Today I received Senator Conroy's reply to my letter that I wrote to him, in which I decried the mandatory Internet filter that Conroy wants to install at an ISP-level for all of Australia. In short, the letter was patronisingly and almost offensively generic. I realise that sending out "standard words" to letters is general policy, but that doesn't mean I agree with it. These politicians are supposed to be representing us; it's their job to address the concerns of the people they represent. And my concerns were anything but addressed.

Unsurprisingly, considering how far this farce has got already, Conroy effectively ignored the arguments, concerns and alternatives I highlighted in my letter and spewed his standard line of misleading half-truths and misrepresentations back at me. As I have discussed before, I consider half-truths a form of lying, so this makes Conroy's letter particularly distasteful.

You can read Conroy's reply letter by downloading the PDF I made of it. Note that I have left my scribbles on the pages, where I highlighted various inaccuracies, misrepresentations and misleading facts that he asserted as I read it.

Of course, I can't let this issue lie. The Internet is a massive part of my life and I can't stand by and watch Australians' access to it be so damaged by Conroy's folly. So I wrote a reply to Conroy, in which I debunk his letter and again present the facts. This is what I wrote:

Dear Minister,

RE: Your response letter titled “Cyber-safety and internet service provider filtering”

I received your reply to my letter in which I highlighted the serious issue I have with your campaign to mandatorily censor and filter the Australian Internet and was extremely disappointed. Your letter was obviously a generic response and failed to satisfactorily address most of the issues that I highlighted.

In your letter, you again assert that this filter is for the protection of children; however you ignore the fact that there is plenty of material (legally rated X18+) that the filter will not remove and therefore children will be exposed to inappropriate material anyway. You note that you will encourage ISPs to provide optional filtering of this material to families, but this just highlights the inconsistency of the ISP-level filter being mandatory, since the optional filter would need to be enabled for it to even start to serve its purpose.

You fail to justify why this filter is needed mandatorily for 100% of Australian adults. There is absolutely no need to make this filter mandatory, if the idea is to protect those adults that would be offended by the inadvertent exposure to RC material; these people would be able to simply opt in to an optional filter if they felt the need. My experience, and the experience of my family, is that one does not just easily and inadvertently “run into” inappropriate material on the Internet, thereby making this filter more of a liability than a benefit. This is emphasised by the fact that those who wish to circumvent the filter and see inappropriate material can do so easily.

You assert that the blocking of Refused Content (RC) material is a good thing, and in many cases, most notably child pornography, this is true. However, the RC rating covers many areas that are morally and legally grey. One should note that an issue that is morally and legally grey does not mean that it is necessarily unacceptable behaviour. For instance, 50 years ago homosexuality was regarded as morally grey, but now is acceptable behaviour. An example topic of a modern morally and legally grey area that the RC rating would mandatorily block is euthanasia, which incidentally, is legal in the Netherlands (link). If Australians are blocked from accessing this sort of material, how are we as a nation supposed to educate ourselves about the issues? You cannot do that for us, as in a democracy you only represent us; you do not dictate how we should think.

You again misrepresent the results of the Enex Testlab report by claiming that the URL filtering technology is 100% accurate. This is, at best, a half-truth. You notably fail to consider the 5% of pages that report says will be blocked incorrectly and the 20% of pages that should be blocked that will be let through. Not only is your misrepresentation twisting the truth, but it also serves to lull those Australians less informed than I into thinking that your filter is a panacea. You assert that you have “always said that filtering is not a silver bullet”, but yet you say that it is 100% accurate.

You also fail to address how it is acceptable that, because of the use of a blacklist, entire websites may be taken offline for all Australians mistakenly. You cannot assert that mistakes cannot happen, as we all know that mistakes can and do happen. Case in point, a country that you assert “enjoys” filtering: the United Kingdom. In 2008, the UK was blocked from accessing the website Wikipedia (a key Internet resource) because it was mistakenly added to their blocklists (link). This is evidence that such a filter will harm our access to valid websites, and this is far too high a price to pay in light of the existence other, less damaging, solutions to child protection on the Internet.

