The Rudd government is planning to implement its $126 million Plan for Cyber Safety. This was sold to Australian voters as a means to prevent children from accessing inappropriate content, but will include mandatory filtering for all Australians. If you opt out of the child-safe filter, one would assume you get unfettered access but you would be wrong. Instead, you will be put onto a lighter version of the filter that filters content from a “blacklist of illegal and prohibited content” decided upon by the government.

Exactly what will be considered illegal and what will be prohibited isn’t clear, but there are concerns for sites dealing with topics such as euthenasia, drugs and political protest. Such a filter will also slow net connections significantly as well as incorrectly blocking some other websites. A trial was conducted by the Australian Communication and Media Authority, and found:

• One filter caused a 22% drop in speed even when it was *not* performing filtering;
• Only one of the six filters had an acceptable level of performance (a drop of 2% in a laboratory trial), the others causing drops in speed of between 21% and 86%;
• The most accurate filters were often the slowest;
• All filters tested had problems with under-blocking, allowing access to between 2% and 13% of material that they should have blocked; and
• All filters tested had serious problems with over-blocking, wrongly blocking access to between 1.3% and 7.8% of the websites tested.

Learn more about this censorship at Electronic Frontiers Australia.

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