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Hell, even Australia is doing censorship and filtering

As an Australian I feel compelled to correct this.

Certainly politicians have tried to get a filter implemented. In fact there have been a series of them. It started with Kim Beazly (leader of the opposition at the time, who first made it ALP Policy, the ALP being the mob who ran the country for the last 3 years), then we had Kevin Rudd (Prime Minster), Stephen Conroy (Communications Minister), Brian Harradine (independent who held the balance of power in the Senate), and Steve Fielding (who saw himself as Harradine's successor) all pushed very hard for it. They were aided and abetted some the local elites, such as Clive Hamilton (a Professor of Public Ethics and Vice-Chancellor's of Charles Sturt University) churning out papers in support of the filter. It is a truly impressive list of heavy hitters.

Yet, they failed. Now the opposition has formally rejected the idea it looks dead and buried.

For me it was a painful period in Australia's political history. Every time the issue was brought up on a forum that allowed public comments, the comments ran at about 20 to 1 against the idea. Regardless this mob tried to ram it though for 3 electoral cycles. Had they succeeded you could have truly said Australia democracy was doing a lousy job of representing the people doing the voting.

But despite having their hands firm on the leavers of power and the public megaphones (no newspaper editorial outside of the tech industry strongly rejected the idea) they didn't succeed. I don't know whether this means Australia's hands are safer than the US's, as the US has a better constitution. But it certainly has given me a new found faith in Australian style democracy.

It's not ok for google to inadvertadly capture minute packets of useless information, but it's ok for the government to direct ISPs to intercept data illegally.

The Australian Labor party have time and time again broken their promises, Barging ahead with Policies that their citizens do no want and completely fucking up things they tried to achieve

The only reason Google are in hot water is because they stood up to Senator Conroy and he got upset about it.

I for one will be making my vote count this year and I urge all fellow Australian slashdotters to do the same.

Regardless of the government's hysterical raving about internet filtering it is worth noting that it has always been the case that any publication that has not been given a certification by the Australian Government's Office of Film and Literature Classifaction is technically illegal - porn or otherwise.

Please stop spreading myths, you obviously have no idea what you are talking about. RC material is generally not illegal to possess. Listen to Steven Conroy sometime, whenever he is asked a question about this he goes off on a long spiel about how RC material is not available in shops, can't rent it at the video store, etc etc which is all a distraction so he can avoid having to admit that it isn't actually illegal.

Refused Classification ("RC") material is legal in most states and territories, except for material that falls under the definition of child porn. See here, for example, for more details, and stop spreading crap info!

Eh... it may not be illegal to posess but I suspect that it is illegal to import without a license

Regardless of the government's hysterical raving about internet filtering it is worth noting that it has always been the case that any publication that has not been given a certification by the Australian Government's Office of Film and Literature Classifaction is technically illegal - porn or otherwise.

Please stop spreading myths, you obviously have no idea what you are talking about. RC material is generally not illegal to possess. Listen to Steven Conroy sometime, whenever he is asked a question about this he goes off on a long spiel about how RC material is not available in shops, can't rent it at the video store, etc etc which is all a distraction so he can avoid having to admit that it isn't actually illegal.

Refused Classification ("RC") material is legal in most states and territories, except for material that falls under the definition of child porn. See here, for example, for more details, and stop spreading crap info!

I agree. Or at the least, a requirement for an image being illegal is that it is reasonably considered to be an image depicting an abusive act (there doesn't even need to be proof beyond reasonable doubt, just a reasonable belief - just so that someone taking an image of themselves, or 30 year old Album covers, not to mention cartoons, don't get counted).

The situation today is very different to when child porn was criminalised in the 70s. Back then, any such image was an image of abuse. The only way to get such images was usually to pay for them, so the distinction between buying and possession didn't matter. But things are different today.

The sad thing is that far from realising the law needs to be refined, lobbyists are scaremongering about the availability of images as a reason for stronger laws - e.g., the NSPCC [*] recently announced 20,000 child porn images a week put on internet. Perhaps many of these images are of real abuse, which is very worrying, and should rightly be stopped. But it's hard to trust political lobbyist organisations - how did they estimate the numbers of images that came from abuse? (Also see http://libertus.net/censor/resources/statistics-laundering.html ).

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line lobbyists started to claim that child porn was bad not due to the abuse, but because it causes people to become abusers. The argument becomes circular: the large numbers of images is assumed to be evidence of increasing abuse, but they can also say that increasing numbers of any child images on the Internet must be causing increased abuse, therefore all depictions must be criminalised.

