It Is Never Right to Shoot the Messenger
Once again the Australian Government, in league this time with a website filtering company, has revealed a lack of understanding about information and how it works.

This story appears in today's Sydney Morning Herald and dots all the i's and crosses all the t's

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Filter's prudish paranoia clogs research
By Mike Seccombe
May 22 2003

Pornography, drugs, gambling, racism, how to make bombs or conduct computer crime - it's all out there on the Internet, and 105 bureaucrats in Parliament House want to make sure they can get it whenever they need it.

They are the information and research staff of the Parliamentary Library and they are fuming at the prospect of having access to net nasties cut off by a new filtering system.

The filtering system, provided by the American company, Websense, covers more than four million restricted sites, and

for the staff of what is called "program one" of the library fighting the filter has become a campaign. For they are the ones under pressure to provide timely responses to their impatient political masters on all manner of subjects.

The Websense database, they found, blocked the site of an group funding vaccinations for children in India as "sex".

The Autism Behaviour Intervention Queensland site was blocked as "gambling".

A German site which examines historians who deny the Holocaust was blocked as "racism/hate".

They found data which showed filters designed to block pornography could also cut out 55 per
cent of references to condoms, 50 per cent of safe sex sites, 60 per cent of gay health sites and even 32 per cent of pregnancy sites.

How could they research sex slavery in Australia without access to ads for Asian sex workers? How could they research a harm-minimisation approach to drugs when the system reflected America's zero- tolerance approach?

Yesterday the man behind the introduction of the filter, library official John Templeton, said its application to the research staff was on hold.

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John, its not just the research staff who need to know this stuff, its everyone. The so-called flattened structure of modern organisations means that everyone, at any time, can be called on to fund out something, for themselves, for their bosses, for a client. The net does that better, and faster, than any previous system. Filters, managed and controlled by people whose political, social and psychological agendas are not up for review, and who refuse to allow others to double check their work, are stupid, and dangerous.