Watching the footy tonight I was privileged to view the latest public advertising campaign from our federal government. The campaign is for the new NetAlert program to protect children from online stalkers and other e-criminals. The main plank of the $189 million NetAlert campaign is an internet content filtering program. Now, protecting children from online threats is a very good idea. There are even some useful aspects of the NetAlert program, such as the parent advice programs. The problem with the program overall is that it is a massive waste of money based on a system that is doomed to fail and which, really, comes down to an attempt by the Federal government to create a fear of the internet among parents who are not tech-savvy and then present itself as the solution for that exaggerated fear.

For well-known reasons, internet content filters will not work in the way the government would like them to. Filtering software is not entirely useless, but it only works well in conjunction with close parental supervision and it creates its own set of problems, too. It is a fantasy that you can leave a child unattended while a content filter protects them from things you would rather they didn’t see. (Electronic Frontiers Australia has a guide to the pros and cons of using filters and how to use them to maximal benefit.) The news last week was full of the suburban teenager who bypassed the new $84 million filter in around half an hour, while leaving the toolbar intact so that parents would believe the system was still working.

Australia’s Communications Minister, Helen Coonan, responded to this development by admitting that “no Internet child safeguards were foolproof” but that nevertheless “a computer with a filter is infinitely safer than one without.” My emphasis. Coonan seems either to not understand, or more likely not care, that these two statements are logically exclusive.

This is not, of course, the only example of wasteful government spending in the country, but it deserves particular opprobrium because it was destined to fail — the federal government has been informed for years by the IT community about the inevitable failure of net filtering but it simply refuses to listen. There are only two countries in the world with successful net filtering: North Korea and China. North Korea manages it by having virtually no computers. It doesn’t even have electricity at night. And China backs up its firewall with 30,000 dedicated police, a US$800 million startup budget, and the sort of society that can convert prisons into organ farms. Even so, the “Great Firewall of China” can be bypassed with sufficient nous and motivation.

Now, to the advertisement. It features a teenage girl typing on a computer, her face obscured by the monitor, while a series of captions appears. This is the sound of talking online. This is the sound of stalking online. You can see the ad here. And then comes the fear. Over half of 11 to 15 year olds surveyed who chat online are contacted by strangers.

Let’s parse that sentence. Half of children who chat online are contacted by strangers. Contacted, not stalked, by strangers, not criminals and paedophiles. This statement is about as alarming as pointing out that children catching public transport from school often sit next to people they don’t know. In reality, most of the strangers these children contact in chat rooms will be close to their age, share their interests, and live in other cities and other continents.

Interestingly, there is no reference anywhere on NetAlert’s website as to the origin of that information. If you search Google, you find that there is a reference to it that has now been deleted, but Google’s cache reveals a press release from October that states: “Recent results from a NetAlert and ninemsn survey show that almost 50% of children surveyed had been approached by a stranger to meet in real life. Of those children who agree to meet with a stranger, only 10% ask permission from their parents first.”

Note the slipperiness of the way the data is presented. 50% of children had been approached, 10% ask permission. The impression this leaves is that a lot of children agree to meet a stranger without telling their parents. But that’s not so. There’s a critical figure missing. What proportion of children approached by a stranger agree to meet? The answer, I would suggest, is surpassingly small. I would further suggest that the reason why the figure is not reported is because it is surpassingly small.

Sometime between the October press release and the current campaign, the results of the survey have been downgraded from “almost 50%” to “four out of ten.” In October, children were being “approached by a stranger to meet in real life” now it’s just being “contacted by a stranger” with no mention of any attempt to meet. What is going on? Why is the survey result evolving over time? And more to the point, where can we find the data for this survey? What was the methodology? What specific questions were asked? As far as I can tell, the full results have never been published. If they have been, they are certainly not made easy to track down by the agencies promoting the data. What we can say is that the survey was commissioned by NetAlert itself and ninemsn — two organisations with significant conflicts of interest in the subject. And why, if this survey is the keystone to a $22 million dollar advertising campaign, is it so hard to find the details? And why is it that the NetAlert website is regularly updated with the Communications Minister’s public announcements, but has not managed to make its report on the effectiveness of its program available? NetAlert promised the report would be “added shortly.” In May 2006.

The government has spent a fortune on a program that could not possibly work. The government knew this because its own expert report warned against the program. What’s more, the government has decided to roll out the NetAlert program before its feasibility study is finished. It would be nice to put this down to incompetence, but it isn’t. The government knows exactly what it is doing. It is spending $189 million on a program that it knows will fail in order to curry favour from the Family First Party, the Assemblies of God church, and the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, all of which have expressed delight at the program and seem not the slightest bit concerned that they are being buttered up with a waste of public monies that could make a very big difference to, say, alleviating poverty or providing services to the homeless. Welcome to modern politics.