[LINK] Letter to Fielding about the filter

[James Collins]

> [James, it's all accessible again; thanks for your assistance today]

Excellent! Still advise one further step when you have time, due to that earlier incident that Cora says occurred. 

Quoting your blog -:

> Most of us read it to be mandatory that ISPs provide a filter,
> but that people could opt out

This was exactly, word for word almost, what I originally proposed, but that which all governments have changed.

Remember that I am "PRO" Protection but anti Blanket Censorship. And I am not anti Blanket censorship because I’m a renegade radical who wants to perform criminal activities on the Internet. It’s quite simply because it doesn't engender the cooperation that's needed for a fair and democratic society to get things done. 

	The Australian Protected Network design is something I call Protected Networking; just like Social sites are Social Networking. It’s all about Australians joining together to protect themselves from "Anti-Social" activity, as judged by the many value systems Australians hold. Not everyone is Straight, Gay, Bi, Muslim, Christian, Orthodox, Children of the Fields, etc, etc. So we join together in Communities to protect ourselves from what we don't want our children/spouses/employees/other householders to access through our network connections. What one community may want to block, another may not. Many people with gambling addiction, pornography addiction or value systems that don't agree with everything on the Internet simply are not able to use it. With the Protected Network in place, they would! Criminal elements batter at our lives, with the Protected Network we would have a first line of defence. At the moment, in many ways, we're naked in a dangerous environment.

	There _ARE_ some common things to which we all hold. We don't want our Computers hacked by supposed Russian criminal elements posing as Dutch Businessmen or supposed Ghanaian based Con-Artists talking our Grandmothers out of their life savings. We don't want to see some of the vilest things on the net being pre-loaded into the caches on our computers when we go looking for a site on “Teddy Bears”. There are SOME URLs out there that fit many or in some cases ALL of the above criteria and that, hopefully, none of us would want to have on our computers. There are of course a lot more than 1000, or even 10,000, there are Millions that my systems know about, and some of them are in a constant state of flux.
 
Quoting the blog once more -:

>  I don’t hold out too much hope of dissuading the silliness of the current 
> minister, Stephen Conroy, but perhaps enough outrage will have some effect.

	The trouble starts when someone in government starts to think about this. The trouble is the logic involved here. Look at it if you will, from the good Senator’s point of view. He's in Government, operating as a leader in his field, in this case the DBCDE. He sees that he _CAN_ protect everyone from these things (although he seems to think there's far fewer than there actually are) and then he seems to think, quite logically -:

"Well. Why, if these things CAN be blocked, shouldn't we just block them from everyone? I mean? Doesn't it make sense to block them if you CAN? Surely only criminal elements would want to access those sites and what normal person wouldn't want them blocked? Let's at least block a thousand of them!"

	Thus far, no one has given him a well reasoned enough argument to change that opinion. I would LOVE to discuss this with him, but he won’t talk to me, because he probably doesn’t even know I’m alive amidst the plethora of opinions that are battering him and his fax machines. This is Government Policy and is decided not solely by the good Senator by the Prime Minister and the Caucus.

	Conflict starts with the loss of recognition of individuals to make their own decisions about their personal lives. The right to say “Yes” and the right to say “No”. That’s where the problem starts. Human beings have a very strong sense of the right of individuals to make their own choices and their own mistakes. They have limits in their minds of what Governments should and should not be able to impose on them, and loss of personal freedoms is one of the “biggies”.

The Australian Protected Network model that I've been pushing for all these years works by the cooperation of people on a large scale. The Internet works by the cooperation of people on a large scale. All the fantastic things we have done, and can do in the future, work by the cooperation of people on a large scale. From the first modem connection I made with another person in the early 1980s, the wonder of this medium has been people cooperating. What the Senator is proposing, quite innocently, is in direct violation of that very basic principle that makes everything work on the Net.

 
	I can NOT get to talk to him, and if he gets voted out at the next election, whoever replaces him will no doubt adopt a similar position of one extreme or the other. Both extremes do NOT benefit Australian Internet users and do NOT engender an environment of cooperation and safety to grow and do business. And yet extremism seems to be the order of the day when it comes to this topic, because of the fear of loss of personal freedoms on the one hand, and the fear of not protecting the weak on the other hand.

	There are people out there DYING. Physically and Emotionally. There are lives being destroyed. Because we simply can not cooperate on this issue. I see them every day, and I see the damage being caused by the daily bombardment of criminal activities. We can't stop it overnight, but we could severely curtail their ability to attack us on so many fronts if we could just work together on this. Of course, logically, the place to start doing that from, is from the position of Governance.

	Remaining silent on this problem while I wait for the Government to listen has brought me nothing but sleepless nights and constant work. It's a never-ending battle with my current level of resources and I simply don't have the facilities to continue to help people without someone helping me. I will not remain silent any longer. Someone HAS to listen to me. 

My apologies for the soapbox.

<SFX: Kicks Soapbox to one side>


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