The confusing thing is the people implementing the decisions seem to know very little about the way the web works. The filter itself is being brought under the premise of filtering out child porn and 'undesirable and illegal content', however minutes from a meeting earlier this year detailed that only around 30% of the filtered list dealt with this sort of material. There has been no explanation as to what the other 70% deals with; that part is what concerns me.
There was an article earlier this year in which Conroy was quoted as saying that Google could have gained your banking details with the street view car and unsecured wireless. Seemed from the language used that he didn't get the idea of a SSL connection.
Stephen Conroy seems to repeatedly fail at understanding the basic concepts involved in information security and the Internet. A recent quote from him at the launch of the "Cyber Security Awareness" week [1]:
"There’s a staggering number of Australians being in
having their computers infected at the moment, up to
20,000, uh, can regularly be getting infected by these
spams, or scams, that come through, the portal"
Watching the video on the Gizmodo site is like watching a slow motion car crash.
Another car crash video is of Senator Conroy trying to explain how the "Russian mob ... hacked" a dentist's website [2] as an explanation for it ending up on the leaked "Internet Blacklist" from the filtering trial [3].
I don't underestimate the complexity of concepts in the information technology space, especially for those outside the industry. And I particularly don't envy the people whose job it is to explain to the general public the issues and come out with (and sell) realistic public policies.
However, you'd hope the man who has ultimate responsibility for these policies would have a basic grasp and be able to communicate it more effectively. More importantly he sorely needs advisers that both understand the issues and are able to properly brief him.
[3] I won't link to the leaked black list directly but you can find it by searching for australian government ACMA blacklist site:wikileaks.org in Google.
