$24M gets the Government an Internet filter that they can set up, but cannot prevent people from bypassing.

In mid January this year, Greens Senator, Scott Ludlam asked Senator Conroy a sequence of "questions on notice". The answers were at last offered yesterday.

Sen. Ludlam has done a good job of describing the complete range of "points of contention" with the Internet filter plan and the Minister's answers make it very apparent that the Department's understanding of the problems is not as good as Ludlam's.

The Minister's Office said, "The Minister has been shown a demonstration of a number of circumvention techniques of the filter products used in the internet service provider filtering pilot".

The office said that the demonstration occurred on Friday, 5 June 2009, at the Enex TestLab at RMIT in Bundoora, Vic. The demonstration lasted for an hour, and a number of circumvention methods were displayed together with VPN and Tor.

According to its website, Tor is free software, which helps protect against a type of network surveillance, which intimidates personal freedom and privacy, confidential business actions and associations, and state security called traffic analysis.

Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) Spokesperson, Colin Jacobs said that it was exciting to know that the Minister had been demonstrated a "proper demo" of how to circumvent the filter.