Aussie Censors Won't Identify Blocked Sites

Paul Johnson writes "In this news story Wired says that the Australian net censorship law is about to come into effect, and give some details of how it will work. In particular it seems that the Australian Broadcasting Authority is 'unlikely to release the specific names or Web addresses of sites in order to avoid granting them unnecessary publicity.' So it would seem that Australians are not even allowed to know what is being censored." That's the way it works: keeping us in the dark makes it harder to judge whether keeping us in the dark is fair. It doesn't make sense; even Sen.McCain urged full disclosure for censorware.

Comments

FIRST SUPERIOR POST

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Re:Censorship solution..

[redled]

People need to understand why we do not like censorship.. and the best way to do that is to show them that views they agree with are being censored.

Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this censorship too? I mean, free speech activists (rightly) get pissed off when companies like Net Nanny or whoever say "we block all these porn sites from your kids" without pointing out that their software will also block many sites about things such as STD's, feminism, as you mentioned, etc.. So, I see a flaw in free speech advocates publishing a list of banned sites, and only including those that are "wrongly" censored. It is doing the exact same thing as censoring software companies do -exxagerating to promote thier cause. To me, it's no different than a drug company producing a new drug (say, for example, a weight loss drug) and advertising that you will lose 10lbs. a month with the drug, without mentioning side effects.

--

Ask politely?

[DaveHowe]

Hmm. would it be possible for Webmasters of websites (particularly non-.au websites) individually, and daily, to email the operators of the system with a "I am unable to find a list of sites blocked by your software; can you confirm my site isn't blocked?"
I can imagine one or two such requests being tolerable; one or two million every day might be a little harder to handle....
--

Re:Censorship solution..

[technos]

Yes, but how do we discover what is/isn't banned at the moment? Have some enterprising .au ping a huge list of sites daily?

Re:Censorship solution..

[dexev]

Hey, what dose everyone think about solving the censorship problem by creating a means for people to find out what was censored and connect to it?

Hey, this would be just like what the CSS folks are doing!

The problem, of course, is that the list of banned sites won't be centrally published -- you'd have to get each webmaster (or a fan) to sign his site up after it was banned. I'm not sure what you mean by 'removing all the porn from the lists ...', but that sounds like it would be defeating the purpose of the list in the first place!

I think we're going to see a lot more distributed mirrors in the near future, as entrenched powers try to regulate or intimidate the 'net. Our flexibility and speed is our greatest strength (as long as linking stays legal), and we need to use it.

(getting OT) Re:Censorship solution..

[dexev]

There is no reason that it could not be centrally published.

I agree. My point was that because the government wouldn't be publishing a list, somebody would have to figure out what to mirror, in addition to the actual work of mirroring it. I don't think this is necessarily an insurmountable problem, but *it* is more work for the maintainers.

All the satalite banned site lists could feed off of peacefire.org or something via XML.

What I'd like to see is a system where every mirror site also acts as a server, and each webmaster can decide how many other sites to pull information from. When new data is added, it propagates through the entire system, so the loss of any one site doesn't cause data to be lost. I think having one "main" site provides a weak point for the Entrenched Powers(tm) to attack.

I think it would be a good idea to exclude porn (but not art) from the blocked site of the day.

To me, the most important speech to protect is that which is most objectionable. I may not agree with pornography, neo-nazism, or mormons, but I don't think that that silencing them is a solution.

First, it doesn't really solve the problem. People who hate are going to hate whether they've read the Turner Diaries or not. Born again christians are going to try to convert me even after a nuclear holocaust :) Consumers of pornography will have to start going back to 7-eleven. Seriously, though -- restricting availablity of something (porn, hate literature, breastfeeding information, ...) doesn't alter *demand* for that thing. The *demand* is the problem, the consumption is only a symptom.

Second, once you censor the first, most objectionable group, there's both a precedent and a *mechanism* for censoring. The next group that comes under fire is much easier to silence -- just add them into the existing regulation. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A "REASONABLE AMOUNT" OF CENSORSHIP. You've either got a right to free speech or you don't. (Here's a recent ne ws story from BBC that's related to this thread.)

Re:(getting OT) Re:Censorship solution..

[Paul Johnson]

What the right wing really wants to censor is women's rights and gay rights. This is why all the censorware programs censor these types of sites too.

Something we keep on seeing here in the UK is a kind of unholy alliance between right wing religion and left wing feminism. Both want to censor porn, but have different reasons for doing so. The right wants to censor it because Sex Is Bad, while the left wants to censor it because Porn Exploits Women.

The way to break up this alliance is to ask about things that they disagree about. Abortion, sex education and gay rights are good places to start. Then point out to the Left that the Right has always used them and then ignored their particular goals. Then you can make the point that while almost everyone wants to censor something, there are very few things that almost everyone wants to censor.

Paul.

Re:(getting OT) Re:Censorship solution..

[Weezul]

I agree with you that ALL speech must be protected (I'm a member of the ACLU), but most of the country dose not see it this way. My limited understanding of the law is that the courts do not protect porn under freedom of speech, but that they do protect art no matter how much it looks like porn.

