Antony Funnell: Hello, I'm Antony Funnell and this is the Media Report on ABC Radio National.

There's been quite a deal of comment online these past few weeks over plans for a new government-regulated internet filtering system for Australia.

Now last year, the Howard administration released a filter package that people could install onto their home computers in order to screen-out sites they thought were either objectionable and/or dangerous.

The Howard government's approach was about choice, giving people the option to choose whether or not they wanted to use such a filter. But now its successor, the Rudd government, has decided there's a need for a mandatory filtering system to screen all Australian computers.

Their plan will require internet service providers, or ISPs, to block sites designated to be harmful, therefore preventing ordinary Australians from being able to access them.

Now as you can imagine, there are already questions being raised about what sort of sites will be banned by the government, and what sort of public transparency there'll be to the entire process.

The minister for communications is Senator Stephen Conroy.

Stephen Conroy: Well what we're proposing is that we actually have an election commitment. It was stated clearly before the election to protect Australian families and kids from some material that is currently on the net. Now at the moment there is illegal material on the net, things like child pornography, things like ultra-violent sites; and so what we're seeking to do is take technology and actually enforce the existing law. Now no-one is suggesting, I don't think so far that I've heard, that people want to be able to access child pornography sites, or should be able to access child pornography sites. So just to give this a context: we're seeking to use new and emerging advances to block access to sites like that.

Antony Funnell: But as you'd be aware, I mean there are reports that various senators, including Nick Xenophon and Steve Fielding from Family First, there have been reports that they're keen to access to sites like online gaming sites and also general pornography sites included as banned sites with this filter. What's your view on that, and is that a consideration being taken into account by the government?

Stephen Conroy: This is a long-standing election commitment. We made this commitment back when Kim Beazley was leader of the Labor Party, so just to give you an indication, this is a long-standing position we've been advocating. The trouble is ...

Antony Funnell: But could things like general pornography sites and gambling sites be included on the list of banned sites?

Stephen Conroy: Well as I said, what we're seeking to do is implement our election commitments and Senators should be aware what our election commitments are. There's been a number of wild and inaccurate assertions about what Labor's policy is, and let me be clear: we are committed to work with the industry to see if it is technically feasible. That's why we've conducted a laboratory test, and we're moving to conduct a live test with ISPs. That's Labor's policies. At this stage, the very early stages of working with the industry, because there's a lot of claims about the degradation of the internet. If I could just address those for a minute. You've seen the sort of filtering we're talking about introduced in a range of other countries like the UK, Sweden, Norway, France and New Zealand, and there has been no determinal effect on internet speed or performance. We're aware of the concerns...

Antony Funnell: A lot of people will be concerned about what will be on that list of banned sites. Who will determine what are the banned sites, and will that list of banned sites...

Stephen Conroy: There's actually a list today.

Antony Funnell: Well what will be included on their sites?

Stephen Conroy: There's actually an existing list. I mean people are saying suddenly 'Where's this list come from?' It actually exists today. If offensive content is hosted by Australian ISPs now, and when we say offensive, refused classification content, then it gets issued with a take-down notice today. This is an existing blacklist. So people are trying to - a whole range of people have said, 'Hey, let's expand this'. That's a debate that we will come to. What we're trying to establish at the moment, we're no further than establishing at the moment, whether it's technically feasible. So in terms of what some of the senators want to claim should be included on the blacklist, I'm sure that when we get to the debates down the track, if it proves to be technically feasible, there'll be a whole range of people with a whole range of demands about what should be on the blacklist. But what we've committed to do is practically implement what's on the blacklist at the moment, if it is technically feasible. So as I've said, a lot of wild claims are being made, and now a number of new Senators have bought into the debate, the Greens, Xenophon, Fielding, and they've all got ideas about what they think should or shouldn't be on the blacklist. I mean as an example, I had an argument, not an argument, a discussion with Senate Estimates with a Greens Senator, who believed that euthanasia websites shouldn't be blacklisted. But they're currently illegal under the existing laws. So there's people who would argue something should be taken off the list and there's people who argue something should be included in this list.

So, let me be clear: this is about establishing whether or not it is technically feasible. We're no further down the process than that.

Antony Funnell: The communications minister, Stephen Conroy.

So that's the intent, but what about the practicality?

Can the sort of filtering system Senator Conroy is planning, actually work?

Mark Pesce is a regular guest on the ABC's New Inventors program and he's an honorary lecturer in digital cultures at the University of Sydney.

Mark Pesce: In any open society, any system that attempts to filter the internet, is basically going to run up against the wishes and intents of the people who are using the internet to get what they want. I think an analogy that you could use is if you could imagine you have a highway and there's a pile-up on the highway. And the cars are all stopped from going in one direction, and that's basically the filter. Well are those cars just going to sit there? No. They're going to actually find another route to their destination. And that's essentially what's going to happen when you try to censor the network.

There's a rule called Gilmore's Law; John Gilmore, one of the founders of Sun Micro Systems, so one of the very first companies that really understood how to use the internet. Back in 1993 he said that the network regards censorship as damage, and routes around it. So if you try to censor anything on the internet, it's not so much that the network itself will find its way, but it's the people who are the network, will find their way around to any information that they want.

Antony Funnell: So in terms of that central question about blocking child pornography, and you know, no decent person would say that law enforcement authorities shouldn't be doing their best to stop child pornography. But that central question about blocking it, you have serious doubts, do you that this type of filter will be effective in that regard?

