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Courtesy of the "Somebody Think Of The Children" blog

Net censorship plan backlash – BizTech – Technology – smh.com.au.

Stephen Conroy lies like a dog.  So yesterday in Question Time he refuses to retract his statement that this filter is already in place in countries like Canada – a bold faced lie; an untruth to mislead the public.

It’s not just that this Labor Government has shown it is just as out of touch as the previous Liberal Government on Tech issues, my disappointment lies with the fact that this kind of censorship is a complete attack on Freedom itself.

Pay particular attention to Senators Xenophon and Fielding – Labor is courting them hard to support them, and both want to add to the censorship list – yes it starts with Kiddie Porn, and who’d object to that?  But now we’re talking all porn, and gambling to boot.  What’s next?  Are we going to have to read from the Bible before visiting a site?  Oh well, don’t be ridiculous – only sites with Bible verses already existing on them will be allowed through the filter.

Which leads some to the question why am I so opposed to this if it will block Kiddie Porn?  If it works just a fraction, isn’t that the price to pay for the censorship of a few wrongly classified sites and a little (86%) loss in speed?

Well, aside from the fact that the list of “bad things” is growing and Australia is already so far behind the ball in the Tech game that it will hurt our already struggling IT industry – just last week the CEO of Microsoft was calling on Australia to build the infrastructure to give us what most of the developed world already has: broadband (and if you think you’ve got it, you don’t.  Go see broadband in America.  Our Nation is stuck in 1987) – aside from all of that, he’s the problem:

No one who wants Kiddie Porn just types “Kiddie Porn” into Google.  Yes, we’re spending millions (nearing billions) on this, and forsaking our rights and it won’t even stop illegal P2P file sharing, which, no doubt is where most of the Kiddie Porn trading is done.

This is the equivalent of stopping Bank Robberies by lowering the speed limits in this country to 20 kph, so that get-away cars will be easier to catch.  It totally disregards the fact that the crims will speed anyway, it will hurt everyone else, it will destroy business, and it will make us look like bloomin’ idiots to the rest of the world because we are so stupid.

Except it’s worse; we’re not talking about making it to work on time, we’re talking about being able to speak your mind.  We’re talking about building a police state.