First I must say Senator Stephen Conroy shame on you, you need to learn about bullying, and the consequences of it. We have seen in the last few years an active push to stop bullying in schools (http://www.bullyingnoway.com.au/), but that seams to have slipped past the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

So what am I harping on about, well there has been some debate on implementing a national internet filter in Australia. Well ok maybe that’s not really true, it’s more an argument about what to block, as it appears the decision has already been made and now it’s up to the special interest groups to get as much stuff blocked as possible.

Here is the part that really pisses me off, Conroy tried to shut this information down. When Mark Newton from Internode raised these concerns and criticisms, minister Conroys department (Belinda Dennett) fired off a letter to the Internet Industry Association (IIA) board member Carolyn Dalton in an attempt to pressure Newton into reining in his dissent.

“In your capacity as a board member of the IIA I would like to express my serious concern that a IIA member would be sending out this sort of message. I have also advised [IIA chief executive] Peter Coroneos of my disappointment in this sort of irresponsible behaviour”

The worst part of this is that a phone call demanding that the message be passed on to senior Internode management was made. What?! Sound like they were trying to get Mark fired to me.

Any way I’ll leave it for you to decide, below you will find links to coverage on it but most importantly an interview with Mark conducted by NetQOS’ s Performance daily.

Coverage:

• Interview with ‘Bullied’ Network Engineer on Australian Gov’t Net Filters – Network performance Daily (NetQoS Inc)
• Filtering out the fury: how government tried to gag web censor critics – The Sydney Morning Herald (Fairfax Digital)
• Labors web gag ‘worse than Iran’ – Brisbane Times
• Cheap tricks not the right response on internet filtering – Crikey.com.au (Private Media Pty Ltd)
• Australia’s Internet filter: Could legal content be banned, too? – ARS Technica (CondéNet In.)
• Australian censorship minister tries to censor critic: time to go Conroy – The Inquisitr
• SAGE-AU defends right to criticise content filtering – iTNews (Haymarket Media)
• The Great Firewall of Australia – ABC Radio National

Oh yes I’ve also set up a redirect on my site that grabs people coming from gov.au internet addresses and gives them a wonderful message that you are all free to view.

The code in the htaccess file is as follows:

Yes, not perfect but the aim is to annoy, anyway it’s inspired by the “the gov.au blockade” back in 1999.