TRAVELLERS coming into Australia are being asked different questions depending on the card they are given by immigration officials.
The Government had pushed through the change in November last year, altering the first question on the Incoming Passenger Cards to ask travellers if they were carrying pornography.

Those answering "yes" will have their material examined by customs officials.

The change was labelled as "sneaky" and an "invasion of privacy" when revealed last week.

However the question is not being asked of all travellers, with an immigration spokesman saying there is no way of knowing how many cards are in use at any one time.

..Older cards may be being used by travel agents and other operators beyond the large airlines.

The issue of bringing porn across the border was first raised by the Australian Sex Party who said many travellers will be embarrassed by the "invasion of privacy".

“Is it fair that customs officers rummage through someone’s luggage and pull out a legal men’s magazine or a lesbian journal in front of their children or their mother-in-law?” party leader Fiona Patten said.

"If you and your partner have filmed or photographed yourselves making love in an exotic destination or even taking a bath, you will have to answer ‘yes’ to the question or you will be breaking the law.”

Ms Patten said some travellers had not been asked to declare porn this year.

"I've had reports from people who have not had that question when they've come into the country in the past four weeks, but I've also had people confirm that they were asked that question."

A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said the change was because the term “pornography” was more recognisable to travellers than the term “objectionable material”.

A poll of nearly 1500 news.com.au readers found that over 80 per cent believed the porn searches were an invasion of privacy.

Source: http://www.news.com.au/

Police across Australia will crack down on child pornography with an image matching platform in development in Queensland that is set to go national at the end of the year.

The system will identify and match hundreds of thousands of child abuse images located on suspects’ hard drives and stored in the Australian National Victim Image Library (ANVIL), and tie them to solved and cold cases.

Government technology agency Crimtrac estimates 20,000 new child exploitation images appear on the Internet each week through some 100,000 websites, paid portals and peer-to-peer sites. About 100,000 of the 500,000 images estimated to be in circulation are original.

State police agencies have no way of knowing if a seized image is original, or is part of a solved, open or cold case in another state.

Queensland Detective Senior Sergeant, Wayne Steinhart, said the system will image-match to determine if a suspect has duplicate images, or is involved in new acts of child abuse.

“Detectives spend hundreds of hours sifting through child abuse images to discover child exploitation on an offenders’ computer — it could be 100,000 images which is overwhelming, but our role is to identify victims,” Stienhart said.

“We won’t know if suspects have committed new offences unless we have eyeballed each image.”

The Child Exploitation System (CETS) is under trial by the Queensland Police and the Australian Federal Police. It uses image recognition and hash functions to identify groups of images that involve the same victim in order to gather evidence for investigation.

“It’s not nice work… the system saves the operator from that work,” Steinhart said, adding the CETS and ANVIL will provide a complete system from “seizure to storage”.

The system was built in 2005 by Canadian police services and regional Microsoft developers for more than $11 million, and is used by 25 of the nation’s police forces. The United Kingdom, the US and Italy are some of the countries that use and share data from the CETS, and according to CrimTrac national manager of law enforcement systems, Stewart Cross, has led to the dismantling of “at least” three international paedophile rings.

Steinhart said online child exploitation material is distributed evenly between websites and peer-to-peer networks and said the government’s Internet content filter will help restrict access to child porn websites.

It is expected to go live in Queensland after the trial business case is presented to Australia’s police ministers at the Ministerial Council for Police and Emergency Management Police in July.

Steinhart said there is no substance to rumours that Microsoft had planned to pull support for CETS.

Source: http://www.computerworld.com.au/

A story that reveals how an apparently well meaning attempt by government to protect children from video nasties on the net turned into a policy that critics say promotes censorship and reduces personal freedom.

Twenty one years after the world-wide web was born it's hard to know how we'd live without it. But for all its benefits there are dangers too, especially for children. Child pornography, bestiality and other forms of extreme and illegal sexual material are freely available for anyone to view. Central to the Federal Government's policy on cyber safety is the introduction of a mandatory filtering system, aimed at protecting children from the worst excesses in cyber space. Now reporter Quentin McDermott looks at the potential impact of the Government's plan.

In a town hall somewhere in suburban Australia a group of people, all over 70 years of age, are attending classes to learn how to by-pass internet filters. The reason they are doing this is simple. All of them want information relating to euthanasia. All of them know that in the very near future a new government law might make any attempt to find that information on the web difficult, if not impossible.

The question is, how did a promise to protect children from porn on the web evolve into a policy that stops ordinary citizens getting access to information on a wide range of topics?

"No responsible government can sit there and do nothing if there's 355 child abuse websites on the public internet." Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy

In 2007 the then Federal Labor Opposition made a big election promise: if elected it would oversee the introduction of a system that would filter out porn and other nasty video material to protect kids. The move drew praise from many people, including the former head of the Australia Institute, Clive Hamilton, who'd been warning for some time the web was not child friendly:

"Any curious 14 year old can go from a site that shows men and women having sex in all sorts of different ways to a woman being penetrated in every orifice... to sites which show incest and promote incest, to sites that show bestiality, explicit pictures of say women having sex with animals."