Mark Pesce: Well it's because the entire question of child pornography is a bit of a canard. Child pornography is not something that's just sort of freely and openly available. Child pornography is distributed by human social networks; it may be distributed through electronic means, but it's distributed by individuals who know each other, because they understand how dangerous it is to hold this material. And so law enforcement always works by disrupting those human networks, not by disrupting the technical networks. And so really it's a bit of a canard to say that this has been implemented to protect us from child pornography.

Antony Funnell: The minister for communications says countries like the UK, France and Sweden all have internet filtering schemes. If they can make it work, isn't it reasonable to try something similar here?

Mark Pesce: But the question is, are they making it work? I mean they have systems, but there's no indication that these systems are ever effective anywhere they're implemented. They'll either produce a false positive, so people would not be able to go to a site about breast cancer because it has the word 'breast' in the title. Or something like that. So they'll give a false positive, or they'll simply be ineffective because they won't filter out what you want.

That's not going to be any less true for a system in the UK or in France or in Sweden than it would be in Australia. Now Australia's system as has been described by the senator is more comprehensive, they are more categories covered, which means it would create more false positives.

Antony Funnell: And I know that you have argued in the past that systems are actually designed, there is technology out there to help people in oppressive regimes to hide their identity when they're searching for things on the net, for reasons of democracy, that kind of thing. So presumably Australians, if this net filtering system does come in, some of them will be using some of those systems, some of those technologies that already exist.

Mark Pesce: Yes, I've already been talking to Australians about something called TOR, or the onion-router, which is a system that was developed for people in countries where they don't have freedom of speech, in the case of maybe China, or Iran, or areas like that. And it basically allows you to take the computer, and just by running a piece of software on your normal computer, and browsing normally, it basically what they say is it anonymises it, it makes it impossible to track where you're going or where the information is coming from. So there's no way that you can effectively filter against it.

This software is very easy to use, and one of the things that I've been doing, I've been doing my best to make sure that people in Australia know how to use it. Already Australians use BitTorrent the file-sharing program that's used to distribute television and movies and other things. They use that more often than any other people on the planet, and I suspect that if Conroy gets his filter in, we will also be the biggest per capita users of TOR, because Australians will be using it to get their internet unfiltered.

Antony Funnell: Now there's been a lot of talk in the press over the last couple of weeks about possible unintended consequences of an internet filtering system in terms of slowing down internet speeds. What can you tell us about that?

Mark Pesce: Well as near as we can tell, with the small test that they ran, it slowed down access speeds by about 86%, so it would take us from a nation that's not particularly fast in our broadband, to a nation that's much more molasses-like in broadband. Now whether this is going to be truly annoying or noticeable, it's going to be something that's going to be there, and the more aggressive that the government is about detecting things that are unacceptable, the slower that is, the more processing that's required. And that's essentially going to be a cat-and-mouse race, because not only is the filter going to be easy to get around using technologies like TOR, not only is the filter going to give you false positives, but it's actually going to ruin the quality of the internet experience. So it's going to be a lose, lose, lose situation.

Antony Funnell: And do we know what some of the ISP, the internet service providers, what they think about this move?

Mark Pesce: Well there have been some statements. Someone who runs an ISP in South Australia as a private citizen, sent a letter off to his MP detailing all of the reasons why he thought this was a bad idea, and some of the things that we talked about were in that. Really the ISPs don't want to have to be made the policemen in this situation, and they don't see that there's any need, because the perception of the internet is that yes, there are things out there that are un-TORed and you can go out and find them, but they are not being pushed at you, and if they're not being pushed at you, then why should the ISPs have upon themselves the responsibilities of blocking it.

Antony Funnell: Mark Pesce, from the University of Sydney.

Now as was mentioned earlier, there are already personal filters available to help parents screen the net. And there is the service, Net Alert, set up by the government to provide advice and assistance to parents on the issue of online safety.

Another organisation people turn to for help is a not-for-profit group called Young Media Australia. Its president is Jane Roberts.

Jane Roberts: Young Media Australia gets a lot of contact either through the national helpline that we have, or by internet site Ourselves. And whilst there is a growing number of contacts where people, I have to say are actually quite confused about the internet filtering tools that are out there, and also about their sense of relying on one tool to actually keep the young children safe from the internet. So what we try and promote is that there are a number of filtering tools, but also that those tools are not infallible, and that they actually must be supplemented by if you like, some sort of parental or carer vigilance.

Antony Funnell: And how fallible are they? Not knocking them, but how easy are they to crack, from your experience?

Jane Roberts: Well the wonderful thing about young people these days is that they're actually often far more savvy than their parents who are providing the computer and the material for them. And from our experience we've heard that some of these filters are really only as good as the clever children that are out there, that tend to find ways to work around it. I guess that filters themselves are there as a safeguard, and that if people feel that those safeguards don't always work, it then makes them realise that they need to be using other strategies along with that filter.

Antony Funnell: But as you said, there is confusion about how people go about this, about what these filters will actually do and how they should use them, is that correct?

Jane Roberts: Yes. I mean we try on our website to tell parents that Look, you know, they can block access to certain websites, whether they're based on banned sites or particular words, they can stop a search engine from going in to search for a particular topic that the parent might think is not suitable. They can block access to news groups and chat rooms and they sometimes can even set control on how much time a child can spend online. So there's a range of things that these can do. But my understanding from some of the feedback that we've got is that parents still don't always understand how they work, and again, as we will always say, that internet filters are one tool in a toolkit of ideas that parents need to use if they would like their children to be safe when using an internet.

Antony Funnell: Jane Roberts, the president of the not-for-profit organisation Young Media Australia.