Australia’s Communications Minister, Senator Conroy, claims to be ignorant of criticism from the US Administration, and has taken to blasting one of the word’s most savvy web companies, all in trying to justify his plans to filter – censor – Australia’s internet.
Conroy ignores USA – ‘filters’ our criticism
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has turned to ignoring Australians ally, the USA, and attacking critics instead of trying to explain and justify his plan to “filter” the national internet.
While spending more than $40 billion laying new fibre-optic cable around Australia to boost speeds under the ‘National Broadband Network’, the same Minister is planning to censor – and coincidentally slow down – the same system.
But, instead of explaining the expenditure of huge sums on two different projects with entirely contradictory results, Senator Conroy is instead pretending ignorance of criticism by the US Government, and abusing the world’s biggest communications enterprise, Google, for saying his internet filtering/censorship won’t work.
Senator Conroy is preparing legislation to make all ISPs block a blacklist of “refused classification” websites to all Australians. He says the blacklist – which will be added to regularly – will include child pornography and such things as instructions on crime. However, liberties and freedom groups (including Civil Liberties Australia), academics and IT experts say the filtering will be too broad, and that it will be easily bypassed by anyone with a rudimentary expertise in computers.
The Minister claimed late last month to be unaware of the US State Department contacting his office and the office of Australia’s Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith, over Australia’s planned internet filters.
However, State Department spokesman Michael Tran had 24 hours earlier issued a statement saying: “Our main message of course is that we remain committed to advancing the free flow of information which we view as vital to economic prosperity and preserving open societies globally.”
Mr Tran confirmed that the US had informed Australia of its concerns: “We don’t discuss the details of specific diplomatic exchanges, but I can say that in the context of that ongoing relationship, we have raised our concerns on this matter with Australian officials.”
Senator Conroy next laid into Google. He attacked the company over its privacy credentials: “Recently the founders of Google have got themselves into a little bit of trouble because notwithstanding their alleged ‘do no evil’ policy, they recently created something called Buzz, and there was a reaction, and people said well look aren’t you publishing private information?” Senator Conroy said.
Google, meanwhile, said that it had surveyed Australians and that “the strong view from parents was that the government’s proposal goes too far and would take away their freedom of choice around what information they and their children can access”.
Google also said filtering could “negatively impact user access speeds” and filtering high-volume sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter “appears not to be technologically possible as it would have such a serious impact on internet access”.
“We have a number of other concerns, including that filtering may give a false sense of security to parents, it could damage Australia’s international reputation and it can be easily circumvented,” Google said.
CLA would like to invite Minister Conroy to respond to the criticism, rather than pretending it doesn’t exist, or ignoring it.
¬ Bill Rowlings, CEO