Not to be outdone by China, Australia wants its own national filtering system for ALL users of the internet. The problem, as I see it, is that ‘illegal’ content is, and always will be, hidden from plain view. Such as system will have one hell of a time trying to inspect every packet going in and out of Australia and attempting to determine whether it is ‘legal’ or not. It will make all Australia suffer in terms of speed and access to legitimate content for the sake of preventing the casual observer from looking at material deemed ’sensitive’. Of course, anyone that really wants to look at it (child or otherwise) will be perfectly capable or doing so with relative ease (via anonymisers, open proxies, etc). Attempting to secure the internet in such a way seems to require such gross misunderstanding of its, and our, nature that I have lost all hope in this Government’s tech credentials.
From what I understand, the blacklisted sites will not be published, so most Australians will not even know what sites they are not allowed to view and why not. Who decides who gets to see what? and who prevents those people from abusing this power (using anti-terror laws for political end, just like in the UK). So much for freedom of speech.
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