Labor's pre-election policy promised to require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to offer a 'clean feed' internet service to all homes, schools and public internet points accessible by children, such as libraries. It also said that Australian children would be prevented from accessing any content that has been prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), including sites such as those containing child pornography and X-rated material.

Fast forward two and half years and the Government's plans have substantially changed. The idea of an internet 'clean feed' is gone, dismissed as technically unfeasible. The idea of filtering a collection of blacklisted sites is still alive, but the scope has been limited to material known as 'refused classification', leaving most pornographic sites accessible to children.

"A lot of the content that families really are concerned about for their children, things like violent material, racial hatred material, material which promotes race hate, maybe even just adult content that you wouldn't want your children to see, none of that will be picked up by this filtering solution." Peter Coroneos, Internet Industry Association.

Some critics say that the changes signal a climb-down, but others are worried that the mandatory nature of the filter to be imposed means that all Australians are now subject to censorship and not just children.

The Government defends what has to be seen as a major policy change:

"We said we would take an evidence based approach and we commissioned a report to look at a whole range of options and that report came back and said that if you target individual addresses as we're doing, you can be 100 per cent successful in targeting individual web pages." Stephen Conroy

There are other complications in Labor's new approach too. 'Refused Classification' material doesn't just target extreme pornography but much greyer areas, such as sites that instruct in crime. The latter could include information on euthanasia, safe injecting procedures or other sensitive political topics. For some this is a potential attack on free speech.

"It's not self evident what is refused classification and what is not... Any regime that attempts to impose this sort of broad and relatively nebulous concept upon something like the internet, will inevitably block material which is valuable as well as material that other people generally consider to be harmful." Dr David Lindsay, Technology Law expert, Monash University

As the senior citizens in the town hall show us, it is very easy to circumvent the filter with limited technical experience, using proxy sites and virtual private networks. It is an issue the Government acknowledges but ultimately dismisses as an argument against filtering:

"It's relatively easy to get around the underage drinking laws. It's relatively easy to get around the underage smoking laws. It's relatively easy to speed. It's relatively easy to drink and drive, but that's not an argument for not having those laws." Stephen Conroy

While the battle over the question of filtering goes on, one thing is clear: more than two years after Kevin Rudd promised parents he would protect their children on the net, Australians still don't know what the new net filtering laws will look like and what material they will block or approve.

"Access Denied" goes to air on Monday 10th May at 8.30pm on ABC1. It is replayed on Tuesday 11th May at 11.35pm. It will also be available online and on ABC iView.

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/

The Australian Marriage Equality (AME) group is asking voters in the ALP-held seat of Sydney not to support the Labor Party while it refuses to allow same-sex couples to marry.

AME have begun distributing flyers to households throughout the electorate highlighting Labor’s support for the current ban on same-sex marriage.
AME national secretary Peter Furness said supporters of marriage equality were frustrated with the ALP’s refusal to support full legal equality for same-sex couples.

“When it comes to marriage equality, Labor has ignored reasoned arguments, human rights principles, overwhelming popular opinion and the heartfelt pleas of ordinary Australian families, but it can’t ignore concerned voters in key seats,” Furness said.

“We are sending Labor a strong message that there is a price to pay for pandering to religious bigots and for opposing the equal human rights of gay and lesbian Australians.”

The seat of Sydney has been held by Tanya Plibersek since 1998 and is considered to have one of the highest gay populations of any electorate in the nation.

“Given her electorate, Tanya Plibersek should be one of our strongest advocates but has chosen to rigidly toe the party line throughout her career,” Furness said.

“Senior Labor figures have told us they will only take marriage equality seriously when they see constituents taking it seriously enough to change their vote. We are now following that advice.”

Source: http://www.starobserver.com.au/

The government has postponed its web-filtering legislation to defuse it as an election issue
IT was ironic that Communications Minister Stephen Conroy announced the postponement of his internet filtering legislation via an adviser last week. Advice was not something he was fond of taking. Sensing a voter backlash on the legislation, which was supposed to be introduced into the parliament before the federal election, Rudd and Conroy are banking on removing it as an election issue. But will they?

If Conroy had introduced the legislation before the election, he might have risked the ire of the Greens and Electronic Frontiers Australia, but at least it would have been done and dusted. It would then be up to other political parties to say that they would try to overturn it, a much more difficult task. Now the election could be turned in part into a referendum on the issue.

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Labor's private polling on internet filtering has consistently shown that a large number of computer-illiterate mums and dads are worried about what their kids can access online. They want Conroy to make it safer for them. This is the reason he has continued to withstand so much virulent criticism from those who do not live in a nuclear family and who do not feel threatened by the internet. They include people who use it for business, those who use it for pleasure and those, especially in their 20s and30s, who use it as a way of social networking.