[*] A child protection charity, but they've lobbied both for this law, and the recent "extreme porn" law criminalising images of consenting adults.

So you don't recall the Liberal Govt's threats to ban all X-rated material, which they used to make the reclassification to NVE (Non-Violent Erotica) more palatable to the public? A lot of what had been previously acceptable was lost in the translation and very little of it had to do with violence.

The Libs actually determined how many cumshots were allowable in a porn film before it would be classed as "fetish" material, such material being forbidden under the then-new NVE classification.

The fact that the number was considerably higher in most gay porn than straight had, I'm sure, nothing to do with the decision (which was made by a group that included members of John Howard's church, if I recall correctly...nothing like churchgoers to tell you what's acceptable in your sexual fantasies).

Try going back to the 1995/96 entries here if you think the Libs weren't censorship happy: http://libertus.net/censor/debate/articles08.html

Sure, now it's optional and only in Australia. Soon it'll be in the UK, and then the US.

Rudd-Labor in bold to emphasise that this wasn't a problem under the Liberals, who had a realistic approach based on educating children, which was very successful, rather than trying to make the internet pre-school safe.. To any Aussies reading let's bring the Liberals back next election.

It didn't matter who won the 2007 election, the internet censorship was going to happen... From this link it appears that the censorship could possibly even be a relic left over from the liberal's stint in control.

More info at http://www.libertus.net/censor/know.html#bh.

I get sick of listening to that tard on parliament broadcasts.

You're forgetting the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999

I can't believe that this was taken so seriously by so many people because it is so futile. Basically, the law stipulates that freely serving any content of a nature that would prevent it from being shown on free-to-air TV cannot be hosted in Australia. As anyone who has used the internet for more than a few minutes would know, it doesn't matter where in the world the server you're connecting to is located so this has had absolutely no effect whatsoever in making it harder for Australians to access stuff that their government doesn't think they should see.

Unless, of course, you were to argue that the law wasn't passed with the intention of it being useful for anything other than buttering up the conservative Tasmanian Senator Brian Harradine, whose vote the government needed at the time in order to pass a law allowing them to sell off more of Telstra, in which case it was very effective... but who would be that cynical?

• Electronic Frontiers Australia
• Irene Graham's site
• my own site

Danny.

What happens is that if a man views porn regularly, he gets a very distorted view of sex and women, which can cause two things. First he will treat women that do allow him to become close to them in ways that are (for many women) highly inappropriate, which is abuse of those women, and damaging to an otherwise good relationship. And secondly he will be approaching all women with this distorted view, which will cause him to find it more difficult to form relationships with women, and lead back, via frustration, to yet more porn. Its a negative feedback loop, and one that some men find very hard to see their way clear from. This is potentially harmful and dangerous to these men and the women around them.

Can you please point us to ANY credible research that shows that this is the case, please?

This is an old argument, and I have yet to see any evidence for it. Several researches have concluded the opposite: That pornography serve as a healthy way of getting fantasies "out of your system", to prevent them from affecting your daily life.

Note also one of the classic mistakes made in much of the research of this issue: Many reports have described high usage of porn by rapists, and equate that with porn causing or contributing to the rape.

But those numbers are also consistent with the suggestion above that pornography serve as a way of getting fantasies out - if that is correct, then it would be natural to also find a high consumption of pornography by people who have used it to try to stay under control, but that have failed.

For a study to present credible evidence on any connection as mentioned above, the very least they would have to do would be to find a random sample of people that do use porn and a random sample of people who dont use porn, and let parts of the group that does use porn stop using it, and parts of the group that does not use porn start using it, and follow the resulting four groups over a prolonged period of time to see whether members of any of the groups are more or less likely to get abusive or to get problems handling relationships.

This page presents some research (mostly supportive of porn). If you have any specifics criticism of the research presented there, or any credible research showing different results, I'd like to see references to it, to take a look at it.

You are also making the typical mistake and assuming that porn is only consumed by men, when the major market for mainstream porn videos is couples, and videos for use by couples are typically chosen and bought by the woman.

The major reasons couples cite for watching porn together? To inject fantasies and excitement into their relationship, and to explore sides of each other they do not yet know well. In other words: To get closer. How that is detrimental to a relationship, I fail to see. I can however agree that that some couples choose to do so does not mean it's right for everyone.