I suspect because that’s not the true objective.

Article in the Herald today mentioning Thomas Beagle (perhaps due to this post?):
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10584982

Strange that the Minister’s office didn’t want to comment.

Can you please explain the difference, in your view, between preventing someone viewing child porn, and allowing someone to view child porn and then immediately prosecuting them.

It’s supposedly a ‘free’ society we live in. Freedom always comes at a price. Dealing with filth and human excrement like those sexually abusing children requires education, not censorship. We can all take responsibility for our own action. And I mean: Action, because what the government does is merely avoiding actually doing anything about it, while filtering bits, which means nothing to the children that are being abused! Someone else said: Children are not abused on the Internet but in their homes and families. That’s exactly right. If the government would want to shut down child-porn, they would just have to call up the provides. But they don’t, because they rather start wide-spread censorship.

Nobody says that child-porn is a good thing. Anyone possessing it may as well be prosecuted to the full extend of the law. But here it is merely used as the alibi to install something rather terrible: A full blown censorship and monitoring infrastructure, government controlled and with secret black lists.

As I said before, the Internet as a communication medium is too important and a revolution like nothing before in mankind’s history, exactly because of its uncontrolled nature. Governments don’t like things they can’t control.

I’m no expert but I would imagine that for a filter to work, each and every URL request would have to be compared to a list before the file was served.

Wouldn’t that slow everyone down?

Most certainly however, this needed a law to have been passed in order for the go-ahead, and it’s undermining parliamentary sovereignty (as the DIA is not empowered to censor the internet yet) and legislative process.

Keyword filtering is almost 100% ineffective nowadays

This is not keyword filtering. This is a master list, and there’s no indications of how they’re filling it. They are filtering requests to ISPs to display certain webpages based on their list, not searching for keywords.

I have yet to hear a convincing argument for such filtering that goes beyond the convenience of the enforcement agencies.

This system isn’t even used for enforcement so that justification is complete crock anyway. It’s censorship and should be treated as such.

Stop trying to score points and actually think of the ramifications of one server collecting the IPs of anyone who visits a site and suppressing said site from casual internet users with no official complaints process. Can you not see how that undermines freedom of speech?

I only mean to say “do we?” about the right to have a say about which sites are blocked. I totally agree about the how.

While no-one objects to possession of the heinious materials that the DIA is trying to block being illegal, we do have a right to a say on how any censorship is set up and what sites will be blocked.

Do we?

Objectionable material is defined in law, we have a right to have a say about that law, but I struggle to find an argument that says we have a right to have a say about the interpretation of the law.