The Australian Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Stephen Conroy has made a number of statements recently which make apparent that:
Lists of banned URLs compiled by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) are open to human error;
These errors can and do exist for sometime before being corrected;
The owners of banned URLs are not made aware that they are on any blacklist;
Once on the blacklist it is unlikely that a banned site will be removed, even if the offending material is removed from the website in question;
The official ACMA blacklist contains more than just content that has been refused classification or is unlawful under Australian legislation;
The blacklist can and does contain political content, using a commonsense definition of the term political;
The ACMA list of banned URLs is not monitored by an independent agency and has little or no ministerial or parliamentary oversight;
On their own initiative ISPs are capable of further expanding the blacklist provided to them by ACMA; and Such expansion is not monitored by the Department of Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy.

What is also becoming obvious is the fact that some Australian ISPs are ignoring ACMA’s blacklist regarding banned content which is based in Australia.
See:
http://northcoastvoices.blogspot.com/2009/03/australian-government-website-blacklist_29.html

I’m also very much against child abuse. It’s a terrible evil. It’s the only thing I might be willing to bend my objection to censorship for. However, I don’t think censorship works and I certainly don’t think internet filtering works.

Invariably, the censors end up making fools of themselves. If nothing else, Australia proves that. Did ACMA seriously think they would be able to keep this list secret?

Anyone with even minimal computer skills knows how to bypass any internet filter. All you need is an encrypted VPN. If you don’t know what that is, ask any 15 year-old. This makes a nonsense of filtering attempts, and creates a dangerous false sense of security in parents who think it actually works. Apart from that, everyone knows that most of this activity has been driven underground and now takes place in chat rooms and news groups that the filters don’t affect.

Most producers of CAI do it for the money. That’s the way to stop them. Payments have to be made somehow and this is how the problem should be tackled. It has already been done with great success. Knock out the profits and much of the material will dry up.

As far as protection from accidental encounters goes, I have no problem with filtering to spare young people from things they are not yet equipped to cope with, like most of what’s on television, I just doubt the efficacy of it. But it should be the choice of the parents in any case, not something imposed by a government. And for those who are not children, I say grow up, get over it, don’t have a cow, say a prayer if you have to. If you possess any moral fibre in the first place it won’t dissolve just because you accidentally see a nasty image or read a rude word.

Part of my reason for getting involved in this area is my concern for over-extension of government censorship. I don’t think hiding something preferable to solving it.

Liaising with DIA has altered/extended my perceptions to want to rid the net of this stuff. At the moment, filtering is their preferred course of action, and trying to diminish the market for the stuff by tracking down and prosecuting people who download and share it. I’ve said to DIA that I don’t think it’s long-term viable – there always will be a demand, sadly, no matter how many you catch, as the audience is global. We do what we can, and hope we can do enough.

In the 1990′s my child fell prey to a particularly clever and nasty pornographer. The Police were aware of this man’s activities but did not have sufficient evidence for charges. Although I believed (hoped) that images were not taken of my child, I wanted to be certain. The lack of filtering back then enabled me to track this man to a number of sites across the web and to gather evidence. The Police were informed of what I was doing and everything I found was passed on to them.

The man in question was part of an established international child pornography ring. He became the subject of a 60 Minutes broadcast and was imprisoned for his crimes against children. However, the first hard evidence that was used to build the case came from one mother who, though sickened by what she had to trawl through, was free to look in the dark corners without Internet filtering blocking access.

The evidence I gathered led to some sites being taken down and to the conviction of a major contributor to online child pornography. I am passionate about getting this stuff off the Net but don’t believe that filtering is the answer.

Gak – I’d forgotten you’d done this particularly fabulous gig.

I totally agree that there will always be those who actively seek out what they think is being hidden from them. And the variety of media around these days will always make it available – just as it has always done with whatever is to hand – just a hella more people and more likely to affect those not searching for it…