Labor's internet filtering policy isn't being discussed in the run-up to the election but its impact on Australia is significant.

Championed by Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, the $30million+ filter is being sold by Labor as an internet block for child pornography, bestiality and extreme pornography with 'wide ranging support from the Australian public' and 'only minimal opposition against'.

But after a new, lengthy investigation it transpires that virtually none of this is true. What Australia will get from this internet filter is a framework for censorship that doesn't stop "the worst of the worst" but will absolutely curtail discussion on politically incorrect topics like euthanasia, safe drug taking and graffiti while banning relatively-tame adult content.

Below we examine the filter from the point of view of the people who know most about it, Australia's tech community, which in the past week has united in one last ditch attempt to bring Labor's censorship policy into the open and bring its discussion into the mainstream media in the run up to the election.

Support for the filter boils down to a handful of pro-censorship lobbyists claiming to be speaking for all Australians. The opposition is sizeable, informed and has put its detailed case into the open, backed with numerous polls and abundant technical information and show why the filter being touted simply won't protect anyone from child porn to virtually any degree. The following is long, but hopefully simplifies the situation enough for mainstream media and political journalists to at least question Labor (and the other political parties) about and let Australian's know that currently, "Moving Forward" under Labor brings with it censorship the like of which hasn't been seen in the Western world before.

This morning, an online poll closed with 98% of 38,000 respondents saying they would not vote for a political party that supported the internet filter. While the ALP is unlikely to be worried by a few tens of thousands of votes, the poll is significant in that it was promoted by an unprecedented alliance of almost every major technology publication and community in the country including the Sydney Morning Herald, News.com.au, PC Authority, Australian Personal Computer, PC User, PC World, Good Gear Guide, ITnews, ITWire, Delimiter, Atomic, Gizmodo, Life Hacker and the large OCAU online community. A version of it can be seen here. The only two major absentees were CBS Media (publisher of CNET and ZDNet) and the large Whirlpool online community, both of which have run similar polls with similar results in the near past.

The result underlines the fact that Australia's technology community is unequivocally against Senator Conroy's internet filter. Even if you regard this recent poll as a protest vote, with wide margins for error, it echoes the results of dozens of major previous polls before it including Whirlpool's thorough survey in 2009(23,500+ votes, 93% against) and SMH's poll in May (69,000, 99% against). Read anyone of the above publications, and there's a history of rebellion against the filter.

Opposition also comes from pressure groups such as the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, GetUp! Australia and the Australian Sex Party, organisations like Euthanasia group Exit, plus Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook.

Conroy cites support for the filter using a McNair poll commissioned by the ABC's Hungry Beast. The poll found 80% of respondents would be in favour of an internet filter that cut out Refused Classification (RC) content. However, the poll invoked large criticism for not properly explaining what RC content was. McNair summarised RC as being, "Images and information about one or more of the following: child sex abuse; bestiality; sexual violence; gratuitous, exploitative or offensive sexual fetishes; and detailed instructions on or promotion of crime, violence or use of illegal drugs". No mention was made of content being blocked for being politically incorrect. Conroy later told Four Corners that this poll demonstrated how, "the Australian public overwhelmingly believe that Refused Classification is a reasonable classification. They demonstrated that in a reputable poll". No it didn't.

But by focusing on the less contentious aspects of RC content, is it any wonder they were in favour of it? If the same respondents knew how much it was costing, that it wouldn't and couldn't work along with what else was being censored, it's likely the result would swing the other way. In May the Safer Internet Group commissioned a poll by GA Research which discovered, as the Sydney Morning Herald put it, "That the more parents found out about the proposed filter, the less they support it". The problem is that almost every pro-filter poll has been presented with a question along the lines of, "Would you like a filter which blocks child porn?". What it also shows is that if a major pollster like McNair can't get a handle on the filter, what hope is there for mainstream media? While we're certain the whole of Australia would love a filter that banished child pornography, this is the last thing that the proposed filter will do.

