My first op-ed for CSO, “The Resource for Data Security Executives”, has just been posted. It’s voluntary ISP-level internet filtering, but a different angle from my Crikey piece earlier today.

After nearly four chaotic years, Australia’s internet filtering scheme is finally coming together in a way that makes sense technically and politically, if not necessarily for effective child protection.

The chaos wasn’t all communications minister Senator Stephen Conroy’s fault. The “clean feed” was announced as Labor policy back in March 2006 by then-leader Kim Beazley. ISPs would filter out the nasties hosted overseas, where they couldn’t be hit with a takedown notice from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

But Conroy’s name was on Labor’s Plan for Cyber-safety published just five days out from the federal election in late 2007, and once in government it was Conroy’s job to explain that plan and sell it to voters. Everyone presumably imagined it’d be a protect-the-kiddies no-brainer.

Problem was, neither the plan not Conroy’s explanations were clear…

As I say, it’s my first outing for CSO, but if all goes according to plan there’ll be more. And in case you’re wondering, CSO is a job title. Chief Security Officer.

Over at Crikey I’ve written a summary of what’s happening with Australia’s internet filter.

Australia’s mandatory internet filtering by internet service providers (ISPs) won’t happen for at least two years. But we’re getting filtering anyway. Voluntarily. By ISPs. Next month…

Telstra and Optus are expected to have their filters ready within weeks, although the situation with Primus is unclear…

The Internet Industry Association (IIA) is also about to release a voluntary industry code that would see an estimated 80% to 90% of Australian internet connections filtered by the Interpol blacklist over the next year. Attempts to access domains on the list would be redirected to an Interpol block page.

Overall, I reckon the process that’s now unfolding could well result in the gvernment’s planned mandatory ISP-level filtering disappearing off the table entirely.

As a bonus link, here’s Interpol’s explanation of their “worst-of” blacklist of child exploitation material.

Australia’s mandatory internet filter is at least two years away, but Telstra and Optus are only weeks from implementing their “voluntary” equivalents. Where are we up to with this controversial issue?

That’s what I covered in yesterday’s Patch Monday podcast for ZDNet Australia. And as I explained on the weekend, I’m returning to my habit of doing a blog post here for each episode.

For this internet filtering update, I spoke with Peter Black, who teaches internet and media law at the Queensland University of Technology; network engineer Mark Newton; and Lyle Shelton, chief of staff for the Australian Christian Lobby.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Since this podcast was recorded, we’ve discovered that Primus isn’t so sure about voluntary filtering any more. They were the third ISP to commit to the plan last year. However the Internet Industry Association (IIA) has said most Australian ISPs will filter via the Interpol list this year.

Previous podcast on this issue covered the meaning of the Refused Classification content category, Senator Conroy’s announcement of the strategy in July 2010, and the apparent fact that parents don’t act on their cybersafety fears.

Please let me know what you think. Comments below. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

After Senator Stephen Conroy’s disastrous week last week — the ACMA blacklist of banned Internet content leaked and shown to be rubbish, the Classification Board’s website hacked and his damagingly poor performance on Q&A — what next? And what’s Conroy’s exit strategy?

Last month, Greens Senator Scott Ludlam wondered how we can move beyond criticism of the highly-flawed Internet filtering plan:

We’re all in vociferous agreement about what won’t work. But what will? Can this enormously empowered campaign speak with one cogent voice about what we’re for?

How do we empower parents to make the best choices for their families, and law enforcement agencies to prosecute the creators and distributors of the worst material trafficked over the internet?

Is there a way to adequately prepare children to understand other threats such as cyber-bullying, without asphyxiating the greatest information sharing tool in history?

Can we directly challenge the epidemic of sexualised violence against women and children in this country and place the online tip of the iceberg into its proper context?

All very good questions. And as Warwick Rendell points out, this isn’t just an abstract debate.

In a well-written and well-worth-reading essay, Rendell says we — that is the people tearing apart the stupidity of the Rabbit-Proof Firewall — need to do something constructive.

Even if we manage to stop the Great Australian Child-proof Fence this time, if we don’t find a way to put our knowledge into layman’s terms, draw the non-computer savvy up to meet in the middle, and teach “digital citizenship”, then a solution will be imposed on us.

In summary: The pro-filter lobby are offering a solution to the “problem”. It’s not enough for the anti-censorship campaign to demolish their argument — if we don’t start offering an alternative workable solution as part of our strategy, we will ultimately fail.

So my questions for you today are:

1. What solutions can we offer to the key problems — solutions which are practical economically, technically (if they have a technical aspect) and politically?
2. How can Senator Conroy manoeuvre himself out of his current position politically while still retaining his personal political credibility and that of the Labor Party?
3. How is all this presented to Family First and the others who saw Magic Internet Filtering as he solution to their problems?

We also need to be very clear that we’re addressing three separate problems — problems which get conflated because they’re both about “protecting the children”, but which are really very different in nature.

1. Preventing the production and dissemination of child abuse material such as child pornography.
2. Preventing children accessing information which, in the view of their parents, is inappropriate for their age.
3. Preventing bullying.

What are you suggestions?