On this point Conroy has seriously misunderstood the fears that business has about how a national internet filter could degrade our already under-performing online environment. Not just the technical performance of internet service providers, which will have to scan all their traffic all the time, but whether he will blacklist international business sites such as Amazon and YouTube that sell or offer a host of material that would be refused classification (RC) under Australia's proposed prudish censorship laws.

He also has miscalculated the number of people who use the internet to seek out sexual material. At last count there were 238 million adult sex sites on the internet and millions of searches every day are for sexually related material. Does Conroy think all these people live in Upper Volta or New Zealand? His insistence on calling them pedophiles and perverts has only hardened their resolve to bring him down. Sexual pleasure on the internet is a personal freedom that many adults will not give up lightly.

The networking and social sites are the new pubs and clubs for generations X and Y, and they resent government intrusion into these areas like a Digger would resent government monitoring the local RSL. Conroy is oblivious to these concerns and, privately, very angry these people won't see his point of view. It's a Mexican stand-off where Conroy has put his revolver back into its holster but it's still cocked and loaded.

There is every chance a post-election internet filter will be more censorious than the proposed pre-election one. The Rudd government has been quietly increasing controls on sexual material coming into the country through other means. Anyone coming back to Australia from an overseas trip now has a new question on their incoming passenger card. It asks if you have any pornography in your suitcase. They've also raised the bar for those who bring in more than 25 DVDs that would be refused classification such as a DIY euthanasia film or an adult film where a couple spanks each other; both of which are available on Amazon and YouTube. Yet you can get five years' jail for them now.

Australian Christian Lobby chief executive Jim Wallace has boasted publicly of having numerous meetings with Conroy about banning sexual imagery in Australian homes and Rudd addressed the group's national conference last November. With another four years to run after an election win, Conroy could go back to the original plan he floated, which was to blacklist the X18+ classification entirely.

Conroy changed his mind about this one night on SBS television's Insight program in March last year when challenged by Australian Sex Party leader Fiona Patten. She pointed out X18+ material was legal in Australia and that filtering legal adult erotica would be the thin end of the wedge.

Suddenly, he changed his policy to "we will only ban material that is refused classification and already illegal".

Curiously, Conroy fronted Patten in the green room after the show and regaled her with "Why didn't you just call me about this? We could have sorted it out. You didn't have to set up a political party against us."

The threat of a new party focused on the internet filter didn't deter him, though. Not even blinding inconsistencies and duplications such as the fact the new blacklist of illegal sites will sit on top of an existing blacklist that has different parameters. Under the present Broadcasting Services Act introduced by the Howard government in 1999, the Australian Communications and Media Authority maintains a blacklist of prohibited content that includes X18+ content, R18+ content that does not have a restricted access system and content that is even classified MA15+ and provided by a mobile premium service. This list is secret to the public and supplied to filtering companies.

According to Conroy, this list will remain alongside the new one, which will blacklist only refused classification material. Why?

Unbelievably, the Coalition is edging closer to supporting this farce unless it degrades the network or can be proven to be technically obstructive. Coalition communications spokesman Tony Smith is beginning to shift from John Howard's old policy, which was that the millions of dollars that government spent on providing free end-user software to families should be put to use by parents without having to duplicate the whole thing at ISP level.

Through senator Scott Ludlam, the Greens appear to be leading the charge in the parliament against the filter. But when you consider they preselected the architect of Conroy's internet filter, Clive Hamilton, at last December's Higgins by-election, you have to wonder about their commitment. There are plenty of rumours going around that they will do it again. Preselecting Hamilton for a marginal Victorian reps seat would be a huge mistake for the Greens and would undermine much of Ludlam's efforts to date. And that pretty much leaves the Sex Party, a political party that was founded on the issue of internet filtering, to lead the charge.

Conroy may think he has won the battle but this war is far from over. In the green room no one can hear you scream.

Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/

KEVIN Rudd has put another election promise on the backburner with his controversial internet filtering legislation set to be shelved until after the next election.
A spokeswoman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said yesterday the legislation would not be introduced next month's or the June sittings of parliament.

With parliament not sitting again until the last week of August, the laws are unlikely to be passed before the election.

Labor promised before the last election it would force internet service providers to block access to illegal content such as child pornography and X-rated images.

But the US government, Google and free speech advocates have said any efforts to censor the internet would slow download speeds, stop the free flow of information and be ineffective.

Senator Conroy's spokeswoman said the government was not deterred by this criticism.

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The government was still consulting with internet service providers and considering public submissions; once that process was complete, it would introduce the legislation into parliament, the spokeswoman said.

Australian Christian Lobby managing director Jim Wallace was disappointed.

"The minister has done an excellent job on this . . . and I would like to see it legislated because it was an election promise," he said.

Opposition communications spokesman Tony Smith said Senator Conroy should come clean on when he would release the legislation.

Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/