(Via Techdirt.)

Australia’s Slippery Slope Of Censorship Gets Even Slicker With Plans To Filter Bittorrent: “It’s no secret that plenty of folks are up in arms over Australia’s plan to censor internet connections. From the beginning, it was clear that this was quite a slippery slope, and that slope appears to be getting even more slippery. A bunch of folks have sent in the news that the country’s Broadband Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy is already talking about using the system to filter and block file sharing and BitTorrent as well, falsely claiming that the technology exists to do so effectively.

It might just be something of an off-the-cuff statement, but so far Conroy and others in the Australian government appear to have been incredibly tone deaf to the complaints about the filtering system. It is worth noting that Conroy claims in a blog post that he’s monitoring the complaints on various websites and social networks — even to the point of following certain keywords on Twitter. That, at least, shows a surprising (but good) recognition of where he should be reading about the protests. Unfortunately, though, so far it doesn’t appear that any of those complaints have resonated.