Lucky for those of us who are concerened about any censorship the religious right has no interest in fighting porn.. or they would have crafted the CDA so that our concervative supream court would not have struck it down as quickly. What the right wing really wants to censor is women's rights and gay rights. This is why all the censorware programs censor these types of sites too.

We have a political advantage now because the religious right and censorware sellers are a bunch of liars. We should press this opertunity as an object lesson to show people that censorship really is fundamentally evil.

Now, regarding wether we should point to porn sites when we talk about censored sites: If you are actually tring to undo the damage they caused with censorship then yes you need to list the porn sites too, but if you are fighting the memethetic war over wether people think censorship is evil then you do not list porn sites, i.e. a mom may not want her daughter to see porn at school, but when faced with a choice between the small risk of porn and her daughter being told not to studdy women's rights, the mom will join us.

The polotics of the situation are: common people oppose censorship becuase something they like might get censored (just look at all the /. posters who support censorware in school). We need to show them censorship is evil. This means we need to show people that views they agree with are being censored (then they will eventually begin to realize that there is no such thing as only censoringthe bad stuff).

Jeff

BTW> Atually, the religious right has this agenda (censoring gays and women) because it is basicaly a buisness which makes money by getting old ladies to give it their social security checks. This means it needs to have a cause to get attention and it needs to prevent ideas about freedom which premote tolerance.

Information Gathering.

[Rev. Null]

One thing that should be done is to try to reach every possible IP address through the censor-proxies. And millions of people need to do this. One address after another. Let's see how well the bastards stand up to that.

Re:Information Gathering.

[VoodooBird]

Yes, yes! This sounds like a viable approach to countering commercially non-viable typically uninformed rule passing by technophobic politicians. (should we really have technophobes in positions of power given that the world is becoming tech-full?) This could be run like the SETI@home project: a distributed processing arrangement where ppl's machines only try to hit Ip addresses whilst in screensaver mode. I would be interested in receiving correspondence regrarding the production of such a system. matt dot miller at parliamentDOTsaDOTgovDOTau

Re:Info Gathering: reverse engineer the list

[CurtisLeeFulton]

Excellent idea! This project needs to started now. Publishing the results on a web page would creating a delicious uproar. Email VoodooBird if you want to help:

matt dot miller at parliamentDOTsaDOTgovDOTau

Relevant Paper

[DHam]

Since this appauling legislation is now raising its head again, I'd like to point any interested slashdotters to a paper I wrote last year (1999) on internet regulation which focuses particularly on this law. A particular point to note is that the Australian Government's own laboratories feel that the proposed legislation is unimplimentable at least with regard to content hosted outside Australia.

I should highlight that this is a legal rather than a technical essay. I should also point out that although the paper was submitted to a university in Sweden, I am an Australian on exchange at that university.

Finally, the traditional disclaimer: IAOALS (I am only a law Student).

Censorship solution..

[Weezul]

Hey, what dose everyone think about solving the censorship problem by creating a means for people to find out what was censored and connect to it?

It would be like a banned book lists.. people would specifically go out and visit the censored sites. Now, I know there are encrypted proxies and things, but it seems to me that these sites might themselves become blocked. Plus, we want active notification of cool banned sites, i.e. people see new banneed sites everday as part of the news. Perhaps we could set up a banned site list mirror network. It would be a news service like slashdot or memepool, but would push banned sites. Anyone could DL the html and perl, put up a mirror, and get updates via the network. The only real technical problem is getting people to switch to new mirrors when the old ones are banned. There could also be a windows client which used an encrypted connection to obtain the IP address of a new miror for people who live in really repressive places. People would install the windows program out of curiosity and a banned site list would become there homepage.

I suspect people could run a pretty good memepool style site list by removing the porn from the lists of banned sites.

Jeff

Re:Censorship solution..

[Weezul]

The problem, of course, is that the list of banned sites won't be centrally published

There is no reason that it could not be centrally published. All the satalite banned site lists could feed off of peacefire.org or something via XML. Actually, peacefire.org has a banned site of the day. They could just set up XML perl and php clients that everyone could instakk in there own pages to put peacefire's banned site of the day on there own page, i.e. the default slashdot config would have a slashbot which showed the blocked site of the day, and other people would do simillar things. It would be like the proteast where everyone turnned their pages black execpt that it would be permenent and keep drawing attention to the problem.

I think it would be a good idea to exclude porn (but not art) from the blocked site of the day. Example: blocking software already seems to block a very high precentage of feminist sites.. and feminists will natrually get much more pissed off about this then the porn. People need to understand why we do not like censorship.. and the best way to do that is to show them that views they agree with are being censored.

Jeff

Appropriate webmaster's script.

[technos]

#/bin/sh
echo "2 0 * * *" > /etc/crontab
echo "/usr/ucb/mailx -r nobody@[jrandomsite] -s 'Am I blocked?' admin@censorship.au >/etc/crontab
echo "As the webmaster of [jrandomsite], I'd like to confirm that my site is not blocked from the Australian audience. I can't seem to find an official list of those sites you have chosen to block. Could you either point me to the list or just confirm that I am not blocked?" >> /etc/blocked.txt

Re:Appropriate webmaster's script.

[technos]

Oops! I just realized this will only run on the out-of-date Sun box I was posting from..

Please edit to taste!