The filter works by having Internet Service Providers, like BigPond, iiNet and Internode, block specific web page addresses on a blacklist. However, it is facile to circumvent in just seconds by using completely legal services like 'proxy servers' and 'Virtual Private Networks' which are regularly used by corporate employees working from home. Getting round the blacklist at the publisher's end is simple too. Recently, tech site, Gizmodo showed how a blocked page could effectively get off the blacklist by adding a question mark to the end of the web address thereby changing the address enough to make it different. If that subsequent web address was then blocked then any number of meaningless combinations of letters and numbers could be added to the end of the address to avoid blocking too. Internet Industry Association CEO Peter Coroneos summed the situation up to ITnews, "While we support many of the Government's efforts in the online security sphere, we aren't convinced that it [the filter] will have anything more than symbolic value".

The only people who won't be able to readily circumvent the filter are the general public that aren't specifically looking for the blocked content in the first place. What these people will find is that if they ever go looking for detailed information on euthanasia or safe drug taking and in some instances, mild pornography, they won't be able to find it without seeking help on circumventing the filter.

In addition to ease of circumvention the filter is diverting attention and resources to the wrong place. The internet is made up of various elements: the World Wide Web's web pages are just one part (the shop window) of the greater internet. There are also vast information stores called newsgroups, plus Virtual Private Networks, chat rooms, internet messaging services and email which act like back rooms and alleyways. This is the natural domain for criminals and the really offensive material. If you're going to commit a crime it's unlikely to be in the shop window. Those child porn sites that are on the web move around very quickly too - you can read more on this here.

Senator Conroy recently stated that, "No responsible government can sit there and do nothing if there's 355 child abuse websites on the public internet." However, the 'public internet' consists of more than one trillion individual web pages rendering any attempts at blocking all of the 'bad' sites futile. Hypothetically, a team of 100 censorship engineers investigating 1000 pages every day each would take over 27,000 years to investigate what's online today, and in that time countless other pages would have appeared. Any filter couldn't ever be considered remotely complete and any public faith that the filter will in some way protect them is entirely unfounded.

Establishing whether the public need protecting in the first place is a tricky matter. Running a poll asking people if they had ever seen any child pornography is unlikely to provide reliable results with few people wanting to say yes to such a question under any circumstances. We can only go on anecdotal evidence here. Personally I've used the internet practically every day since the beginning of the World Wide Web and I've seen just about every disgusting thing there is to see, but I've never once seen child pornography or necrophilia. Discussion with online communities suggests that this experience is universal. Only one person I know has said they'd seen something terrible involving children and that came from following a false music-related link which directed them to one such site. They called the police. At present no one has provided statistics or any evidence saying that accidentally accessing these sites is a problem that actually exists.

Another issue is that the internet is global and Australia's broad RC guidelines are at odds to mainstream media coming out of other countries. Decapitated hostages, people dying in accidents and crime scene pictures are not just widely available all over the web, but many come from reputable news sources and even prime time news shows in regions like Eastern Europe, The Middle East and South America. In Amsterdam's Sex Museum there is a restricted section which warns sensitive people that what they are about to see is not for the squeamish. In it there are numerous photographs of women having sex with various animals. The Sex Museum is listed as a major tourist attraction in most guides to Amsterdam and is frequently mentioned by Australian tourism publications as being one the main things to see when in Amsterdam. While few Australians are likely to want to see such content in their mainstream media, anti-censorship bodies and groups caught up in RC classification are adamant that it's up to the individual to decide for themselves and not the government what they see online. The government routinely counters that it's the classification board that decides, but the board does not do what the government says it does and the government is the body that's empowering it.

At the sharp end of the argument is the international Euthanasia group, Exit. A recent episode of Four Corners detailed how groups of pensioners were attending nationwide courses which literally taught them how to hack the filter in order to access (at least the key elements of) euthanasia information sites like, peacefulpillhandbook.com which would be blocked by the filter. The full transcript can be read here. Senator Conroy insists, "Individual pages are targeted. Websites are not. This common argument that the euthanasia websites will be targeted and banned is just false. If there is a detailed instruction in self-harm, yes, that page would be targeted but the website and the discussion around euthanasia would not. So for those who keep trying to make this argument, they're simply misleading Australians." Host Quentin McDermott countered that, "In fact, the entire online version of the Peaceful Pill Handbook and related videos will be blocked if a mandatory filter is introduced." And summed up by saying, "The spectacle of elderly folk finding ways to bypass a filter intended to protect children online begs the question - how on earth did we get to this point?"

