Professor Landfeldt, one of Australia's leading
telecommunications experts, says some of the fundamental flaws of
the scheme raised in his report include:
� All filtering systems will be easily circumvented using
readily available software.
� Censors maintaining the blacklist will never be able to
keep up with the amount of new content published on the web every
second.
� Filters using real-time analysis of sites to determine
whether content is inappropriate are not effective, capture wanted
content, are easy to bypass and slow network speeds exponentially
as accuracy increases.
� Entire user-generated content sites such as YouTube and
Wikipedia could be blocked over a single video or article.
� Filters would be costly and difficult to implement for
ISPs and put many smaller ISPs out of business.
� While the communciations authority's blacklist would be
withheld from internet users, all 700 ISPs would have access to it,
so it could easily be leaked.
� The filters would not censor content on peer-to-peer
file sharing networks such as LimeWire, chat rooms, email and
instant messaging;
� ISPs and the Government could be legally liable for the
scheme's failures, particularly as content providers have no right
to appeal against being blocked unnecessarily.
Kerry J on 20 Mar 09Doubt has been cast on the federal government's proposed internet censorship regime after a blacklist of banned websites was leaked online. Note: this article incorrectly suggests that Wikileaks has been removed. The Wikileaks site says the org's servers were overwhelmed by popular demand.
