The Department for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy have finally announced which ISPs will be graced with the privilege to take part in the censorship trial. The resulting list is nothing short of hilarious.

The chosen few are Primus Telecommunications, Tech 2U, Webshield, OMNIconnect, Netforce and Highway 1. Of these, Tech 2U is a completely nondescript ISP, Webshield already offers only filtered connections, OMNIconnect and Highway 1 are both targeted at businesses, and Netforce — wait, Netforce is an ISP? I can only find this page concerning Netforce’s ISP operation, and they too appear to be a business ISP. That leaves iPrimus, which already offers voluntary content filtering, as the only notable ISP involved for home users. Optus and iiNet, two of the largest ISPs in Australia and the largest known to have offered to participate, have been snubbed.

In other words, home users will be represented in this trial by two ISPs with a pro-filtering bias that already have the required content filtering infrastructure in place and one that is so small as to be essentially insignificant. The larger, far more significant ISPs that had offered to participate were excluded, probably because they have expressed concerns about the plan. I have little doubt that this trial will find ISP-level Internet censorship to be a resounding success, given that the DBCDE have cherry-picked the most biased and obscure ISPs possible. An evidence-based approach? Rubbish.

Perhaps the most hope-inspiring development in the Internet censorship debate of late is the complete and utter failure of the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy to effectively implement their plans. The targeted start date of Senator Conroy’s much-touted trial — unrealistic though it may have been — has come and gone without the start of any such trial, and there is still no word from the DBCDE about a more feasible timeline. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that even iiNet, one of the largest ISPs known to have offered to take part in the trial, has only been responded to with “deafening silence”.

Of course, while it’s amusing that they’re proving completely incapable of advancing their Internet censorhip plan, it’s disturbing to remember that this same department is in charge of overseeing the rollout of the the National Broadband Network. One has to wonder, if they can’t coordinate a trial with ISPs, can they really handle a major nation-wide communications infrastructure upgrade?

Senator Conroy’s beloved Internet censorship regime has taken a new turn with a post on Whirlpool by Mark Newton of Internode: there will no longer be any opt-out at all. According to Mr Newton,

The Government’s plan is for there to be two blacklists, one for “unsuitable for children,” and another one for “unsuitable for adults.”

The much-touted “opt-out” would merely involve switching from blacklist number 1 to blacklist number 2.

If this is the case, then there is no longer even any pretense of choice and the Australian Government will be deciding what is and is not ‘suitable’ for us to see on the Internet. Of course, this bears absolutely no resemblance to Internet censorship in China and is entirely for our own good, unlike theirs.

It is also rather telling about the transparency of our government that we have to rely on second-hand information to gain any insight into their plans. This all bodes wonderfully for our liberty.

In the latest instalment of the moral crusade led by Senator Stephen Conroy and the Labor Government, the ACMA released their report entitled Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Content Filtering, which was subsequently hailed an astounding success and a victory for the safety of children everywhere. Stepping out of PR land, despite what Senator Conroy would have us believe, the report indicates that the choice of filters would, essentially, be a choice between one with minimal performance hit but abysmal detection rates, and one with better detection rates but significant performance loss. Worse yet, the report itself has been described as being ‘riddled with technical errors’, making numerous false claims and failing to effectively measure and analyse the performance impact of the trialled filters.

So, on the grounds of this disputable report, the Government has cleared the latest hurdle in their quest to censor the Internet and ensure the repression of free speech for Australians. Of course, anyone that disagrees with their aims must be a paedophile and child molester. Meanwhile, the mainstream media in Australia has been outraged by the Internet censorship in China, but seems to be paying no attention to its rise in their own backyard.

Enough with all the ridiculous pretense. The children are already safe; our liberties, however, are in grave danger.

Freedom and censorship are two opposing goals which cannot coexist; freedom is the absence of restrictions, while censorship is such a restriction. In such a light, the continued perseverance of the Australian Government in their attempts to censor the internet is disturbing at least, and an assault on our freedom at worst. First came the Howard government’s multi-million-dollar client-side filter, an ineffective piece of trash and a laughable waste of money. More recently, the passing of the Communications Legislation Amendment (Content Services) Act 2007 and the ensuing development and release of the Restricted Access Systems Declaration 2007 by the ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority). Finally, the latest announcement by Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy concerning the introduction of mandatory ISP-side filtering.

The client-side filter posed little problem outside of being a ridiculously wasteful expenditure of of government resources. It was, by its very nature, entirely opt-in and voluntary, and therefore of no threat to the freedom of our society. However, the other two developments are significantly more worrisome. The government’s Act and the ACMA’s Declaration essentially require all content on the internet and ‘mobile phone networks’ which has an ‘Australian connection’ and is ‘classified as R18+ or MA15+’ or ‘has not been classified, but if it were to be classified, there is a substantial likelihood that the content would be classified as MA15+ or R18+’ to be subjected to regulation. In the case of MA15+ content, non-commercial content is exempt and commercial content will basically require the user to register and declare they are over 15 before being able to access the content, which is little more than an annoyance. Slightly more troubling is ‘R18+ content’; it applies to all content regardless of whether it is commercial in nature, and will require a proof of identity and age. That may not seem particularly problematic at first, but when one considers that that this applies to content which has not been rated, and that the cost of verifying an ID is significant, the potential for abuse rises. If the content provider is unable to provide an adequate ‘access-control system’, e.g. due to cost, there is a possibility that some content, regardless of whether it is artistic, scientific, political or otherwise, may not be published out of fear that it might be considered R18+. Similarly, existing content may be taken down because it is threatened that it could perhaps be seen as R18+ content. Evidently, such scenarios could potentially be exploited to impose censorship on the internet, and although it provides a compelling argument against the new regulations, it does not inherently make them censorship. The announcement by Senator Stephen Conroy, however, is a clear statement of intent to censor the internet.

Senator Conroy announced that the government will require ISPs to provide ISP-side filtering of ‘pornography and inappropriate material’, which will be opt-out, not opt-in. He justifies this because he wants to ‘protect children’ from ‘pornography and violent websites’. He then makes an amazingly convoluted leap of logic, stating: “If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree.” Keeping people from viewing child pornography is rather different from his justification that the filtering is necessary to restrict the access of children to pornography and violence, and could very well be the first sign that this filtering system, already starting as ‘opt-out’, could very well completely stop being ‘optional’ at some point. This censorship, this assault to our freedom, simply because the government supposedly wants to impose Elizabethan morals on children, despite the fact that there has been no conclusive scientific study showing that exposure to nudity and violence harms a child’s physical or mental development in any way? We, as a society, must not accept this.

Well, I decided to start a blog. Now, I have no intentions of using it as a public diary to tell the world and no-one about my life, but I do intend to use this as a place to write and rant about things which I believe are important. As for when I’ll actually start writing, we’ll see…