Much has been made about whether the list should be made public or not. But the question is pointless. It will go public whether by whistle blowing or a simple process of reverse engineering (the latter having been promised by online entities already). Whether anyone should reverse engineer and publish it is irrelevant. That's what happens on the internet and anyone who is adamant that it won't simply doesn't understand the internet. The internet has very many people who value their privacy to extreme degrees and will rebel against any government censorship action just out of principle - whether it's their own government or not. Already, in March 2009, an early version of the blacklist appeared on award-winning whistleblowing website Wikileaks.org which notably released videos of US Army "collateral damage" incidents given to it by anonymous whistleblowers. The videos showed civilians and journalists being killed by the US Army. Wikileaks itself was named on the blacklist. The list was reported on around the world with some Australian journalists investigating the sites on it citing journalistic duty. In this regard the filter was counterproductive in that it acted as a web directory for some of the most heinous websites on the internet. One can't imagine that with the global exposure that the story got, many people, including children, didn't visit the site out of morbid curiosity or whatever reason. Even if Australian kids did find it harder to access child pornography and RC content because of the filter, to the same degree, kids in other countries will find it more easily thanks to an Australian government sponsored directory of websites that wasn't otherwise available before.

Although Senator Conroy plays down the impact of the filter, saying that determined people can get around it if they really want to, critics are concerned that Conroy's non-policing of filter circumvention will not be mirrored by future governments who may also broaden the scope of the censorship it affords. He told Four Corners, that he "absolutely guaranteed" that no future Labor government would let this happen and subsequently that "If a majority of the Parliament in the future want to broaden the classification, well then, Australians should stand up and say 'just a minute', and I'll be one of them." We contacted Conroy's office to ask how the Senator guaranteed this would not happen but the question was not answered. The notion that all future Australian governments will be formed by Labor is optimistic of Conroy to say the least. That future governments, intent on censorship (probably under banners of "child protection" and "terrorism"), would listen to people "standing up and saying 'just a minute'" is more optimistic yet, given the contempt Conroy himself has shown to all the people disagreeing with him.

While many tens of thousands of Australians are demonstrably against the filter, finding communities that actively support it is somewhat harder. While Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have both stated they support the Senator and his filter, they haven't addressed any of its points or said why. In the face of all the communities and community leaders against the filter, the same few names keep coming out in support of it, principally Child Wise CEO Bernadette McMenamin, the Australian Christian Lobby's Jim Wallace and Professor Clive Hamilton of Charles Sturt University.

At the Media Connect conference of Australian technology journalists in 2008 McMenamin addressed the conference stating that "she did not understand the technical side of the filter" but that "she supported it anyway". After weathering criticism from the attending journalists she stated that only child molesters could protest against the filter - something that mortally offended everyone attending, especially the parents in the room. Her response to the subsequent backlash was, "won't someone please think of the children". When McMenamin published her views in The Australian newspaper in January 2008, they drew similar criticism. Journalist, Blogger and ABC Unleashed contributor, Stilgherrian commented at the time, "The fact that Ms McMenamin is willing to hand the government a comprehensive online censorship mechanism while chasing this chimera of a Magick Filter only shows how naive her understanding of the Internet is, and how her passion has clouded her understanding of the bigger picture."

McMenamin is not alone. Senator Conroy recently recommitted himself to the filter by saying, "I'm not into opting in to child porn" in response to Labor Senator Kate Lundy and Greens Senator Scott Ludlam's speeches against it. If they're right, and the only people who protest against the filter are child molesters, then it's a good job Australia is separated from the rest of the world by so much ocean. The implication that the other Senators were opting into child porn was not covered by mainstream media.