I’m in Crikey again today with an 800-word essay about the leaking of a secret Internet censorship blacklist — exactly what I’d predicted only on Wednesday.

The article is free to read, but here’s a flavour:

Dear Government, look, I hate to say we told you so, but… we told you so. On Wednesday. The more you try to hide your controversial Internet blacklist, the bigger you make it, the bigger the incentive for someone to leak it.

For money. For political advantage. For the sheer bloody fun of sticking it to The Man. And, yes, maybe someone might even leak it because they’re one of that tiny number of sick bastards who get off on child pornography…

American bank robber “Slick” Willie Sutton was (probably apocryphally) asked why he robbed banks. “Because that’s where the money is.” ACMA compiles a virtual bank vault of nasty websites and hands the keys to the makers of filter software and from there, it’s planned, every ISP in Australia — including many low-margin businesses which, let’s face it, don’t have the security procedures of an ASIO or an MI5. As yesterday’s leak to whisteblower website Wikileaks proves.

I go on to analyse the leaked list — I judge it “a pretty shit piece of work” — and drop in a few thoughts from Greens Senator Scott Ludlam. Enjoy.

I’ll post my 5-minute interview with Senator Ludlam tomorrow morning.

Since Wallace promotes himself as a representative of good Christian values, I’ll allow that he may just be ignorant rather than a deliberate liar. Ignorance is no sin: it can be cured with knowledge. But he does use the familiar fraudulent propaganda techniques: misrepresenting his opponents; cherry-picking numbers; failing to explore the implications of those numbers; citing the same suspect Australia Institute report; and wrapping it up in the same old “protect the children” cant.

Those of us who’ve been covering this issue for more than a year now are getting sick of responding to the same easily-rebutted debating tricks. But, as I keep saying, politics is a marathon event. So if Jim’s rolling out the same material, we’ll point out the same flaws.

Again.

Wallace starts, as is traditional, by painting a distorted picture of filtering’s critics.

It will be the downfall of the internet, the end of free speech as we know it. It will lull parents into a false sense of security, and it doesn’t even work.

But just as students are taught not to believe everything they read on the internet, so should we not believe everything said about it. Some things are too important to leave to drown in a pool of misinformation, and internet filtering is one of them.

Wallace’s propaganda technique here is the straw man. He mentions some genuine criticisms (the false sense of security and that the filter won’t work), but massively over-states others (the “downfall of the internet” and “end of free speech”). You’ll see this technique used over and over again in politics. Add “drowning in a pool” to imply a flood (i.e. lots) of falsehoods and danger, and you’ve got a powerful emotional frame.

The actual arguments are that filtering may well degrade Internet performance, and that it’s a risk to free speech because the proposal hasn’t been properly defined. That latter point is why even ultra-conservative Senator Cory Bernardi opposes the scheme.

There’s also the point — which Wallace doesn’t even mention — that the filter may not be the most efficient use of the taxpayers’ money. If we’re talking about preventing child abuse, for example, the money would achieve more if it went to the police.

The opponents of the filter are engaged in a constant dialog to inform each other, and link back to well-researched material like Irene Graham’s Libertus.net. The proponents of filtering rarely cite references, except for one: the Australia Institute’s 2003 report Youth and Pornography in Australia: Evidence on the extent of exposure and likely effects [PDF] by Clive Hamilton and Michael Flood. It’s hardly a neutral source. Hamilton has been the key promoter of mandatory Internet filtering — indeed, there seems to be something highly personal happening there — and the arguments he uses are remarkably similar to those Jim Wallace uses today. And Hamilton hired Newspoll to conduct the survey: they’ve got form for push-polling.

There doesn’t seem to be any research from neutral sources to back the claims that “93 per cent of parents of 12- to 17-year-olds” want automatic filtering of the Internet. And even if there were, the fact that people want something to exist doesn’t mean it can exist.

I’d like to live forever, as it happens, and so would plenty of others. But it ain’t going to happen.

There doesn’t seem to be any social research supporting the filter’s proponents’ views which is less than half a decade out of date. That’s an awfully long time if we’re talking about people’s attitudes to the Internet.

Wallace doesn’t like the GetUp! campaign, perhaps because it’s raised about $50,000 and their petition has been signed by 95,000 people. That cuts out the “extremist libertarian” spin: 95,000 people looks pretty goddam mainstream.

The activist group GetUp!, for example, has raised a petition with the alarmist statement that filtering “will slow the internet by up to 87 per cent”, but the claim is based solely on the worst results of the products trialled.

It conveniently omits to advise would-be signatories that the trial results released in mid-2008 showed another of the filter products tested slowed internet performance by less than 2 per cent, and three products slowed it by less than 30 per cent.

GetUp!’s 87% figure might be alarming, but it is from the government’s own Phase 1 trials, the lab test conducted in the first half of 2008. Here’s their report again: Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Internet Content Filters [PDF], and here’s my original discussion.

Wallace himself “conveniently omits to advise” that the filters which “only” degraded performance less than 2% were also those with the most appalling false positive rate. Yes, he’s accusing others of cherry-picking numbers, but does exactly the same himself. I believe that’s called “hypocrisy”.

He also repeats the lie that…

From the outset, it has been clear this system is not going to stop any adult from viewing anything that is legal.

