senior ethics professor at the Australian National University whose think tank The Australia Institute was responsible for the initial media attention for a mandatory Internet filter in 2003, argues "The laws that mandate upper speed limits do not stop people from speeding, does that mean that we should not have those laws? ... We live in a society, and societies have always imposed limits on activities that it deems are damaging. There is nothing sacrosanct about the Internet."Liberal tyranny on the World Wide Web (spiked) Despite proposing the filter, he has been chosen by The Greens to stand in the Federal seat of Higgins. Retired Justice Michael Kirby believes that it is a bad example for the government of a democratic country like Australia to take control of what people hear and what information they get, and made comparisons to the situation in Iran and Burma In an open letter to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Reporters Without Borders states that the web filter is not the solution to combating child sex abuse, and the plan entails risks to freedom of expression. The censorship of websites by the Australian Communications & Media Authority, rather than a Judge, is in contravention of laws. The criteria for censoring "inappropriate" websites is too vague, and it would be a dangerous censorship option to target "Refused classification" sites, many of which are unrelated to sexual abuse. Subjects such as abortion, anorexia, aborigines and legislation on the sale of marijuana would all risk being filtered, as would media reports on these subjects. The Howard Government commissioned a number of independent technical experts to examine Internet filtering. The resulting report was delivered to the Australian Government in February 2008, and released publicly in December 2008. Professor Bjorn Landfeldt, one of the report's authors, stated that filtering technology simply does not work, as it can easily be bypassed and slows access to the Internet by up to 87%. In response, Stephen Conroy has stated that the report involved no empirical testing, and was simply a literature review of material available from other sources; any problems raised by the report would be tested during the filter trials scheduled for mid-January 2009. A report by Tim Stevens and Peter Neumann for the London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) analyses each of the available ISP-based filtering solutions and concludes that they are ineffective in the