Many of us who contacted Senator Ludlam over the last couple of months heard back from the his office today. Nothing stand out in the correspondence, but Ludlam does offer reassurance that he will be pursuing the issue of mandatory ISP filter at Senate Estimates in February and will be back in touch with us with further information.

In other news, I’ve published a quick wrap up of net filtering articles below. I suggest you take a look at all, but I’ll draw attention to Rosie Williams’ On Line Opnion article The Devil Within for her unnecessary return to thinking-of-the-children. She writes:

Yet the current debate surrounding the government’s mandatory ISP-level filtering is notable in its superficiality. Technology lovers claim that the conservative Christians and child advocates are creating a moral panic while they themselves try to convince us that filtering the internet will turn our democratic government into an Orwellian monster despite our constitutional protection of political speech.

[…]

The solution to this problem is probably the most difficult but also the most important that this debate has raised. When all is said and done about the need to protect political rights from censorship it would be a shocking irony if the system developed for the protection of the US and its allies went down in history as the largest propagator of crimes against the most innocent of lives known to humanity.

On Line Opinion reader, Chainsmoker, replies:

Nothing emotive or superficial about that at all. It would also be a shocking irony if the system which, despite its origins, turned out to be the greatest facilitator of free speech in human history was choked because of a handful of criminals.

Pro-filtering arguments that use child protection as an excuse are always going to be superficial. While some are obsessing over the internet real children are being abused by real perpetrators who won’t be caught partly because funding has been redirected from policing to the filtering project. That’s not a superficial argument, it’s a fact.

The articles: