Currently the protest against Senator Conroy's Internet filter is happening in a vacuum. This vacuum is occupied by thousands upon thousands of outraged Internet-savvy computer users. Unfortunately these people constitute only a small percentage of the overall voting population of Australia, and not all of them are prepared to vote based only on an Internet filtering policy. Where I live, the newspaper does not even cover the Internet filtering as a news item.
It has been shown clearly that appealing directly to the politicians responsible for the poor policy is not effective. We need to engage more with the general public, not only to raise awareness, but to make them realise how the filter could potentially affect them and show how futile it ultimately will be.
Enough Twitter. More Facebook? More real life, person-to-person interaction about this issue. "Hey, did you hear about that Internet filter? Dumb idea, huh? Hah, no, it won't help block child pornography..." You get the idea.
Protestors have succumbed to another problem -- factual inaccuracy. Nothing kills you faster in politics. In this article which Stephen Conroy wrote for Crikey he correctly blasts inaccurate reporting.
Keep up, people, we're no longer facing a heuristic filter which will cause massive slowdowns. Yes, the blacklist filter has only been trialed against 8 Mbit/s instead of 100 Mbit/s fibre, but pattern matching against 10000 URLs is not a large technological hurdle. ISPs can and will do that quickly in order to retain their competitive low-latency advantage.
It took them a couple of days, but nocleanfeed.com have updated their information page to reflect the most recent announcements, so that should be a good source of information. Furthermore, to encourage my own less technical friends to understand the issue I have developed my own more concise guide, The Australian Internet Filter And You, which I hope to use convince people that this filter is a bad idea. Please let me know if there are any factual errors in it; I would like to keep it up-to-date for as long as is required for this debate.
Go forth and spread the word amongst the people who wouldn't normally care! Goodness knows the media isn't doing it for us.