James Purser [INSERT WITTY CATCHPHRASE HERE]

You know something, there are a lot of us working to try and educate and inform our family, friends and communities about the dangers and inadequacies of the proposed mandatory ISP filtering scheme. We're actually talking to people, explaining the issues as they stand and answering questions.

We're also trying to get the media to move away from the over-simplistic "It's all about the Child Porn" angle to look at the real problems with the scheme.

All that work however is being hampered by the kind of activities conducted today by a group of people calling themselves Anonymous. In their wisdom, they decided that they needed to take more direct action. So, in the spirit of attacking censorship on the internet they declared they would be attempting a Denial of Service attack on a number of Government web sites, and at the same time conducting a "blackfax" campaign and other activities of a similar type against various Government offices.

In essence they were going to declare to the Australian government that any attempt to bring regulation  to the internet would be met with attacks on government infrastructure. 

This sort of short sighted ill thought out protest annoys me on a couple of levels. Firstly it cuts the ground out from under those of us who have been working for a long time to try and change this policy. By acting in such an irresponsible manner, Anonymous has given the media a sensational angle which has and will be used to counter the more cogent and reasoned arguments against the filter. Now, along side the infamous "If you're against the filter you must be for Child Porn" we'll have "Opponents against the filter are evil hackers only concerned with getting access to porn".

Secondly, speaking as a system-administrator and IT worker, these sort of attacks annoy the living hell out of me. The create work, not for the people responsible for the policy you are protesting against, but for the IT staff instead. Not only do they have to deal with the immediate effects of the protest (infrastructure issues and so on), but they also have to spend many hours after any such attack ensuring that nothing more sinister than a DoS was conducted against their infrastructure.

So in the end, Anonymous will have brought attention to themselves, created a link between the Open Internet movement and illegal protests and generally caused problems for everyone concerned.

If only they could get involved in the discussion rather than standing outside yelling obscenities.