Senator Kate Lundy speaks out against mandatory filtering
January 13th, 2010 by Mark Bahnisch | Published in Activism, Authoritarianism, Politics, The Web | 21 Comments
Jason Whittaker has an article in today’s Crikey, which I’ve reproduced below the fold.
At least one member of the federal government stands opposed to mandatory internet censorship, with Senator Kate Lundy pushing the Minister for an “opt-out” alternative from the online blacklist.
But Lundy says she has “a job cut out for me” lobbying colleagues before legislation is introduced to parliament next month. The former Labor front-bencher and passionate advocate for open IT has told Crikey she believes “the majority of caucus” wants a mandatory filter in place.
Lundy has used her blog to vent over her “discomfort” in Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s push for mandatory ISP-level blocking of websites refused classification, defying the government’s commitment to the filter by outlining a “preferred approach” including more effective parental education, internet skills development and voluntary filters at the desktop.
Late last month Lundy wrote Conroy’s proposal left “little room to move”, but she suggested allowing ISPs to offer adult customers an “opt-out” from the filter. This week she has begun canvassing support for the option among Labor colleagues.
“My feeling is I’ve got a tough job ahead of me,” she says. Conroy has vowed to introduce legislation when parliament resumes on February 2.
Lundy acknowledges the flaws in her own plan: there will be a stigma attached to requesting access to an unfiltered internet, and she admits it may “lead to interest by the authorities, even though individuals may simply want to ensure they are not having legitimate content filtered”.
But for Lundy it’s the least-worst option. It “respects people can make an informed choice” while upholding a policy Labor took to the last election (she says she was against it then, too).
Lundy backs Conroy and the process he has gone through in testing filtering technology while boosting funding for cyber crime enforcement. She never believed a filter was feasible but she says the government’s testing has proven that false and she will support the final legislative outcome. But, as she has admitted on her blog, “many mechanisms used by criminal networks will not be stopped through a filtering mechanism”.
Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA), a not-for-profit group leading the campaign against the filter, certainly agrees. Campaign manager Peter Black calls the opt-out compromise a “significant improvement”, but the group is dedicated to a public campaign rejecting any filter altogether.
EFA is investing all its funds in Black, a senior law lecturer specialising in new media at the Queensland University of Technology who will drive the campaign at least for the next three months. New branding and a website (“a hub of campaign activity for all the different individuals and organisations” against the filter) will launch soon to “shift the focus away from the ‘no clean feed’ slogan to a more positive message not only on the flaws in the proposed filter but also provides solutions to the Australian public”.
For Lundy, this is a hobbyhorse. She is a former shadow minister of information technology, a stalwart of Senate inquiries into the subject (she claims not to have missed one in 14 years) and has been a long-time advocate for harnessing IT since working as a communications officer in the union movement. The internet, she says, “really inspired me as a tool for empowerment”.
The ACT Senator says the public has not been properly educated on net safety and filtering technology since the Howard government first put forward censorship plans; the net filter has “never really been tested” as an issue in the community.
In her maiden speech to parliament in 1996, Lundy spoke of the “rewards that come from investing” in IT. She said: “The importance of public policy relating to the use and control of credible information sources and its increasingly complex delivery technologies cannot be underestimated if we are serious about equitable and affordable access.”
From outside, the Labor ministry she has spearheaded the government’s 2.0 online public participation initiative and led public forums on policy development. Last April, Lundy took on IT consultant and open source software advocate Pia Waugh as a full-time adviser on technology policy.
I think it takes a fairly creative reading of the pre-election policy document to believe that a mandatory filter for all was Labor party policy at the last election. Unless the document was deliberately written to be misleading then all the was promised was that ISPs would have to offer a filter and primarily for those computers that could be accessed by children.
Congratulations to Senator Lundy for advocating within her party to change Conroy’s proposal, but unfortunately she has also said she is bound by caucus and will vote for the mandatory filter in parliament if that is what ends up getting submitted.
Does this mean she actually did read the numerous vociferous posts against Labor’s filter on her blog from last month then?
She might well have done. It’s a real pity that she was dumped from the front bench, as she’s one of the few Labor pollies at federal level who really does genuinely engage online. And about policy, not KRudd’s drivel about what he’s up to.
At the risk of half of LP piling on, I have to ask: is this really such a big free speech issue?
I mean, I doubt even Voltaire would head to the barricades to defend internet smut.
Ginja,
Occupational hazard in my case (Internet/Web IT specialist). Partly that’s why I can see how to trivially avoid it as well.
The problem is a combination of government waste and security blanket, rather then solely a free speech issue. If someone offered you a stone that repelled tigers for $100 would it be a good investment?