The Christian Lobby's Jim Wallace told Four Corners that he found it "quite amazing" that anyone would oppose the filter plans. He told Quentin McDermott of his unabashed censorship ideals, "The bigger principle here is to establish the principle that the internet is not a free zone and I think that given the movement of technology and given the expectation of society that what the Government is proposing is therefore a good solution." He also stated, "We've lobbied the Government of course and we've lobbied quite hard. We got the first commitment to this prior to the last election and you know we're happy to see that the Government is delivering on it."

Professor Hamilton, a reputed academic, is the calming face of the learned pro-censorship movement. He told Four Corners, "that [his group] commissioned a poll which showed that parents of teenage children are extremely concerned about their children's access to porn on the Internet and when we asked them explicitly whether they would support a mandatory filter on Internet service providers to prevent extreme and violent pornography coming into the home an astonishing 93 per cent said yes they would support that. I mean that's almost unheard of in any survey such a resounding almost unanimous view." He went on to say, "We now we have this strange alliance in support of Internet filtering ... Christian conservatives, along with feminists, social progressives such as myself and a vast number of parents and ordinary punters out there. That's how politics works."

And it's these claims which sum up the filter's supporters. The lobbyists are playing politics and claiming ownership of anyone who hasn't overtly come out against the filter - the great unspoken majority: those that don't actually know what the filter will and will not do. While Hamilton may have polls to back up his claims, there are many more from the anti-filter side and those ones come with detailed explanations on why they are the way they are, joined most of the time by thousands of comments from concerned Australians. All the arguments are open and in the public domain and can be easily accessed by a quick Google search. The pro-filter side is conveniently hidden but we're assured it's there. Get used to that if the filter comes to pass.

Certainly the anti-filter movement has lost out to the political skills of the lobbyists thus far as testified by the failure to bring the censorship issue into the open. The less debate there is, the more likely the pro-filter movement will succeed in its aims. It's an uphill battle though ... compare the length of this article with the pro-filter's "Shall we ban child porn?" brevity. That doesn't make it right though. As for why the ALP is even bothering to continue with such an unpopular policy when it needs all the support it can get, that almost certainly comes down to politics too: ironically, another policy backflip would almost certainly be leapt on by mainstream media and cost Labor the election. So we're likely stuck with censorship unless things change drastically.

Conroy goes to great lengths to point out that this is not a government run filter, but that it will be run by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) which comes under the Attorney General's department. RC is decided by ACMA's Classification Board and uses broad guidelines with regards to what to censor. Sites will only be banned if a complaint is received specifically about them and it falls under RC guidelines - music to the ears of ultra-conservative groups. The board refused to comment on the specific matters we asked about, but then that's how it operates. Everything is dealt with on a case by case basis. Its own history records conflicting classifications, with some media being both banned and classified for the same thing. There are no hard and fast rules.

But while the Classification Board won't disclose exactly what will and will not be refused classification, we did talk to people on the bleeding edge of the rulings: sex shop owners and adult publishers. Their opinion was unanimous: the RC rules were impossibly broad and grey which left them with no choice but to err on the side of caution in order to guarantee classification. Sex shop owners felt they were being forced out of business as they weren't allowed to sell books, magazines and DVDs with content that was widely available on the internet.

This all flies in the face of Senator Conroy's assertions that "only the worst of the worst will be banned". If you take your definition of mild pornography from what's available online, you'll find what's available in the sex shops - what has been classified acceptable - as positively prudish. We got hold of a document used by an adult publisher which explicitly detailed what should be submitted for classification and what should not on the grounds that similar content has been banned before and will likely be banned again. It details how girls having a play fight, giggling with plastic swords, represented sexual violence and would be classified RC. Also, any images of bondage of any kind with any woman or man being playfully tied up or in any restraints whatsoever would be refused classification. All Sado Masochistic practices, all domination would be refused classification too. We asked the classification board to verify the claims in the document, but it refused. Any Australians that are into these practices should know that although the classification guidelines lead with, "Adults should be able to read, hear and see what they want", your choices are officially, "revolting or abhorrent phenomena ... that offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults". The full guidelines can be seen here.