As a trained IT professional, I was insulted by your patronising and misleading metaphor that dismissed the valid 5-10% performance penalties that Australians will mandatorily pay if you implement the filter: “the impact on performance would be less than one seventieth of the blink of an eye”. Your use of this metaphor indicates that you do not understand that at the time scales that computers operate, 1/70 of an eye blink is an incredibly long time. Although this time period may not be grossly evident to Australians using websites, many new technologies are starting to use the web and the Internet as a medium for their operation (for example, web services) and these products operate at a computer time-scale, not a human time-scale, and their operations would be negatively affected by this.

In addition, in the IT industry, performance is an important factor in deciding what technologies to adopt; something that is 10% faster will be used over something that is not. By effectively wiping 10% off Australia’s Internet speeds in one broad stroke for questionable gains, you make us less competitive in the IT market than the rest of the world that does not implement such draconian mandatory filtering initiatives. Australia is already an expensive place to run Internet services (compared to countries like the USA), and this makes us only more unattractive as a place to foster and run Internet technologies.

The idea behind the filter, the protection of children, is an admirable goal; however, the filter is an extremely ineffective and potentially damaging way of addressing this issue. My previous suggestion, the voluntary installation of filter software on home computers, addresses the problem in a way that solves the problem as effectively as your filter, but without the censorship, performance and mandatory enforcement issues. You may argue that technically competent children may circumvent the home computer filter; however, the same is true of your ISP-level filter.

Another, less optimal solution, is to have ISP-level filtering, but to make it optional for those who wish to have it. However, this is less optimal than the home computer filter solution since it would be much more expensive to implement an ISP-level filter than to offer a free home computer filter. The Howard Government did just this, although they should have been more effective about educating families as to its existence and usage.

I hope this makes it clearer as to the fatal flaws in your mandatory ISP-level filter scheme and presents you with some viable alternative solutions. I would prefer to see my tax dollars spent more effectively and in a way that improves Australia for Australians, not weakens it.

Yours sincerely,

Daniel Chambers

Of course, Conroy is almost religious in his support of the filter, meaning that he will likely ignore this letter as blindly as he ignored my previous one. I think this quote fairly accurately describes Conroy at this point:

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
--James Baldwin

So, in addition to sending this letter to him, I will print a copy of my previous letter, Conroy's reply, and this letter and send it to Tony Smith, the Shadow Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy along with a brief cover letter explaining my displeasure. Credit goes to burntsugar on Twitter for this idea. This is the cover letter:

Dear Sir,

I am writing to you to inform you of my extreme displeasure with the Labor party’s attempts to mandatorily censor and filter the Australian internet at an ISP-level. I have sent two letters to Senator Conroy and one to my local Member of Parliament (Anna Burke of Chisholm) expressing my views and suggesting viable alternatives. I have attached my letters to Senator Conroy and his reply to my first letter so that you are able to understand my concerns.

I am disappointed to see how little the Liberal party has argued against Conroy’s ineffective filter scheme. I hope that by informing you of my concerns, which are replicated by almost every person that I have discussed this issue with, you will assign a higher priority to fighting against this absurd waste of taxpayers’ dollars by voting against the introduction of this legislation in Parliament. Certainly, this issue will be a key point for me when deciding whom to vote for at the next election.

Yours sincerely,

Daniel Chambers

Hopefully, this will help kick the Liberals into gear when it comes to fighting Conroy's folly in Parliament.

As you can see, the fight to preserve the Australian Internet continues unabated. In this war, your silence is taken as acceptance of the filter, so please, if you haven't yet written to your local Member of Parliament, Senator Conroy and Tony Smith and told them that you find this censorship scheme abhorrent, take the time to do so. Your few hours now will help to save you much grief in the future. The only way to make our voices heard by the politicians is for us all to shout.

Also, spread the word about the filter around your social circles. I've been surprised at the number of people I've talked to that had no idea that this was even going on. The more people that know about this, the harder it will be for the politicians to slip this under the radar. So, keeping this in mind, and in the same fashion as my last blog on this issue, I will leave you with a pertinent quote:

I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth.
--Molly Ivins