Not true. It’s far from clear. Words like “illegal” and “unwanted” and “inappropriate” and “harmful” have been jumbled together. Again, Irene Graham has documented the shifts in AU Gov’t Mandatory ISP Filtering / Censorship Plan.

As I wrote in November:

[We can] read for ourselves, on page 2, that the tests covered “technology to filter illegal or inappropriate content”, and on page 21 how the test sites included those rated PG, M, MA… Despite Conroy’s repeated assertion, the tests explicitly included perfectly legal material.

As we’ve said many times, even if filtering is limited to the ACMA blacklist, that blacklist contains much more than “illegal” material, as Irene Graham has already explained in Australia’s Internet Censorship System. Adding the undefined term “inappropriate” makes it clear that the plans intend to go beyond the merely illegal.

And, as I wrote on Friday, ACMA has already added perfectly legal political material to the blacklist.

Given all these points, of which Jim Wallace seems to be ignorant, wilfully or otherwise, there is only one conclusion:

Even if the proposed mandatory filter only blocks the ACMA blacklist, that will block material which is legal for adults to view, and that will potentially block political content.

Wallace also falls for a classic trap in numerical analysis — or deliberately hopes that his readers will — when he uses figures like “less than 3 per cent” for the false-positive rate and imagines this is good performance. Again, as I wrote in November:

As Crikey has reported (Tuesday, 9 July 2008, Internet filters a success, if success = failure) [local copy], even the best filter has a false-positive rate of 3% under ideal lab conditions. That might not sound much, but Mark Newton (the network engineer who Conroy’s office tried to bully last week) reckons that for a medium-sized ISP that’s 3000 incorrect blocks every second. Another maths-heavy analysis says that every time that filter blocks something there’s an 80% chance it was wrong.

If Jim Wallace isn’t addressing this analysis, it’s either because he’s choosing to (in which case he’s failing to address one of the key issues) or he’s unaware of it (in which case he’s uninformed and not competent to be taking part in this debate).

Two paragraphs near the end of Wallace’s piece illustrate another technique. Quoting the Hamilton & Flood report, he says:

“Eighty-four per cent of boys and 60 per cent of girls say they have been exposed accidentally to sex sites on the internet and two in five boys deliberately use the internet to see sexually explicit material, with 4 to 5 per cent doing so frequently …

“There are special concerns regarding violent and extreme material on the internet including depictions of non-consenting sexual acts such as rape and bestiality.”

The propaganda trick here is that the figures he quotes refer to “sexually explicit material”, but by tacking on the “rape and bestiality” comment he creates a false connection — that the figures refer to this substantially more disturbing but much rarer material.

Curiously enough, rape and bestiality are precisely the two examples Hamilton used in his ABC News opinion piece in November. Who’s coordinating whose talking points here?

Wallace also fails to mention that while the earlier figures were about the parents of 12- to 17-year-olds, the figures he’s here using relate to 16- to 17-year-olds only. Wallace is either careless with his writing, or he’s deliberately misleading us into thinking that children as young as 12 are “frequently” seeing this material.

Will Jim Wallace address the actual arguments being put forward? Or will he continue to repeat these same disingenuous talking points?

$2.8 million, which the Howard government allocated to expand the Australian Federal Police’s Online Child Sexual Exploitation Team (OCSET), was instead used by Rudd to help create Conroy’s $44.5 million Rabbit-Proof Firewall.

That’s a shame, because OCSET’s entire annual budget in 2007 was only $7.5 million. Without that money, OCSET simply doesn’t have the staff to investigate all of the suspected pedophiles it already knows about. Some cases get palmed off to the states — that is, to police who don’t have the specialist training and experience of OCSET. The rest…?

“Only half are likely to be investigated by child protection police,” reported the Daily Telegraph. “The rest will be farmed out to local commands or dropped”.

What a great way to “protect the children”, eh? Take money from the police, where it’d do some good, and burn it on a poorly-defined Internet filtering project. Anyone who knows anything about IT will tell you the same thing: without clearly-defined goals up front, you will go over budget, over schedule and in all likelihood, your project will never be completed.

[This article is based on material which first appeared in my subscriber-only Crikey piece Another nail in the coffin of Conroy's Rabbit-Proof Firewall on 15 January 2008 2009, and would not have been possible without Irene Graham's superb research at Libertus.net. Another part of it, with some fascinating discussion in the comments, is over here.]

Third Crikey story this week! Today I returned to that evergreen favourite, the idiocy of the Rudd government’s plans to install ISP-level filters on the Internet.

Alas, the story is currently behind Crikey‘s paywall, but it begins:

Is there anyone who reckons trying to filter bad stuff out of the Internet is the right way to go? Or even possible? Apart, that is, from sex-obsessed panic merchants and moral crusaders, politicians with Senate numbers to count on stubby little fingers, shiny-suited salesmen hawking boxes marked “Rooly-Trooly-Safe Internet Filter”, or cud-munching Luddites who just don’t understand anything about the Internet generally?

Those with a clue are getting sick of pointing out the same policy and technical flaws. But Minister for Denying the Bleeding Obvious Senator Stephen Conroy relentlessly continues his warped version of the trials program set up by Coalition predecessor Helen Coonan.

