- The blacklist will contain “almost exclusively RC material”.
- RC material (excluding “child abuse material”) is legal to possess and view within Australia, in addition anything classified is definitely legal to view and possess.
- Child pornography websites rarely exist for more than a couple of weeks.
- The filter is/will be trivial to bypass.
- Bypassing the filter will not be illegal.
These are all facts. Given that adding sites to the blacklist can take months, it will be ineffective at stopping access to the illegal content (child abuse material). In addition, access to any other blacklisted content is not illegal and can be done easily.
The government knows all this, but is pressing ahead nevertheless. I must wonder: Is there something else that the government wishes to do with this filter?
The only thing I can conclude is that the government actually wants scope creep to occur, but won’t say so in public. It wants to silence its political opponents. It wants to stop access to all pornography. It wants to stop so-called “copyright theft” (even though internet filters cannot hope to achieve this). If it didn’t want to do this, it would have no reason to keep the blacklist secret. The blacklist contains “the worst of the worst” no sane person would want to access stuff on it if the blacklist was only CP.
Above all the government wants to be seen to be “doing something” for all the lobby groups screaming out pleas like “won’t somebody think of the children?”