Australia to spend $189 million on anti-porn tech initiative
Posted by Will76, Source: Article arstechnica.com - 08/14/2007 12:19:37 PM
Australia's prime minister John Howard and opposition leader Kevin Rudd revealed the Australian government's sweeping new $189 million anti-pornography initiative on Friday at an event hosted by the Australian Christian Lobby. During the presentation, which was broadcast to over 700 Australian churches, Howard discussed Christian values and described the government's latest costly plans for preventing pictures of naked people from clogging The Tubes.
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Approximately $89 million will be used to establish Australia's National Filter Scheme, which will impose burdensome filtering requirements on ISPs and provide Australian citizens with free* access to PC-based Internet filtering software. The filtering systems will leverage the Australian Communications and Media Authority's official Blacklist, which is based on the country's National Classification Scheme. According to a statement issued on Friday by communications minister Helen Coonan, the Australian Communications and Media Authority is also evaluating plans to extend the Blacklist to include "terrorism and cyber-crime sites upon prescription by the Attorney-General."
Approximately $22 million will be spent on a broad "public awareness and education campaign" to inform parents of Internet safety issues, and another $11.7 million will be used to establish community outreach programs that will push "the Internet safety message" into thousands of schools. Additionally, the government plans to establish a consultative working group to find a "workable solution" to combat "the use of social networking web sites by predators to contact and groom children via the internet."
Only last year, the Australian government spent $116 million on a similar initiative, $93 million of which was used to provide free* Internet filtering software to families for a three-year period. At the time, Coonan said in a statement that the government's three separate studies on the efficacy of ISP-level filtering found "significant problems with content filter products operating at the ISP-level," and Coonan cited ease of circumvention and limited filtering control when arguing that ISP-level filtering isn't as effective as PC-based filtering. It is ironic that Australia's latest costly anti-pornography initiative leverages the same kind of ISP-level filtering technologies that were dismissed as inadequate only a year ago. One wonders what kind of improvements have been in the filtering technology field since then
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Related StoriesProposal to erect XXX domain faces stiff opposition
Approximately $89 million will be used to establish Australia's National Filter Scheme, which will impose burdensome filtering requirements on ISPs and provide Australian citizens with free* access to PC-based Internet filtering software. The filtering systems will leverage the Australian Communications and Media Authority's official Blacklist, which is based on the country's National Classification Scheme. According to a statement issued on Friday by communications minister Helen Coonan, the Australian Communications and Media Authority is also evaluating plans to extend the Blacklist to include "terrorism and cyber-crime sites upon prescription by the Attorney-General."
Approximately $22 million will be spent on a broad "public awareness and education campaign" to inform parents of Internet safety issues, and another $11.7 million will be used to establish community outreach programs that will push "the Internet safety message" into thousands of schools. Additionally, the government plans to establish a consultative working group to find a "workable solution" to combat "the use of social networking web sites by predators to contact and groom children via the internet."
Only last year, the Australian government spent $116 million on a similar initiative, $93 million of which was used to provide free* Internet filtering software to families for a three-year period. At the time, Coonan said in a statement that the government's three separate studies on the efficacy of ISP-level filtering found "significant problems with content filter products operating at the ISP-level," and Coonan cited ease of circumvention and limited filtering control when arguing that ISP-level filtering isn't as effective as PC-based filtering. It is ironic that Australia's latest costly anti-pornography initiative leverages the same kind of ISP-level filtering technologies that were dismissed as inadequate only a year ago. One wonders what kind of improvements have been in the filtering technology field since then