Filters won’t work because no shut up doesn’t matter let’s try again they don’t work no let’s try again they don’t work let’s try again don’t work try try try try … FFS!

The Rudd government says it’s all about evidence-based policy. Maybe this new report from the US Internet Safety Technical Task Force will help. This panel — a who’s who of Internet heavies — was set up by 49 state Attorneys General to tackle the problem of children being solicited for sex online. It discovered there’s actually no significant problem at all.

You can read the whole thing, if you’re a subscriber or take up the free trial offer, at Another nail in the coffin of Conroy’s Rabbit-Proof Firewall.

My writing must be starting to score some hits, because there’s been two comments today attacking the man and not the ball.

Someone calling themselves Verity Pravda, who blogs at The Interweb Warrior, commented:

Simple question. Does this raving lunatic think there should be no classification system on any media? Or that there should not be a Refused Classification category at all? If so I look forward to his campaign on that change.

I heartily agree that the policy is being handled atrociously. But Stil continually misrepresents what is proposed. Nothing about the filter is about the threat to children from being entrapped on line. The “protection of children” the Minister talks about is the protection of children from taking every action he can to stem trade in the images.

It is the functional equivalent of protecting elephants from poaching by banning the trade in ivory. It doesn’t mean you don’t also have programs to catch poachers. But you sure as heck don’t put up a special entrance way at your ports saying “if you have potentially illegal items please enter here”.

And at this point all the Minister is asking is that ISPs try blocking access to the websites and tell him how it works — that looks like real evidence based policy rather than just one person saying “it doesn’t work”. By the way, saying something more than once doesn’t make it true.

And exactly why is Crikey providing his rants. Since when has Crikey been a paragon of a complete libertarian view on content. Goodness me only yesterday Stephen Mayne seemed to be promoting ASIC’s investigation of those Packer stories and — horror — quite calm about the idea of the journalist being forced to reveal their sources. Somehow I thought that was on the taboo list.

Actually, I’ve corrected the typing mistakes. I’ve got this thing about publishing badly-typed material.

My response:

@Verity Pravda: As I’ve previously answered on your own blog… No, I do not think there should be “no classification system on any media”. I’ll even answer the question again, since you seem to be having trouble with my answer: No, I do not think there should be “no classification system on any media”.

It’s not “just one person saying ‘it doesn’t work’” but in fact the government’s own trials from the first half of 2008 (which we’ve linked to many times before), and the detailed commentary of experienced network engineers such as Mark Newton.

As I’ve also pointed out in your blog, many of the assertions you keep making about current government policy have been thoroughly debunked at Libertus.net (and elsewhere). But you keep repeating your incorrect assertions. As you yourself say, “saying something more than once doesn’t make it true”.

The opponents of ISP-level internet filters can back up their arguments with facts, references to official documentation and solid logic. You seem to keep avoiding addressing those argument and resorting to the straw-man “you want to flood the world with illegal material”, like Conroy does… why? Could it be because your own arguments are actually weak, and the factual basis non-existent?

My own argument is that the limited money we have available should be spent precisely where it will do the most good to “protect the children”: policing and education.

My experience with Crikey is that they publish a whole range of reportage, opinion and commentary. People who imagine there’s a “party line” can’t be reading very carefully.

I will admit to one problem with my article. Written quickly and with a word limit, it didn’t adequately separate out the threads of the government’s Cyber-Safety program.

On the other hand, Senator Conroy has continually jumbled up all the pieces too. And that’s deliberate. It’s a classic troll tactic. Keep changing the focus of the subject. Keep making personal attacks. Keep claiming things which are factually incorrect. Your opponents get lost trying to correct the myriad of factual inconsistencies — while the “ordinary person”, baffled, can only respond emotionally to the “we must protect the children” plea. Dirty, but effective.

