A Question to Senator Conroy

Senator,

You’ve copped a lot of flack over the filter proposal from the IT community, much of it justified in the eyes of those technically savvy parents and those who see this as an attempt at a “nanny state”. The enforcement of a mandatory filter at the ISP level is just the first step towards complete monitoring of the on-line lives of the Australian public.

Look at what happened when the Government of the day tried to implement a “porn filter” many years ago – it was cracked IN LESS THAN 30 SECONDS by a 14 year old school kid in Victoria. $180,000,000 of our hard-earned taxation dollars WASTED.

More child pornography (and let’s face it, this is the only thing that really NEEDS to be blocked) is exchanged daily via other channels such as Australia Post than is over the internet – and having been “on-line” since the early 1980′s (via CSIRO and BBS systems), I can honestly say that I have NEVER, in many many thousands of hours of online time, come across any “kiddie porn” accidentally (and I’ve never looked for it either, let me add !!)

Parents need to be EDUCATED as to how to monitor / block their children from seeing undesirable content on the Internet, with the proposed filter being promoted as either;

* OPT-IN for those who either do not understand how do do this or can’t be bothered learning

or

* OPT-OUT for those technically astute parents who take their roles in this area seriously

And both of these at the USER level, not the ISP

There is no denying that some sort of filtering is needed, but do you not think that it is the responsibility of the parents to educate their children and monitor their internet activities until they are at an age where they can understand the risks ?

Jon