August 6, 2010
When jounalists inject misinformation
In iTWire’s ‘The internet filter is dead! Long live the filter!’ James Riley writes:
Despite the narrow focus of the government’s proposed filter, despite its technical feasibility and despite a series of transparency and accountability measures that were to be put in place, the filter simply unnerved people. And a great many simply said the filter would not work.
Misinformation ahoy. The focus of the filter has and will always be vague, meaningless trite in the style of ‘save the children’, with a creeping scope and absolutely no accountability. Witness how the leaked URL list blew out to include currently legal pornographic material, information about euthanasia and a Wikileaks page. Google et al have spent the last two years complaining that the scope is ill-defined, subjective and hard to enforce.
On the merit of its technical feasibility, where are the concrete statistics on the effect of transfer speed, reliability and false positives? Where is the independent study? Why was the Government’s report so delayed? Again, iiNet and other ISPs whose existence doesn’t depend on continued government contracts forcefully opposed the technical implementation for a wide swathe of reasons.
Beyond the technical implementation problems there’s also the fact that the filter is incredibly simplistic and ineffective; anything based on URL lists is prone to bypass via proxy, tunnelling and encryption (to name just a few techniques). Two minutes after this thing goes live a thousand Yahoo Answers pages will list ways to bypass it. And who’s likely to have the technical knowledge to do so already? The very people you’re ‘protecting’ or ‘stopping’: the technically-minded new generation and anyone else who’s ever stepped off the mainstream web. No, serious commercial paedophiles would not be stupid enough to use unencrypted web traffic, and the filter won’t block their content.
I’d love to see the size of the URL list should the government start blocking pages that describe how to work around the filter.
And no James, there is no ‘technical transparency and accountability’. The general public don’t know how the system works, can’t review it from a technical or source-code level, and have no control over the blocked addresses even as a matter of periodical public or independent review. A telling part of the quote above is “[…] a series of transparency and accountability measures that were to be put in place” (emphasis mine). Note the “were”. They hadn’t been discussed publicly, or reviewed, or implemented, or stress-tested.
The internet filter is about getting a black-box into every ISP to establish a baseline system for blocking arbitrary content at the Government’s whim. Nothing more. It will not protect you, your kids or your dog. If you think it will then you are an idiot.
But the Howard Government end-user filtering policy was a disaster (if you define disaster as a policy that costs millions but is nearly completely ineffective.
Labor’s internet filter has cost millions already (just for testing!) and will be completely ineffective.
Under former Communications Minister Helen Coonan, government spend tens of millions of dollars on its end-user filter policy – including $15 million on an advertising/awareness campaign to make sure parents knew the filters were available.
One Government’s badly-managed project does not preclude a later Government from attempting to do a better job. Also, how the hell do you spend tens of millions of dollars on filtering software development? You know, it’s not that hard, derr. I could give you the name of quite a few free projects the Government could adapt to fit with the help of two C++ programmers and a few weeks. Unless said project decides to invest a few million in gold-plated chairs or a new building full of pointless supervisory staff.
At its peak, about 30,000 people had taken up the government’s offer of free filter software. 30,000! From an Australian subscriber base of 12 million or more!
Believe it or not James, not everyone with an Internet connection has kids, has kids of a the appropriate age, requires new filtering software (other software exists, including stuff ISPs offer already), or shares your obvious political position on carte-blanch filtering.
Further, despite the noisy opposition to the ISP-level filtering proposal, particularly from the technology sector, Mum’s and Dad’s were generally in favour in Government filtering the kind of content that the RC category is applied to.
Wrong, and a totally slanted statistic. Again, we’re not all parents, and we don’t all have kids, and we don’t all want the same arbitrary restrictions as those who are parents. You’re missing a fundamental point here: why are you applying a “solution” meant for a select target audience to all of us? Your use of the colloquial ‘Moms and Dads’ instead of naming a specific demographic also reeks of loaded language.
The fact that the opponents of mandatory filtering quietly accepted the volunteer ISP filtering by the nation’s three largest ISPs – which will block child abuse sites – is just strange.