Elsewhere, the board has come under fire for refusing classification to pictures of women with small breasts on the grounds they look like children - something that has outraged women's groups for stigmatising women who don't have large breasts. Also videos featuring the natural act of female ejaculation on the (erroneous) grounds that it is in fact an obscene "golden shower" have also been classified RC.

Senator Conroy's office laughed off the suggestion that small breasts and female ejaculation would be banned and the classification board also denied doing so either. However, evidence exists to show that both have been classified RC in Australia. According to Australian Sex Party founder Fiona Patten, at an ACMA publications training day being run by Classification Education Officer Antonny Ivancic and four other officers last October, in "one of the slides the reason the RC was given [was because] the woman had under developed breasts and this made her appear under 18. The image was of a woman outside by a pool. There were no pigtails, fluffy toys or anything else in the image that would have you believe that the publisher was trying to portray her as a minor. There was some discussion around the room about this decision. Other images that had been refused classification mentioned the body of the model but also the way that she photographed". As for female ejaculation, films containing it have indeed been banned - Classification Number 237341 is one such example. It all makes a mockery of Conroy's "worst of the worst claims" and he has demonstrated that he doesn't actually know what is being banned by the board he is entrusting so much power to.

To make matters more confusing, different States deal with classification in different ways. At present RC material is only illegal in Western Australia. Conversely X18+ material is only available on sale in ACT and Northern Territory. Consequently, depending on where you are, you may get fined or sent to jail for selling material classified legal by the Federal government. With pornography being added to Australian landing cards last September (to no media furore whatsoever), all visitors coming to Australia with pornography on their laptops or phones, must now declare it, have it screened by customs and hope that it isn't deemed RC as they can be fined, refused entry or jailed depending on what they have. Barely any mention has been made of this in the Australian and international media - surprising considering the attention given to the landing cards dealings with drugs and quarantine. The Australian Sex Party's Fiona Patten told us you can "Risk five year jail terms for bringing in more than 25 copies of an RC film under the new Tier One Customs regulations" which a sex shop owner (or tourist) can do if they inadvertently import anything deemed RC. Furthermore, in April this year, New South Wales man Darrell Cohen, a gay 23-year old sex shop owner was sent to prison for, as Patten states, "Selling 45 Federally classified X-rated films and five RC films ... gay mild ... stuff, nothing with animals or anything. First time in the western world that someone has gone to jail for selling a federal government approved film ... It's just unbelievable that in 2010 when you can get all manner of perversity on the internet, and when Conroy has specifically said the filter will not target X-rated material because it's 'legal' that a young man can go to jail for selling same."

While the full scope of RC guidelines goes beyond this article, it's clear that it's all but impossible to predict much of what will be filtered and what won't be. Perhaps this really did get through to the Senator lately as he recently announced a one year delay to the filter while the RC system was reorganised. Tony Abbott too was recently quoted by Kotaku as saying the system was "broken". It will still provide the basis of a future Labor filter though. It will still censor politically incorrect sites.

The filter did not become law under the current government but earlier this year the Senator reminded us that "We took our filtering proposal to the Australian public and we were elected on it." If this comes as news to you, bear in mind that this is exactly what will happen in one year's time. That it is not being mentioned by a mainstream media, in full election mode, is a disservice to Australia. If Australia wants to vote for censorship then it should be made aware of all the details around it. It should not just accept that the filter will protect the Australian public from things like child porn when it categorically will not. Opposition to it is near total among the communities that actually understand what is happening (Australia's tech community for one) and recognise the devil in the detail. Ultimately, those that know about this filter are against it. Those who don't are having their opinion hijacked by a few pro-censorship lobbyists and politicians. Australia is free to vote for censorship if it wants, but it must go into this election informed and with its eyes open. Australia's media has a moral and professional obligation to ensure that it does so and so far it has failed. It's not too late, but the time has come to ask the pollies, "Do you support censorship?"

Nick Ross is the ABC's new technology and games editor.