Censorship/ ISP Filtering Update

cates

: Image by Ben Lawson via Flickr

Well this week has been busy, what with shopping for the annoying Chritmas holiday thingy and having to learn how to construct a word press blog (curse you google bots). So this post is, as the title indicates a round up of what the Blogosphere has had to say on this issue the past week.

Stilgherian gives us The lies of the internet censors, in which he pummels Bernadette McMenamin and gives us a nice run down on the debate and asks why money is being spent on this farce. He notes also that a child p_orn ring was broken using traditional policing methods netting 19 offenders including a QC and former police officer. The comments section on the crikey website, where the full article is published, raises some additional points.

BanThisUrl has an excellent three part interview series with an internet security specialist in

Exclusive: White hat hacker tears apart flaws in Aussie net filtering scheme

Interview with a white hat hacker, Part 2: The filters’ vulnerabilities

Interview with a white hat hacker, Part 3: What machines can’t judge and why

Which should leave you in no doubt about the riduculous nature of the government’s plans from a technical standpoint. But for any doubters left out there they follow up with an open letter from SAGE AU to Senator Conroy withdrawing support for the trial on technical grounds.

Mike at Somebody Think of the Children alerts us to devlopments on the Simpson’s Porn scandal and the Russian Circus Family video in Eat my shorts: More on The Simpsons and Chris Illingworth cases

And finally we havea new letter from Mark Newton to Kate Ellis, his MP – well worth a read. It is interesting to note that in addition to funding the Filtering scheme the Rudd government his cut funding too the allready under resourced federal police branch responsible for doing real work to stop child pornography. See this excerpt below:

I read that statement with some dismay, after noting that the previous Government had actually dedicated $51.8m to increased law enforcement, including funding for 90 additional AFP members dedicated to online child protection by 2012. Mr. Rudd’s razor gang went through the Liberals’ budget in early 2008 and cut $2.8m from the AFP’s Online Child Sexual Exploitation Team (OCSET) and delayed their increased staff allocation by 12 months, then portrayed the result as some kind of improvement to OCSET’s situation.

The reason for my dismay is that OCSET has already complained about the fact that their shoestring staffing levels leave them so constrained that they are unable to take on new cases, and instead must refer them to State police forces3. So we have the farcical situation where the Minister is praising the output of OCSET while simultaneously cutting their budget and delaying their staff expansions, leaving the Federal Government’s demonstrably successful team of child abuse specialists largely unable to conduct child abuse investigations.

Anyone else find it odd that we have a government cutting funding to a proven method of fighting child abuse/p_rn and stubbornly forging ahead with a plan that they say will address the problem, but that clearly won’t.

Who’s supporting Child p-rnographers Mr Conroy?