The Australian Family Association yesterday issued a press release describing the 3% false positive rate of one of the recently trialed Tasmanian filters as “encouraging” and a “great improvement” on the current situation.

That’s right, the AFA believes blocking access to 30,000 innocent websites out of every 1 million is encouraging.

How is banning the website’s of Australian small businesses beneficial to the family unit AFA claim to uphold? It isn’t.

It gets better. They also say a number of Internet industry representatives have recently tried to attack the government for their attempt at making the Internet safer for Australians.

“These critics are claiming that people’s civil liberties will be infringed upon. These claims of mandatory “censorship” are unfair and misleading” the press release states.

[…]

“This can hardly be called censorship, as the Government has a responsibility to protect citizens from illegal activity. We don’t allow child pornography in Australia, why let it though the back door of the Internet?”

Child pornography isn’t allowed through any back door, it is illegal no matter what form of media it resides on. The police regularly make arrests and if they had half of the money being wasted on mandatory ISP filtering, they could probably make many more. Not to mention actually help children who are victims of such terrible crimes.

However, the most ridiculous aspect of the press release is AFA’s invention of a new form of pornography called goreporn and their claim that a tool capable of blocking it would be of immense value to parents in being comfortable in allowing their children to explore the web more safely.

As we here know, a filter under no circumstances makes the Internet safe for children to explore. AFA should know better.

They suggest that instead of lambasting Senator Conroy in his attempts to provide a choice for families to gain a cleaner Internet feed, his detractors should offer their own expertise and insight into developing the current technology into something that would function even better.

Offer our expertise? We have been but the government has their hands in their ears and is telling experts to zip it.