Peer to peer next. After that, email?

Conroy has finally responded to criticisms that URL filtering is a fail by saying "Well, we'll also filter peer to peer". But how? What filters can tell if child p-rn is being sent across the intertubes? Only a human can tell, which suggests a whole department of internet censors. Is anyone feeling 1984ish yet? Will they next read all our emails? I have a hypothesis: this isn't about p-rn. It's not about illegal sites. This is about RIAA copyright. They're setting up the machinery to look for copyright theft through a backdoor, and without anyone overseeing them.

In the meantime, the opposition has forced the admission there is a report to the previous government that argued that filtering is a flawed strategy. Gosh. Apparently we of the general public, you know, the users of the internet, are not worthy to read it.

Earlier this morning, Australia's Shadow Minister for Communications, Senator Nick Minchin, put out a release demanding that "Communications Minister Stephen Conroy should today publicly release an expert study, which he has kept buried since February, and is reportedly damning of the type of Internet Service Provider (ISP) level filtering being proposed by [the Federal] Labor [Government]."

What's more, the report highlights some of the egregious problems with filtering.

Senator Minchin's statement noted that the report said "centralised mandatory filtering will "significantly slow Internet speeds", inadvertently block acceptable content and be ineffective against peer-to-peer file sharing networks, chat rooms, email and instant messaging."

In addition, the report said: "entire user-generated content sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia could be blocked because of a single suspect posting."

We have seen hints of this around the world already, with Wikipedia being blocked in Turkey for a short while, and so on.

And just so nobody thinks I am pro-Coalition, the report that said nobody was being political in the unfounded charging and expulsion of Haneef by minister Kevin Andrews, AFP Chief Mick Keelty and the rest of the "Terrorised". Bullshit. It was political - it was all about race. Andrews and Keelty are racially prejudiced against Muslims and non-European foreigners, or nothing like this would ever have occurred. They allowed their prejudice to override evidence and judgement. Welcome to the war on terror, folks.