THE minister in charge of the Government's web censorship plan has been caught out censoring his own website. The front page of Communications Minister Stephen Conroy's official website displays a list of topics connected to his portfolio, along with links to more information about each one.
All the usual topics are there – cyber safety, the national broadband network, broadcasters ABC and SBS, digital television and so on.
All except one.
It was revealed today a script within the minister's homepage deliberately removes references to internet filtering from the list.
In the function that creates the list, or "tag cloud", there is a condition that if the words "ISP filtering" appear they should be skipped and not displayed.
The discovery is unlikely to do any favours for Senator Conroy's web filtering policy, which has been criticised for its secrecy.
According to Google's cache records, the exception has been included on the minister's homepage since at least February 14.
A message on the page says it was last updated in October last year.
Melbourne web developer David Johnson told news.com.au the code was intended to remove references to internet filtering.
"The code is a quick fix," said Mr Johnson of creative agency Lemonade.
"If the developers of the minister’s site had wanted to do it properly they would have placed the 'ISP filtering' keyword exclusion on the server side where it is inaccessible to the public, instead of the front-end code which can be seen by anyone and understood by people with even a basic knowledge of scripting."
The function, written in web scripting language Javascript, appears to have been first discovered by a user on the Whirlpool broadband discussion forum.
Senator Conroy's office has been contacted for comment.