• #mumbai: three days as a Twitter journalist | News.com.au: The story of 21yo Aditya Sengupta, a Mumbai student who became part of the Twitter clearing house for news in the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks.
• Adler, The Perverse Law of Child Pornography | The Columbia Law Review: “In our present culture of child abuse, is child pornography law the solution or the problem? My answer is that it is both. This reading pictures law and culture as unwitting partners. Both keep the sexualized child before us. Children and sex become inextricably linked, all while we proclaim the child’s innocence. The sexuality prohibited becomes the sexuality produced.” A challenging read.
• Prospect reads: first rate, brave Economist article on Thailand at First Drafts | The Prospect magazine blog: This post reveals that The Economist‘s feature article on Thailand was written by Peter Collins, their southeast Asia chief, as his final act before moving back to London.
• Thailand bans Economist | Straits Times: Needless to say, this week’s edition of The Economist is banned in Thailand, tho not “officially”. “This is one of those ‘cultural harmony’ bans, where the book distributors and stores take it on themselves not to distribute,” says free speech activist C J Hinke.
• Thailand’s monarchy is part of the problem : The king and them | The Economist: Also from The Economist, a bold editorial calling for Thailand to abolish its “archaic” lèse-majesté law.
• Thailand, its king and its crisis : A right royal mess | The Economist: The controversial cover story from The Economist this week, breaking the taboo on discussing the role of Thailand’s King in politics. It acknowledges that it’ll make Thais squirm, but it delivers one of the most incisive analyses I have yet seen. A must-read for anyone wanting to understand the Kingdom and the choices it faces.
• Live Filtering Pilot Another Lab Test: DBCDE | How to Be A Systems Engineer: Can this be true? According to the DBCDE officer this guy spoke with, the Phase 2 trials of Australia’s Internet filtering still won’t be real. “This will be a closed network test and will not involve actual customers,” they said.
• E-mail Etiquette 101 | Michael Hyatt: This is from mid-2007, and the hyphenated “e-mail” is a bit quaint. However these are all still valid points. I continue to be amazed at how poorly most businesses use basic tools like email.
• Otto the octopus wrecks havoc | Telegraph: Octopuses are smart enough to get bored and start causing trouble.
• Rolling Your Own Newsroom | O’Reilly Radar: Robert Passarella explains how he wired up a quick custom new page using Google Reader, Yahoo Pipes and some Typepad RSS widgets. The same thing could easily be dong using WordPress plugins or whatever.
• World's Top Tourist Traps | ForbesTraveler.com: “Not all overcrowded, merchandise-swollen travel hot spots are created equal, and some deserve to be flagged as full-fledged tourist traps.”
• Breaking news online: A short history and timeline | Teaching Online Journalism: A quick timeline of some major events in online journalism. I think it should include a lot more. Has anyone seen any more comprehensive lists?
• Inside Story | Politics, Society and Culture: “Launched in October 2008 by Australian Policy Online, Inside Story combines high-quality journalism and analysis to bring readers a distinctive view of Australia and the world. Drawing on a network of writers, researchers and correspondents in Australia and overseas, Inside Story investigates the forces shaping contemporary politics, society and culture. Inside Story is edited at the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University of Technology.”
• Net porn: Whose rights matter most? | ABC News: Clive Hamilton has written another piece which tries to equate free speech with pornography, misrepresents the anti-filtering arguments, and deliberate overlooks that filtering won’t work — he even says he’s ignoring that discussion, claiming we should debate the morality of pornography before we look at whether filtering is possible. Full of intellectual dishonesty. Are these really the best arguments there are for comprehensive Internet censorship?
• The Art of the Title Sequence: What is says: A website dedicated to the opening titles of films and TV programs. I stumbled across it because they’re currently highlighting Soylent Green.
• A Penny for My Thoughts? | NYTimes.com: A Pasadena, California news site has outsourced all its local journalism to writers in India, who are paid $7.50 per 1000 words.
• The Musical Compositions of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej: The King of Thailand is, amongst other things, an accomplished jazz musician, playing alto saxophone and writing. This is a selection of his work.
• A piddling offence and much worse | www.smh.com.au: “Senator Stephen Conroy’s plotting and warring has added to Labor’s decline,” wrote Paul Sheehan in this revealing 2004 article. “His base certainly isn’t the electorate,” he writes. “His power comes from offstage, from the patronage of his mentor, Senator Robert Ray, and his years as a recruiter (his enemies call it branch-stacking), deal-maker and kneecapper for the Victorian Right. His reward was Senate preselection at the age of 31. Once in the Senate, Conroy could start knifing people under the protection of parliamentary privilege. He did not waste any time.”
• Sharing Around the World | Facebook: This video showcases a Hackathon project that visualizes all the data Facebook receives.

• Conroy responds to Ludlum. Finally. | Public Polity: A blog post quoting Senator Stephen Conroy’s eventual response to Greens Senator Scott Ludlam’s questions about Internet censorship plans. I haven’t had time to analyse it or link back to the original Hansard.
• Future of Journalism summit | Corporate Engagement: Trevor Cook’s live blog of the MEAA’s The Future of Journalism summit, held in Melbourne on Wednesday. Yes, there’s still some value in reading the commentary.
• History of US Govt Bailouts | ProPublica: A nice chart comparing the size of financial bailouts of commercial operations by the US government since 1970.
• Statistics Laundering: false and fantastic figures | Libertus.net: “This research paper contains information about various alarming and sensational, but out-of-date, false and/or misleading ‘statistics&’ concerning the prevalence of ‘child pornography’ material on Internet websites, etc., which appeared in Australian media reports and articles in 2008. While sometimes statistical exaggerations are not important, those referred to herein are being used to directly exaggerate the prevalence and hence risk level of certain threats, and to indirectly weaken the position of those attempting to critically assess the nature of the threats, and whether proposed public policy solutions are effective and proportionate.”
• Save the Net | GetUp! Campaign Actions: “The Federal Government is planning to force all Australian servers to filter internet traffic and block any material the Government deems ‘inappropriate’. Under the plan, the Government can add any ‘unwanted’ site to a secret blacklist. Testing has already begun on systems that will slow our internet by up to 87%, make it more expensive, miss the vast majority of inappropriate content and accidentally block up to 1 in 12 legitimate sites. Our children deserve better protection – and that won’t be achieved by wasting millions on this deeply flawed system.”
• Are web filters just a waste of everyone’s time and money? | The Guardian: The interesting thing about this article isn’t so much its clear explanation of the pointlessness of trying to automate an Internet “bad things” filter but the fact that it was written in August 2007. Nothing has changed since.
• AFACT v iiNet: the case that could shut down the Internet | APC: A legal analysis of the law suit being brought by the movie industry body AFACT against ISP iiNet. This will be an important test of the “safe harbour” provisions of Australian copyright law.
• Labor's arbitrary internet filter plan misguided and deeply unpopular | Liberal Party of Australia: The Liberal Party’s media release, which includes the full text of Senator Nick Minchin’s statement about Internet censorship.
• Minchin slams Labor’s NBN backflip | ZDNet Australia: Opposition Senator Nick Minchin has ripped into the Australian government’s Internet censorship plans, calling them “misguided and deeply unpopular”. Without Liberal support, and without the support of The Greens, no new legislation can be passed. (The article’s headline related to the other story covered in this report, the question of whether the tendering process for the National Broadband Network is sufficiently transparent.)

