Run by Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA), “The Great Australian Internet Blackout” is on.
Some background on this from our perspective can be found here. This is important.
We’ve been against this Government “initiative” from the outset. It is flawed on so many levels, so please, have a read and pass this information onto your colleagues, family and friends, if you haven’t already.
We need critical thinkers to push this information out into the broader community who may not understand the real issues outside of the Government spin on it. We need to wake up our fellow Australians!
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Securus Global: IT Security, Penetration Testing, Security Assessments, PCI Compliance, Product Assurance, QualysGuard, Security Strategy, Vulnerability Assessment.
I have been following this debate for some time.
As security professionals we work on a sliding scale of protection on a day to day basis (hence why we perform risk assessments and all those other great tools of trade) and we understand that technical controls are never perfect. Yet we would never recommend (as an example) that a company should not perform secure coding practices because “people make mistakes anyway”.
The reality is that sex involving children should not be acceptable to anyone within society, be that sex tourism or internet based child pornography. It is child porn that takes up the majority of the time of the AHTCC lab and AFP resources (or so I have been told). Second to that is fraud. Both of these are syndicate based, both involve a huge cost to our community and both should be suitable for the use of technical controls using the appropriate skill and resource of the Internet community.
I will admit that I lack interest in cyber-bullying as this should be a simple problem to solve, don’t use social networking or block the bully.
I recognise that the model proposed is less than perfect, indeed many would say far than less than perfect. However in my mind the concept is one of interest and is an expansion of what is essentially a DNS Blacklist, something that the majority of security professionals would use today (hello SORBS/ RBL).
I would have thought that the collective might of the Australian Internet community could have done a better job of dealing with this issue than simply being in the negative and letting a handful of commercial filtering vendors set the agenda.
So given the cost of Child Pornography (and I am not talking about kids viewing porn by accident, I am talking about individuals and syndicates who seek out and produce content) and Fraud on the internet and given the flawed nature of the current filtering proposal, what is the alternative?
Are we really saying in this instance we should as security professionals do nothing as this is better than a flawed something?
Do we not have a moral, ethical and social responsibility to instead step up and provide a more workable alternative?
Dude,
Did you just turn up to the meeting 30 minutes late? It sounds that way.
We’ve been talking about this for the last 12 months!
On one topic: There’s a big difference to the Gov spin on “protecting the children” to reality?
Where have you been?