SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — Following the appearance of the Australian government’s secret blacklist of websites on the internet, the foremost proponent of Australia’s plan to censor the Web has admitted the proposed regime won’t do much — if anything — to stop child predation where its byproducts are most egregious.Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the censorship plan was no “silver bullet” for stopping child pornography — but then, the government never promised it would be, he added.
“We’ve never tried to pretend that this was a silver bullet,” Conroy told The Advertiser. “We’ve never tried to suggest this was the sole solution.”
The whistleblower website Wikileaks in mid-March published the official blacklist, compiled by the Australian Communications and Media Authority. Critics of the unpopular censorship scheme said the list did nothing to address a growing concern about the amount of child pornography traded on peer-to-peer networks. In addition, some castigated the list as more indicative of a desire to block material critical of the government than material that violates the public conscience.
“If I stood up anywhere and said, ‘hey, this filter will block peer-to-peer,’ then rightfully I should be ridiculed,” Conroy told The Advertiser. “I’ve never said that…. It is not designed to deal with peer-to-peer.”
Conroy also said he did not intend to block political content.
“I don’t want to block political content,” he noted. “[I’ve] never said we were going to block political content.
“This is patently nonsense,” he added. “If you read what is actually in our policy [which] we took to the election, if you listen to what people claim we’ve said we’re going to do, the gulf could not be wider.”