The forum is at the UNSW Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre from 10am Sydney time on Thursday 27 November, through to 2.30pm, and there’s a fantastic array of speakers.

There’s three sessions: technical and social/legal to set the bounds of what’s actually possible, and then one focussing on how we actually protect the interests of children given this background — both preventing children seeing “inappropriate material” and stamping out child pornography.

The CoveritLive live blog tool should appear immediately below this paragraph — at least if you’re looking at this in a compatible web browser.

I’ll be taking comments and questions during the forum, but do feel free to add them here now, or after the sessions are over.

[This article was first published in Crikey on Monday. I've also added the comment and additional material which were published yesterday.]

Hurrah! The War on Terror is over! Well, at least it seems we’re no longer afraid of terrorists, because when Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus warned that illegally copying DVDs costs the industry $1.7 billion, for a change terrorism didn’t get a mention.

Major distributors have been trying to scare us off illegal copying for years. Australia’s laws were “harmonised” under the US Free Trade Agreement so copyright infringement became a crime. Gloomy doom-music-laden messages play before every movie. Serious people tell us that “piracy funds terrorism”.

“The Abu Sayyaf — blamed for the worst terrorist attacks in the South-East Asian country — are likely behind the illegal copying of movies onto DVDs,” reckons Edu Manzano, chairman of the Philippines’ Optical Media Board.

“The Yakuza are behind them in Japan and the Hezbollah are involved in the Middle East,” though he admits they lack “documentary evidence”.

Bob Debus’ weekend media release omits the “piracy funds terrorism” trope, saying instead that it funds “a range of criminal activity like drug trafficking and money laundering”. (Hang on, isn’t money laundering self-funding?) But by the time the story hit the ABC the government’s current bogeyman had been added to the list: child pornography. Ooh err.

Terrorism is insufficiently scary. Neither are the actual dollar costs.

$1.7 billion? Where’s that come from? We asked the minster’s office but they didn’t reply before deadline. US “estimates” on that scale have been thoroughly debunked.

Screen Australia says DVD sales boomed in 2007, up around 20% over the previous year. The entire net worth of the DVD sales industry is “only” $1.2 billion, which makes a “piracy cost” of $1.7 billion sound unlikely. They quote LEK Consulting’s estimate that 47 million illegal DVDs were in circulation, compared with 52 million legitimate sales — at a cost to the industry of $231 million, not $1.7 billion.

Of course “the industry” wants things to sound bad. But with record US box office receipts and booming DVD sales, could it be that there’s simply too many hangers-on between producer and consumer? After all, the $29 retail price of a music CD only delivers a dollar or two to the actual musicians. Apple’s iTunes and other online distributors take a far smaller cut, and the punters are starting to realise that.

If they’d rather slip a disc into their PC and burn Dark Knight for a mate rather than pay full retail, it means they don’t think the price is right.

The Industry Response

[This "industry response" was published in Crikey yesterday, as was my additional comment about the source of the statistics which follows it.]

Simon Bush, CEO of The Australian Visual Software Distributors Association, writes: Re. “The inflated cost of illegally copied DVDs“. The Australian Visual Software Distributors Association (AVSDA), representing the home entertainment film distributors, is certainly impacted by lost sales due to film piracy. I would not suggest it is the $1.7 billion as quoted but is large enough for the industry to put their hand in their pockets to fund million dollar consumer education initiatives. We would not do this if we did not think it important.

In terms of the links between DVD film piracy and organised crime, I believe the AFP and Interpol have confirmed this. As for this comment by Stilgherrian: “If they’d rather slip a disc into their PC and burn Dark Knight for a mate rather than pay full retail, it means they don’t think the price is right” this is irresponsible at worst and ignorant at best. If you don’t like the cinema ticket price for a film do you sneak in for free? If you don’t like the cost of a product do you steal it? If you wanted to watch the $185 million cost to produce Dark Knight on DVD and you thought buying it for $25 too steep then rent it for $5.

Don’t promote stealing and why is intellectual property seemingly worthless — or is it only Hollywood that is fair game?