What is being offered is a solution that won’t diminish illegal activity of any kind, will allow future governments to control speech and twist the societies perceptions to their will in a subtle underhanded way, and will give a false sense of security that “little johnny” will no longer be able to accidently access hard core porn. Free speech, at least in my case, isn’t that much of a part of it.
On the other hand I also quite like the idea of the filter. It would mean that quickly Australia would become quite savvy about various encrypted communication methods, giving a leg up in the international competition.
I ain’t no literati, but wasn’t Voltaire friends with the Marquis de Sade?
What would Voltaire do?
@4 – Ginja – that question was pretty comprehensively thrashed out on a couple of other threads recently:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/?s=efa
Veltyen, you probably have a point about cost and effectiveness, but do governments really want to control speech? Sure, governments have their spin doctors and they control what information is released into the public domain, but is censorship of the media on anyone’s agenda? If the Iranian regime can’t successfully censor the internet I wouldn’t lay awake at night worrying about the dark designs of our government.
For a generation now most Australian capitals have had only one metropolitan paper. To me, that’s a concrete, urgent free speech issue to get worked up about.
Describing this a Lundy’s hobbyhorse is a bit unkind. She is the closest thing to an IT expert in Parliament; has been for a long time. The pity is that the rest of them aren’t listening.
rumrebellious @ 6,
Just checked the two biographies I’ve got of Voltaire. Des Sade is not in the index.
So, maybe, no.
Thanks Mark.
Paul Burns: bugger, that’d make him even more interesting!
No probs!
Bugger; so we can’t trust my memory but can we trust the internets?
So they may have met at least?
rumrebellious @ 13,
Voltaire knew Sade’s uncle. From memory Sade was quite young when he went to stay with his uncle, (maybe even a teenager.) Sade himself was the next generation, and Voltaire I thunk was in exile in Switzerland at the time the Marquis began to flourish. From memory his flourishing didn’t last long. His mother in law had him locked away for whipping a servant girl and encouraging her (the mother in law’s) daughter, his wife, to participate, for which I think, he was tried and imprisoned. She had influential contacts at court. One has to be very careful ascribing to Sade the kind of sadistic activities he wrote about as fantasiesa during his various bouts in prison or the asylum. Mainly he just had a very dirty mind, and managed to annnoy everybody from the French aristocracy, to the King, to Revolutionaries, to Napoleon.
At least, that’s what I think.
Is the Pope Catholic?
Ginja @ 8, even if this government didn’t want to control speech (which I would dispute, but that’s another story), can you imagine what a Coalition government with, say, Abbott as a Minchivic sock-puppet would do with it?
Talk is cheap – unless Lundy can actually change the legislation or cross the floor what she has to say isn’t worth the paper it is printed on.
Zoot and David Irving: the previous government manipulated the media in all sorts of ways, mostly by preventing information from entering the public domain: no pictures of refugees that could make them seem ordinary and human (as always, on the pretext of protecting them), using the federal police like never before to go after public servants that leak. They dug for dirt and smeared anyone who spoke up against them, they selectively leaked classified defence information to their friends in the media – all the grubby, Nixon-esque tactics we’ve come to expect from the Libs. But I can’t think of any case of outright censorship.
Cheers Paul. :-)
I have to agree with Razor though. I guess she is supplying an avenue for ventage for the disaffected within ALP.
The rest of caucus still need to be targeted though.
What are Kate Lundy’s view’s on ACTA and does anyone have a summary of what view she took to the US-FTA policy debates of 2004 when Mark Latham dumped her from the ministry?
Sorry folks. Google answers all.
While free speech is an important issue, I think it’s unhelpful that this tends to dominate discussion of this issue. It makes it far easire to dismiss, because likening Australia to Iran, China, Burma etc sounds like ranting hyperbole, regardless of how accurate that might be.
The real story is that the Government is spending millions on something that will have no positive effect and will slow the Internet to some extent (whether that would be negligable in a fully operational system is not yet known, even given the testing done so far).
There is very little illegal pornography that is availble via a simple URL, and that is the only thing this filter blocks. It won’t prevent material being distributed via bit torrent, through instant messaging clients and chat rooms, by email, etc etc. Past law enforcement experience as shown that kiddie porn rings are close circles that are hard to get into and careful about how information is transmitted. The only way to put a stop to this activity is good covert policing, which has had success in the past.
Conroy recently responded to Crikey’s criticism by essentially taking the ‘if you oppose this you must support child porn’ angle. That’s stupid. I’d support any effective policy to stop this activity, and that means diverting the many millions that will be wasted on this hi-tech placebo into improved police resources and better education/resources for parents wanting to help keep their kids out of strife online.