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Aussie pols can be idiots, too: Net filtering plan won’t stop evildoers—and will punish legit users
December 12, 2008 | 6:24 am
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By David Rothman
Some of the brightest, most clueful readers of TeleRead are from Down Under. I’d welcome their thoughts on the anti-porn filtering plan that the Australian government wants to inflict on them—even though it clearly wouldn’t stop porn or terrorism. A test is about to begin.
Excerpt from the New York Times:
[Mark White, an executive with an Internet services provider] said the mandatory filter was unlikely to work because it would not monitor illegal activity on peer-to-peer or file-sharing networks, where most child pornography and other illegal content is exchanged. The filter would also slow Internet browsing speeds for all regardless of whether they were trying to access forbidden sites, he said.
Exactly. Children are worth protecting, with tough penalties for molesters, and I’m all in favor of legal and effective anti-terrorism precautions; but this won’t do the trick. The world need protection, all right—protection from the stupidity of politicians and bureaucrats.
The e-book angle: Obvious. Filter the evil Net first, then move on to e-bookstores.
Image: Sydney, from Wikipedia piece (credit here).
Technorati Tags: Australia,Australian
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Comments:
I think the quote is as much wrong as it is write. At risk of invoking Godwin’s law, saying that it’s a bad idea “because it would not monitor illegal activity on peer-to-peer or file-sharing networks, where most child pornography and other illegal content is exchanged” is like saying that exterminating jews is a bad idea “because you’ll never get them all”. There are so many far more significant reasons why it’s a bad idea that this one oughtn’t even to register!
Apart from the inability to scan everything and the slowdowns, there’s the fact that even if you could scan everything, you’ll never get 0% false negatives, and along the way you’ll get an extremely high rate of false positives. Simple stats: If 0.01% of your pages loaded are illegal, and you only get 1 in 1000 wrong, your false positives are still going to outnumber your correct matches 10 to 1! Not to mention that even human experts can’t always agree on what constitutes illegality, or child pornography.
And every false positive chills free speech a bit further.
I have yet to see convincing evidence that there was ever a particular problem with children being exposed to pornography on the internet. The issue was manufactured by politicians to win votes as far as I can see.