Where the numbers came from

Stilgherrian writes: Minister Bob Debus’ office has told us the $1.77 billion cost to the industry quoted in the media release about illegal DVD copying came from Australian Institute of Criminology report “Intellectual property crime and enforcement in Australia“. The report’s Executive Summary says:

The negative impact of IP [intellectual property] crime includes adverse effects on business, the national economy, and consumer health and safety. For example, the software industry has argued that a 10-point drop in piracy globally could create 2.4 million jobs, $400b in economic growth and $67b in additional taxes.

Estimates of the loss to various sectors in Australia include the following:

• $233m per year due to the piracy and counterfeiting of films (LEK 2006);
• $677m of lost sales, in 2002, in the Australian toy, software and video games industry. This includes $445.7m lost sales in the business software industry (Allen 2003);
• $515m in absolute losses in software piracy in 2006 (BSA & IDC 2006);
• $45m per year as the cost to Australian subscription television industry (ASTRA 2006a);
• $300m per year in breaches of trade mark as losses to the textile, clothing and footwear industry (ACAG 2000).

So, only $233 million was about copying films, which matches Screen Australia’s analysis. The remaining $1.5 billion has nothing to do with DVDs. I reckon that’s a tad misleading. The numbers are also sourced from “industry estimates” without any sign of critical analysis, but being requoted by the AIC gives them the air of officialdom. Screen Australia provides some lovely graphs which show a DVD industry that’s positively booming.

• McDonald’s partners with earthwave to provide Australians with “Family Friendly” internet services | LinuxWorld: A company called earthwave has scored the deal to provide Australia’s McDonald’s stores with “clean” Internet links. That’s more than 720 locations.
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• What’s your profit : pain ratio? | Bad Language: Very apropos for me this week: an article pointing out that some clients simple aren’t worth the trouble.
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• Tanner eyes web 2.0 tools | Australian IT: Australia’s federal government says it'll trial online public consultation through blogs and other social media tools. Good luck, guys, because the first thing you’ll have to learn is how to have an authentic conversation with people, rather than just parroting the party line.
• Bush: “Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over” | The Onion: Written when George W Bush was inaugurated in 2001, this is a scarily prescient piece of satire. Well worth a read today.
• Barack Obama’s acceptance: the transcript | Crikey: The full text of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. Very powerful writing.
• Not Quite Art | ABC TV: The official ABC website for Marcus Westbury’s series Not Quite Art including full downloadable files of all episodes of series 1 and 2 (provided you’re in Australia).
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• 6 Nov 2008 – Liberation Day | Microsoft Australia: The Australian launch event for Microsoft’s Azure services platform. I blogged this live previously, and will soon write a more reflective post about it. This page now includes the video of Steve Ballmer’s speech.
• Blog censorship silences free speech around the world | Worldfocus: Thirteen/WNET, the respected PBS station in Boston, blogs about Internet censorship censorship and surveillance around the world, including a link to little old me.
• What Ray Ozzie didn’t tell you about Microsoft Azure | The Register: A nice discussion of the problems Microsoft will face selling its new platform Azure when compared with Amazon’s EC2 and Google’s App Engine.
• 750,000 lost jobs? The dodgy digits behind the war on piracy | ars technica: A nice discussion of where the numbers for “what piracy costs us” come from. This is American rather than Australian, but the points are still valid.
• DVD pirating costing industry $1.7b: Debus | ABC News: Australia’s Home Affairs minister Bob Debus parrots the DVD industry’s claim that illegal copying (which they call “piracy”) costs $1.7B. The bogeyman of “child pornography” is raised to make it sound even scarier.
• “Mankind Is No Island” | One Plus One Equals Three: The winning film in the Tropfest New York short film competition, shot using a mobile phone and found typography in Sydney and NY.

For the second week in a row, the Stilgherrian Live audience voted Senator Stephen Conroy our “Cnut of the Week” for his persistence with and behaviour over the Australian government’s Internet censorship “plans”. The program is now online for your viewing pleasure.

OK, that’s a biased sample, sure. But as I wrote in Crikey yesterday, Conroy is thoroughly tangled in his own Rabbit-Proof Firewall. I’ll try to sneak that article out from behind the paywall later. However in summary Conroy is blustering, maligning his critics with the McCarthyist tactic of bullying and calling them child pornographers and generally ignoring the rational questions being put to him.

He’s also back-pedalling fast. On ABC Radio National’s The Media Report yesterday, he was even denying the policy was about censoring legal material at all, despite clear evidence for exactly the opposite.

Not good enough, Senator Conroy.

If the government wants to persist with comprehensive, centralised, secretive, unaccountable Internet censorship — let’s not use the spin-words “filtering” and “clean feed” because that just reinforces their moral-panic frame of the Internet being “dirty” — then they need to deploy this evidence-based policy-making they used to talk about and actually address the evidence.

Mark Newton, the network engineer Conroy’s office tried to bully into silence, has only become more vocal in his criticism. And at Online Opinion yesterday he puts his case more clearly than ever.

I can’t argue with Newton’s logic. Can you, Senator Conroy?

