CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA — As the Australian government ramps up to a beta deployment of its new mandatory internet filtering system, citizens are venting their outrage at the proposed size and nature of the blacklist. The trial is expected to start before Christmas and last six weeks with ISPs and surfers who have volunteered to participate.According to a recent report, Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy plans to begin the test with a blacklist of about 10,000 sites, 1,300 of which were provided by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

“The pilot will specifically test filtering against the ACMA blacklist of prohibited content, which is mostly child pornography, as well as filtering of other unwanted content,” Conroy told Parliament last week. “While the ACMA blacklist is currently around 1,300 URLs, the pilot will test against this list as well as filtering for a range of URLs to around 10,000 so that the impacts on network performance of a larger blacklist can be examined.”

As Australian citizens see the situation, the problem is not just with a nebulous definition of “unwanted content,” but also with glitches already known to exist in the software. ACMA ran its own test of the process earlier this year and determined the technology could slow internet access by as much as 87-percent.

Free-speech advocates have accused Conroy of attempting to censor not only adult content from the Web, but also political speech that is critical of his party’s control of the government.

“As long as the 10,000 sites include all political party websites and all sites ending in gov.au, I’ll agree to the filtering,” one Queensland reader wrote at the Courier Mail newspaper’s website.

Another asked, “”Can I elect to filter all political advertising from my television, newspapers, mailbox, etc.? If I never have to see any of that crap again, I will be in heaven.”

Others saw fewer benefits in the plan.

“Why is some faceless bureaucrat to be given the same powers to censor our internet access as a prison screw has over the perversions of an uncontrollable pedophile?” one reader wanted to know. “The mechanics are different, but that is the ultimate result of the federal government’s ill-considered and ill-liberal plan to filter the internet.”

“This is typical of a government that thinks it knows better than the people that voted them in and the arrogance of [Prime Minister Kevin] Rudd to think he should impose his morals and ideals on the population,” another fumed. “This is a communist style of imposition, and the dopes that voted Labor into power should wake up to themselves.”

Another of the 271 comments posted at the paper’s website within 24 hours suggested the Labor Party currently in power may find itself deposed in the next election.