Australia's net censorship plan
Australia is about to move to the small town of censor-ville. Their neighbours? Iran, China and Saudi Arabia.
The most alarming thing for me about their plans for centralised internet filtering is that the list of sites they censor is to remain a secret.
Well, that and the fact that it sets a dangerous precedent for us. New Zealand often looks across the ditch to compare policies and laws.
This new legislation will effectively mean the Australian government can block whatever they want, for whatever reason they want and no one gets to know why or object, all under the guise of protecting us from child porn websites.
I'm all for protecting kids on the net, absolutely, but this is not a solution, more like an excuse.
There are ways around blocked sites and content and they know it. The proposed filtering misses peer-to-peer file transfers entirely, a huge source of objectionable material.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has already tested the new technology and has issued a report for the Minister of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy.
Mr Conroy obviously plans to join the small league of leaders who support government-mandated censorship, a league including Joseph Goebbels, Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong-Il.
Some Australian netizens have begun a campaign against the laws, the Great Australian Internet Blackout.
At the moment, the world's focus is on China and their censorship of Google. The Blackout campaign has reminded us that it is more widespread than initially thought - in fact it's a couple of hours' flight away.
The Obama administration has backed Google's criticisms of China's internet censorship, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has also urged China to drop the censorship.
So why is Australia going backwards, when the rest of the world is fighting to go forwards?
There have to be better ways to do this without giving the government seemingly unlimited powers to control what we access.
Australia is considered "under surveillance" by the Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders) organisation; read their report on the matter here.
It also seems that the Aussie government is uninterested in talking it over with a bikkie and a cuppa.
Here's a very worrying few paragraphs from the Wikipedia article on Australian internet censorship:
"In October 2000, Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) attempted under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) to obtain documents relating to the implementation of the internet filter.
"While a few were released, many were not, and in 2003 new legislation, 'Communications Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2002', was passed by the Liberal government and four independents, and opposed by The Greens and the Australian Labor Party.
"While the stated reason for the bill was to prevent people accessing child pornography by examining the blocked sites, this bill exempted whole documents from FOI, many of which did not reference prohibited content at all.
"EFA state that the bill was designed to prevent further public scrutiny of internet filtering proposals."
I'll certainly be standing up to support the movement and voice my opinion, for what it's worth.
What do you think? Bad move from Aussie? Likely to spread to other Western countries? Or perfectly innocent? Should Kiwis be getting involved here?
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I doubt this will spread to other countries. Australia is notoriously stupid about this sort of this, look at video games and the amount that are banned due to a lack of an R18 rating.
I highly doubt the Aus government will listen to it's citizens and will just put this legislation through. However the opposition party will use this to win the next Aus election. If it even goes through it'll be gone within a year or 2.
New Zealand is actually doing something almost identical, the only major difference is that the Aussies are having an engaged public debate, while our censorship regime is slipping in quietly under the radar via the Dept of Internal Affairs (and for some ISPs has been active for years). We also has an unpublished list of censored sites. So, yes, NZ is already involved here, like it or not.
The best source of information is the Tech Liberty NZ blog: http://techliberty.org.nz/issues/internet-filtering/filtering-faq/ It'd be great if you could do a followup column on this to bring more media exposure!
The secrecy seems to be designed to prevent hackers coming up with circumvention applications and plugins. Which will be freely available within 17 seconds of this filtering coming online.
Current methods of policing sick content online work. Specialist law enforcement teams work with international counterparts to identify and stop this stuff from being circulated. Blocking websites that have content that may or may not be child pornography is the same as using a shotgun to swat a fly.
New Zealand will follow - we always do. A lot of our internet content is relayed from Australia, and if an innocent website is blocked then what protection is there for the owner of that website?
What if your domain gets hacked and has a sub-domain added to it as a cesspit for this stuff and you get it back and it's fixed - but your company is labelled as hosting this material? Even if you get it cleared up there is still going to be the issue of "This company had their website blocked for child porn" - which would become public if your site appears to be censored.
Australia has been trying to become the Apartheid South Africa of the 21st Century for a few decades now. This is just another step in that direction.
Here in NZ, the DIA is working on its own internet filter. If you use TelstraClear, Ihug, or a couple of other ISPs, then you were part of the trial last year. Thomas Beagle over at Tech Liberty has been covering the issue. He has a FAQ up here: http://techliberty.org.nz/issues/internet-filtering/filtering-faq/
I live in Aus and this worries me some.
The Liberals were firmly opposed with Turnbull (more of a classic Liberal than Conservative) but now we have Abott (a classic Christian Conservative) and are looking at supporting this plan.
The only party opposed here is the Greens.
The irony is Krudd is rolling out a multi billion dollar high speed broadband network, which will then be slowed down by the great firewall.
Internet censorship is in direct violation of MY basic civil rights, liberty and FREEDOM OF THE PRESS AND SPEECH. The Government is in violation of our constitution and must be put in jail for retraining like they do in communist countries.
Indeed, get with the program - NZ has already been doing this and is pushing for the exact same thing in the future.
Won't someone think of the children and ensure that the internet remains UNCENSORED here in NZ.
Porn people are clever. They will beat anything that is put up to stop them. So there is no point trying.
Wot?
Jim's right, we want our children to have the rights to choose what they can/can't access - not have the need to fight to overturn a law that was passed while they were toddlers by police state dictators who don't understand what freedom of speech or privacy means.
This has nothing to do with porn people.
And it has nothing to do with keeping our kids form accessing bad things. There are plenty of ways to achieve those things.
The righteous idiots who are pushing this upon us should move to China.
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A little precision please, Paul
Internet censorship is a joke. There is no surefire way to stop people from accessing whatever the power of the day decides is objectionable or immoral.
This whole 'Think of the children' arguement is used by people who don't really have the facts on their side. Slashdot has such a tag for stories on net censorship.
I agree that child porn is indecent and there is no way that I would want anything to do with it, the sad matter of fact about it is the people who are sharing this stuff are generally clued up enough to hide what they are doing and work their way around a firewall, no matter how secret the list is.