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Censoring Australian Censors' Blacklist
steveroehrs writes: "'Your access to the Web is being censored by the Government -- but it refuses to reveal exactly what it is we are not allowed to see.' Despite the attempts of Electronic Frontiers Australia in obtaining a copy of the Australian Internet black-list, the Australian government is still refusing to release the list to the public. This is in stark contrast to the situation for film classification, where the list is freely available. Article here "
Seems to me they feel it's a good way to control people. If the citizens never knew it existed, how are they going to complain on it being censored.
...is that those who make them secret often won't even divulge what it is they've made secret. This is a major problem in a democratic society. In the US we are still dealing with decades of Cold-War-era documents that are difficult to get at. The Freedom of Information Act provides some help, but if you don't know a secret exists, how can you file a request to have it released to you? Also, the gov. is increasingly putting people on trial with secret evidence, that even the defendant and/or their attorney cannot see. This is the sort of thing this country was founded in reaction against.
I sympathize with our Aussie friends on this. At least the USA doesn't have this sort of regime on the Internet (yet).
Speaking of government secrets: ever wonder what the true story is about Bush and the "pretzel?"
Apart from the fact that Australians obviously aren't Free to decide what they would like to view on the Great Network, what measures can a government take?
I mean, if somebody in Australia wanted to, that person could use a proxy somewhere else in the world, where the "forbidden" content is available. Or does the Australian "government" have some really creepy way of filtering stuff out? (Can't think of how that could be possible, without secretly installing rogue software on everybody's computers which would filter content per machine)
Something like that could be attributed to evidence of filtering being a moot point. That the person who would like to view "forbidden" content could do so regardless of the "safeguards" put in by the Australian "government".
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
Alston and company are incompetent twits. They are atypical of an endangered species of Australian politician and/or upper corporate manager - overweight, not too bright and utterly ineffectual.
Let them strut around Canberra spouting drivel about anti-censorship views suggesting the holder is in league with "drug pushers and paedophiles." I have not noticed a single difference to my internet access in the 2.5 odd years that Alston has been around.
So I might be apathic, but I also have faith that dinosaurs like this are on the way out.
:wq
Over here, 9/10 movies you go to see at the cinema have a nice big yellow screen before the start of the show with a big "This film has yet to be classified" messaged on it :)
I am thinking that if they can't even keep up with the small number of movies that are released every month, how the *fuck* are they going to keep up with censoring the internet? :)
Thats forgetting for a second that they actually manage to get content blocked in the first place :)
smash(this isn't censorship - its a joke :)
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Im a Aussie [Sydney based] who has had the chance to live and work in many difference places around Europe and the US. [Seems to be an Australian cultural thing to get drunk in strange places]
/. like this alot of people who dont understand the country get on their high horses and yell "Australia = facists", "If they had guns they could defend their rights", etc etc.
Our government does some stupid things. Attempting to censor the net is one. When Australia gets mentioned on
When it comes down to it, our government is no more stupid than the next guys. We're still free down here [wish there was more free beer!], and I honestly believe Australia is one of the best places to live in the world.
The man who passed the rule will no longer hold the balance of power in 2 years in the Senate elections, and we can move forward and change policy. This is what a democracy allows us to do.
As a matter of interest for some of you US based people -- Australia has no freedom of speech legislation. This is a myth. The only freedom of speech that is mentioned in the constitution and our laws is that of Political free speech.
Does that make us a a facist state? No. Would we react well to this changing? No.
Sure, it's not censorship 'as such' since users can read at -1, but it makes posts far less obvious and there's also the 'chilling' effect of massive karma loss.
Speaking of karma loss.. I'm really half-inclined to post this anonymously but what the hell, karma is easily regained :-)
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Whats the use of censorship if when you release the Black List every single site that is black listed gets double the traffic. It makes sense not to release the Black List for if they did it would neglect the whole purpose of the censorship. The Sites Black Listed would get a lot of attention that they don't deserve. This is especially the case for links to illegal sites such as child porn. Although I don't support this type of censorship I do support the decision not to release the Black List.
