Interview With Media Contact For Senator the Hon Stephen Conroy Regarding Australian Internet Filter
Australian Internet Filter – Interview With Media Contact Tim Marshall For Senator the Hon Stephen Conroy.
Expression of Interest announced as an upcoming proposal announced for live testing to occur amongst Australian ISP’s.
Transcription care of Sacky on Whirlpool:
Marshall: There’s been a lot of… how would you describe it? Pretty speculative coverage in the last couple of weeks
Interviewer: Yeh, and it’s coming to light as of late, err especially this week, I think Computer World Australia started, well they put out, basically they’ve been in talks, well there’s been… you know, news thats just come to light, I know Crikey started attacking at it, everyone seems to be attacking, attacking but yeh there’s no like, free information that I can get out of it that is confirmed.
Marshall: Nah it’s all very specky (speculative) and it all rose sort of at the end of last month when a… I think he was a technician from one of the ISP’s wrote something.
Interviewer: Yeh I think Internode.
Marshall: Yeh, I think he wrote something speculative on the whirlpool site, and it’s all sort of risen from there. You might have picked up that it is a reasonably emotive issue, and you know there’s a few lobby groups in the sector who are pretty keen to put there extreme view out there without perhaps having too much interest in the facts. But look it’s been pretty specky at the moment and there isn’t a lot of information out there, but what I can say is that we have been consulting closely with the industry, the ISP’s, throughout the year, and we are very close to releasing an expressions of interest for the industry to take part in a field pilot of filtering technology, and that document will contain quite a bit of information about what we are, what we’re looking to get out of that pilot and the processes we want to go through to ensure we are making policy based on the best available evidence.
Interviewer: So will there be another media release soon detailing, because I know tests were done not so long ago in Tasmania in February in 2008.
Marshall: Yeh, look I’ll explain about those tests, ACMA who’s the communications regulator probably for the (?), ran some tests, now there needs to be clarification on those tests they were designed by the previous government so they weren’t necessarily testing things that we may have tested if we were designing the parameters of that research. They were also tests really to check on the progress of the technology so we said we welcomed the results but they were really but more…
Interviewer: It was kind of irrelevant I suppose.
Marshall: Yeh, it was more simple than a lot of people made out in that it was quite obvious that… There were some similar tests in 2005, and as you would imagine with technology, over that three year period technology had improved. On what they were evaluated against and over a three year period, yes, we can confirm that this showed these technologies had improved. Now as I said they didn’t really test for quite a few things that we would be looking to do, as you know we’re looking now to do a field pilot with the ISP’s.
Interviewer: So would that be still in a test phase where people could opt in?
Marshall: No, well look, how do you mean opt in?
Interviewer: Well if your going to be doing a test phase will that be, you’ll be liaising with for example a couple of ISP’s that will test it.
Marshall: Yeh, look it’ll be, we’re going to cast an expression of interest, we’re going to cast a wide net for as many ISP’s as possible to take part in the trial, and as I said we’ve been in consultation with the ISP industry for months now, and have had largely a very positive interaction, with them. And so we’d expect a number of ISP’s to take part in that trial, and the document that we’re releasing shortly will detail how that will all take place.
Interviewer: And so the ISP’s that will be taking it on will they distribute such a test to all there user base?
Marshall: Look I’m not sure of the details of the EOI at the moment but that will all be made clear at the time. It’ll be a live field pilot.
Interviewer: So when can we expect a media release, sometime in the near future?
Marshall: Yeh, sometime in the near future.
Just listened to your interview Ben, very interesting to get some recent news on the subject. I’ll be very interested to read the upcoming information from Senator Stephen Conroy.
Speculative coverage.. get your damn facts straight and get them out. [The Government]
Your ideas for a filtering system is too extreme, too in-the-dark, too ridiculous and far to totalitarian for anyone to take this seriously. Unfortunatly you seem to think that this is a great leap forward in australian broadband, where in fact you’re simply pushing it backwards.
He never denies what so called “extreme” groups have been claiming, he only makes it clear he doesn’t like that they have the audacity to say it, which is hardly surprising since his office openly hates freedom of speech.
Ben, next time you might consider interviewing rather than encouraging Marshall to meander through his ideas and misinformation unabated.
@Elomis
I would hardly call it encouragement.
I like to let everyone have their say.
I would like to know as much information as you would, and as I have said to others regarding the interview, drawing blood from a stone is quite hard with Mr Marshall, so you gotta’ talk their not so competent language.
Let the Government “meander”, who cares, it only makes them look more douchier’.
Regards,
Ben Grubb
‘banning’ whatever content cannot currently legaly viewed in Australia is fine in my opinion. People should be held account to the laws of this country.
However, the fact is, that ISP based filtering is SO easy to circumvent.
I strongly believe that even spending the amount of money the current and former government has spent on this so far is a CRIME against the people of Australia.
If not someone within the government, then surely someone outisde the government has explained the simple reality that an internet filter ISP side is trivial to circumvent. The goverment continues to hide from this reality (ignore the facts) and waste our money persuing this.
Anyone else would be locked up for stealing 10s of millions of our money. We must call these people to task over such gross negligence.
David, a blacklist filter ISP side is easy to circumvent but not so much a content based filtering system. The irony is while the false positives will inevitably anger a lot of people and deny them legitimate content, those dedicated in obtaining the sort of material intended to be blocked will find a way one way or another. The end result being it is completely ineffectual, costly and causes nothing but interference with law abiding citizens.
Actually, it is worth reading ACMA’s report on the trial. Part of the problem with the entire discussion on this topic from those opposed is that the view that ISP based filtering is easy to circumvent is increasingly flawed. It was true a few years ago, but now increasingly less so. If more people understood exactly what is illegal content and how effective content filters have become in the last 3 years there might be more active concern. By the time you factor in the full range of federal and state protective legislation, including the copyright laws, there is, in Australia, a very wide range of content currently viewed on the internet by users that is, strictly speaking, illegal and could therefore be liegitimately blocked – and that includes substantial copyright infringing content on U-tube.
All speach that is deemed as discrimatory or likely to inflame intollerance against minorities, for example, is strictly speaking illegal depending on your jurisdiction (and there is a very wide definition to these terms), more confusingly is the status of media that has not received a censorship classification in Australia (which means most streaming media) is, in effect, illegal as it has no censorship classification – even if it is otherwise harmless and would be G rated, a further complication is that differing Australian jurisdictions allow differingly censored material.
Certainly, for those wealthy enough to have servers or connections hosted overseas, it is a simple matter to use their off-shore site as a proxy with a tunnel to the proxy (at the cost of some 20-30% of their bandwidth and 2 connection fees), and for others there is the less secure public VPN proxies, but the new fliters intercept HTTPS – raising the concern about the privacy of banking transactions – so that is insufficient in its own right. The simple reality is that for the committed user interested in the type of material with broadbased acceptance of rejection, there are many ways around the filters including a host of peer-to-peer technologies, but for the casual user (read 98% of the population) the filters will be effective.
No – if you oppose this move you must focus on the principles at stake and not on the technology weakness. The issue must be about what the technology is intended to achieve, are those targets acceptable to our society’s values (including our assumption of freedoms of speach and association), and how can it be constrained to only achieve those outcomes and whether the collateral, attendant price to an agreed set of liberties is acceptable?
Further, one must focus on soliciting the support of the unaligned and opposition parties – or no amount of argument will be effective.