The online community’s argument is a simple one:

• there’s no problem to solve because actual illegal material on the Internet is so rare that nobody ever finds it;
• even if there was a problem to solve, there’s no serious public demand to solve it;
• even if there was a public demand to solve it, none of the solutions proposed by the ALP will be effective, and the Government has handily provided original research to decimate their own case;
• even if they were effective, they’ll slow down Internet access and reduce Internet reliability, as shown by the same original research released by the Minister on July 22;
• even if the proposed solutions had perfect performance and reliability, none of them are affordable;
• even if they were affordable, they’ll be implemented terribly by the same underclass of bureaucrat that deemed Mohammad Haneef a terrorist, or Bill Henson a pornographer. The salivating of hangers-on like Family First and Nick Xenophon, lobbying to have the blacklist expanded before it’s even in force, demonstrate perfectly how open the system will be to political manipulation and lobbying;
• even if they were implemented perfectly by perfect administrators, the blacklists will inevitably leak, be published on the Internet, whereupon they’ll fall into the hands of nefarious individuals and consequently enable child abuse all over the world, with the direct assistance of the Commonwealth of Australia; and
• there’s no possibility that the blacklists won’t leak. Finland’s list has already leaked, CyberPatrol’s encrypted blacklist is cracked every six months or so. It’s delusional to believe that Australia will be any better at securing its officially sanctioned list of Child Porn and Terrorism sites than anyone else. It might take a month, a year, five years, ten years, or two hours. But it will leak, secrets always do. Pressing it into service will be like setting a ticking time bomb, and when it explodes there’ll be a thronging multitude of critics pointing at Senator Conroy and saying, “I told you so, you were warned, but you did it anyway”.

This isn’t a complicated argument. To justify the ALP’s policy, cogent, successful arguments against each and every one of those independent points will need to be mounted.

So, Senator Conroy, would you care to respond? Would anyone in government? Because if all you can do is slag off those wanting to debate the issue, your plans clearly don’t stand on their merits, do they?

Australian photographer Bill Henson is no stranger to controversy. His images, like the one here, are of nude or semi-nude adolescents, and “protecting the innocent children from the evil pedophiles” is a powerful rallying-call. Newspaper columnists and talkback radio hosts alike revel in its ability to stir the emotions — attention-seeking pricks that they are.

In an incident earlier this year, some of Henson’s photographs were seized by the police — but returned once the Office of Film and Literature Classification found that none of them were “child pornography”. Indeed, it called their nudity “mild and justified” and gave them a PG rating.

Got that? PG. Suitable for viewing by children under the age of 16, with parental guidance.

But apparently the considered judgement of the official body charged with this kind of analysis — the people who deal with and (sometimes) ban material which is pornographic — isn’t good enough.

When it was later found that Henson toured a school seeking models — in company with its principal who was following all the right procedures — Crikey correspondent Peter Faris QC called for an investigation.

Bill Henson makes a lot of money photographing naked or semi-naked pre-pubescent children. This is called Art by the Left glitterati. Most decent Australians would call it Pornography. It is a matter of debate as to which side of the line we place Henson.

We now discover that Sue Knight, the (then) principal of St Kilda Park Primary School, invited Henson to look around the school and select young models about 15 months ago. It is reported that a new book (by David Marr and excerpted in The Age over the weekend) states that Henson walked around the playground at lunchtime, accompanied by the principal.

This is not good enough. Nowhere near it.

I ask this: By whose authority did Henson trawl for subjects/victims?

And he goes on.

Faris, being a lawyer, didn’t quite call Henson a child pornographer. But he larded his rant with lawyerly rhetoric and went as close as he could go without getting slapped with a libel suit.

My response for Crikey was published in the email version and was on the website — but I can’t find it just now so here it is again with added linkage:

Peter Faris’ rant about Bill Henson is the usual grab-bag of logical fallacies (like the appeal to an assumed majority of “Most decent Australians”) and cheap rhetorical tricks (like the name-calling of “Left glitterati”). But unlike Crikey‘s Canberra correspondent, who clearly points out the key difference between the two rounds of Henson-bashing, Faris makes an obvious error which demonstrates that he simply hasn’t thought this through.

He starts by pointing out that Henson makes pictures of “naked or semi-naked pre-pubescent children”, but then says the Victorian Crimes Act defines child pornography as including a photograph of a minor “depicted in an indecent sexual manner or context”. Bzzzt! Since when does “semi-naked” equal “sexual”?

I don’t know who all these sickos are who can’t see a little uncovered skin, adult or pre-pubescent, without feeling their lust rise, but why is Faris agreeing with their perverted worldview?

And if he continues to overlook the obvious difference between “semi-naked” and “sexual”, can I assume his next spray will be to call for the arrest of all surf club members for the mass child pornography of a Nippers Carnival, everyone involved in building a church with cherubs, kitschmaker Anne Geddes, and the producers of that toilet paper advert showing a baby’s bottom?

And yes, Anne Geddes’ work is evil. Little children who are far, far too young to give consent are drained of their individual humanity and, dressed as fruits and flowers, used as props in sentimental clichés. These are human beings, people, not dolls and mantle ornaments!

Meanwhile, I hope that when the NSW Sentencing Council report is finally published, so we can all see it unfiltered by tabloid journalism, it will show a rational series of amendments to law based on evidence — not pitchfork-wielding talkback outrage.