Excogitate Cake

Helping Australia? May 31, 2010

Well I thought I had better actually use this blog for it’s intended purpose once in a while.. i.e. blogging.

What to talk about? There has been a lot going on in the world recently, horrendous oil spills/leaks, Facebook having it’s way with our private data and Queensland education regressing into the dark ages. I’m sure I’ll get to those juicy topics in the near future, but for now I’d like to talk about a topic which I care passionately about.. Conroys looming Internet Filter.

There are so many reasons why the filter is a bad idea.  Unfortunately most of these reasons are only revealed by having either specialized knowledge (techy types) or by people who can look past the face value of the proposed filter and apply some wholesome critical thinking skills. Never-mind the largely uninformed public opinion of the filter, i’m more disturbed by how rarely these simple critical thinking skills are used within the Australian Government.

For the purposes of this article we can ignore the horrendous technical aspects of the filter and just assume that it has a flawless technical component. Breaking the proposed filter down to it’s most simple actions and goals still results in a self refuting failure (which i’ll eviscerate here for good measure).

The filter is (apparently) being introduced to give Australian Internet surfers an RC material free browsing experience. Which is where we run headlong into the main problem.. when has the accidental finding of child pornography or illegal material ever been raised as a problem by anyone? I challenge any supporters of the filter to provide some evidence that an unfiltered Internet has ever posed any problems for an innocent Australian citizen stumbling onto illegal content. It just doesn’t happen.

If you’re not searching for illegal material, you won’t find it.. and if you ARE searching for illegal material then not much is going to stop you from finding it. Senator Conroy has even admitted himself that circumventing the filter is not hard to do and it’s not illegal to do so… how can this massive contradiction not bring the plan to a shuddering halt?

There are so many other mind boggling problems with the filter, but I find this one short and sweet contradiction in the plan the most dumbfounding. Maybe a Government over-site committee could be formed which takes the time to apply these elementary logical tests to Government proposals.

I really wish our Government would do things because they are the right thing to to.. rather than doing it to win the votes of the uninformed masses.

Please support these organizations who are trying their best to inform the uninformed.

http://www.efa.org.au/

http://www.somebodythinkofthechildren.com/