Wrong. We expressed dissatisfaction and frustration that those ISPs caved in without considering the ramifications. We do not accept their decision. Where are you getting this idea from? And again, you’ve tied that sentence in with a simplified version of the truth: ‘block child abuse sites’. This paragraph’s utter absurdity is exposed when you write it honestly: … quietly accepted the volunteer ISP filtering by the nation’s three largest ISPs – which will block arbitrary content at the Government’s sole discretion – is just strange.
Doesn’t quite have the same effect as the slanted rhetoric of the other version though.
All the die-hard anti-censorship protesters and free speech libertarians were in effect saying that Government filtering (or censorship in their language) indeed had its place in our society and that only difference they had with Government was over precisely where the line was drawn.
This is called a strawman argument. You may have heard of it. Don’t do it; it’s essentially a manipulative way to seed fear, uncertainty and doubt. If that’s your goal then you shouldn’t been in journalism.
Without the Liberals support, without the Coalition, Government will not be able to get its mandatory plan through the Senate if it is re-elected.
What? I don’t know how to interpret this sentence; is it just a statement, a request to put pressure on the Liberal party, or political campaigning for Labor? I’m very confused.
Regardless, even with the ad hoc voluntary scheme, the accountability and transparency measures that govern the blacklist will need to be passed.
Wrong. Which sites a parent chooses to block in a PC-level filtering program becomes a decision for that parent alone. I don’t see the Government passing a blacklist bill for my AdBlock subscription, so why this? Recommendations are as far as this should go.
This debate has legs in it yet. Certainly the internet filter issue generated more heart than any technology-related public policy debate of the past 30 years.
Yet hardly anyone outside the ISP and technical communities know how it works or the future repercussions of installing black-boxed filtering machines. The mainstream media hasn’t dissected the system for laymen, and articles such as yours continue to pave over all the interesting technical and political detail and tote the benefits while ignoring the problems.
And so much misinformation was propagated about how the filter would work, and what kinds of content that it would capture that what passed for debate often descended into personal abuse and name calling.
And much of the vitriol was heaped on Communication Minister Stephen Conroy, who became a kind of lightning rod for criticism on anything filter related.
Surely you’re familiar with how dishonesty from the Government leads to distrust amongst the people. We distrust Conroy and associates because time and time again they’re used inaccurate language, misinformation and demagoguery when describing the filter. Conroy shouldn’t have his post because he isn’t technically competent. The position, especially in this debate, requires explicit technical knowledge which he doesn’t possess.
Perhaps we should put Fred Nile into the Communication Minister position. I’m sure Mr Nile’s personal views wouldn’t affect the decisions he makes as part of his responsibility to reflect public opinion in a senior political position with the power to limit the transfer of information. Behold the second reason we distrust Mr Conroy: decisions with serious, long-reaching consequences require a completely objective viewpoint, and that hasn’t been demonstrated.
The Coalition has enjoyed watching Senator Conroy twist in the breeze over this policy for well over a year. Finally they have announced which way they’ll jump on this issue.
That the Coalition has tentatively grown a single vertebrae of a spine shouldn’t distract from the fact that their otherwise jelly-like corpse has been silently flapping in said breeze for two years. Their politicians waited until polling group returns showed they could use the issue to boost percentages, not that they truly believe what’s said in their media release. Politics in this country (at least for the two intractable parties) has devolved into vague promises of unique perspectives and solutions while effectively paraphrasing the opposing party’s policies and working only to maintain a sad and sorry status-quo.
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Articles about potentially crucial topics such as Internet filtering require statistics, frank language and the ability to understand a deep, technical subject’s consequences in both the technical and societal areas. If you have the vantage of a journalistic soapbox and only have a fleeting grasp on the topic — or even worse a politically-biased viewpoint — you run the risk of turning a complex argument into a bunch of talking points and subjective gum flapping.
Come on guys, journalism’s core is objectivity. Watered-down reporting and opinion-seeking has drained the media of its ability to present tangible facts that actually prompt readers to consider their position on an issue. Weaving in your opinion between facts complicates your readers’ ability to analyse and make decisions since they first have to extract truth from fiction — and that’s supposed to be your job!