatory system to be run early this year.
According to the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s (ACMA) last report, about half the sites on the blacklist fell under the heading “RC – Child – Depiction.” The rest were X-rated and other legal material, as well as nudity, violence, crime and sexual fantasy.
Until now ISPs have been able to ignore the (ACMA) blacklist of web pages.
The reaction from ISP’s and IT professionals has been negative. Critics of the scheme say the filters will slow internet delivery speeds, block access to legitimate sites and be pointless because the same material will be able to be found somewhere else.
Telstra has refused to take place in the pilot. “Telstra is not in a position to participate in the Government’s Internet filtering trial, primarily due to customer management issues,” a Telstra spokesperson said.
iiNet manager Michael Malone stated he has enrolled to prove “how stupid it is.”
iiNet’s website states “The government has said ‘The pilot will specifically test filtering against the ACMA black list of prohibited internet content, which is mostly child pornography, as well as filtering of other unwanted content’. iiNet believes ‘unwanted content’ can be interpreted to mean anything the government of the day wants. This is absolutely unacceptable. We have no objection to appropriate legal process, but will not accept that an anonymous government official will make a call on the basis of his or her own judgment.”
Colin Seeger of Electronic Frontiers Australia, an online freedoms and rights advocacy group, said “Senator Conroy has consistently referred to stamping out child pornography when defending this scheme to the public and to the Parliament. The plan is being represented as a ‘cyber-safety’ measure for young people, protecting them from pornography, violence and terrorism. Unfortunately We don’t know the full extent of it because the contents of the ACMA blacklist are not available due to special changes of the FOI act. It seems safe to assume that the Government could expand its blacklist and use the filters to block material they object to, such as negative political speech.”