If ISPs can't access a government-compiled list of what-is-banned, then to absolutely comply with the law they have to manually (ie. with a human) proxy every request from their customers, determine whether those requests will return <jellobiafra>HARMFUL MATTER</jellobiafra>, or expose themselves to possible prosecution.
It's a bit like keeping a secret list of banned foods, then busting a grocer for ordering in a special type of mushroom for a customer.
Much noise was made at the time against the leglisation because it's stoopid. I remember reading about six months ago (sorry, no link) that, despite all the fuss, only half a dozen complaints against ISPs had actually been received by the Aust. Broadcasting Authority. No prosecutions ever eventuated.
Although it's a Very Bad Thing, since nobody's (so far) gotten in trouble because of this legislation, the real danger of ignoring this might be that you teach politicians they can be ignorant and stupid all the time and get away with it.
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
My guess is that the government is too embarrassed to show how pitifully few sites have been taken down for the money expended
Refer to this EFA report : Government Net Censorship Reports - Facts or Fallacies? 7th September 2000
The censorship regime is highly costly in view of its ineffectiveness in protecting children using the global Internet. The explanatory memorandum to the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill 1999 states the total ongoing cost to the Commonwealth of the regime was estimated at AUD$1.9 million per annum.
Graham remarked "If the ABA has only received 201 complaints in six months as the government report states, and the government's cost estimate of $1.9 million was correct, it's costing taxpayers around $4,700 per complaint. Only 93 of those complaints resulted in a finding of prohibited content, a small fraction of the billions of pages on the Internet, and less than 20 concerned pages hosted in Australia."
Fantastic value for money there , AUD$100,000 per page....
You need to remember that Alston et all are only really interested in pandering to the popular press, and not in actually making any real changes.
Also, now that the balance of power has changed in the senate (ie Senator Harradine has gone) , the Libs will now be pandering to the Democrats, so we may see an end to these silly, unenforceable censorship laws
As far as I can make out, I still have unrestricted access to everything I have ever had
I say this because:
I have NOT been forced to install blocking software
My ISP is not running blocking software (nor any others to my knowledge
If the ABA has taken down a site, I'm sure it's just popped up again overseas
It's probably just more boring pr0n anyway ..
ho , hum , back to work...
Darren Kruse CCNP CCDP
WAN/LAN Networking Consultant
mailto://darren_kruse@hotmail.com
www.geocities.com/darren_kruse
Liberal, Conservative, does not matter. People pushing their ideologies on any side tend to want to censor material they find offensive or detrimental to their ideology. To anyone who thinks the leftist ideology is more free: remember Communism is considered on the left (and in practice has always turned out to be complete totalitarianism), and Nineteen Eighty-Four was about an English Socialist system out of control.
Liberty in your lifetime
This here is a key example of why "democracy" doesn't work. The United States is NOT a democracy, its a republic. Any country that attempts to base its laws on "democracy" will ALWAYS end up socialized.
The main problem with democracy is that it allows a crazy majority to infringe on the rights of a sane minority -- as has been happening in the U.S. in growing amounts since 1913. In the beginning, the democratic system says "lets help those who can't fend for themselves." When government gives a handout to 2 or 3, those closest in financial ability to the 2 or 3 will ask, and eventually it will be 4 or 5. Go long enough, and even the rich want a hand out.
A democracy is a BAD IDEA. Australia has now made illegal something that infringes on NO ONE's rights -- basically another law that criminalizes NON-VIOLENT activity. Why bother?
Make people not responsible for their actions, and they'll be less responsible. As time goes on, they'll look to big government as the daddy-state that it is -- to pay for their health care, their retirements, their children's educations, their unemployment, etc.
Oh, wait. We're already there...
Ok, I'm about sick of this. THERE IS NO INTERNET CENSORSHIP IN AUSTRALIA. Ok? Got it?. The Only "Censorship" is from the Federal Police shutting down websites that contain illegal content (i.e. child porn, bomb making 101, ... ). The same thing is done is the U.S.
There are no restricted sites, no great-big-firewall, no proxy server we are forced to go through... the only filtering done is at the client end- ISPs have to sell software like NetNanny at a reduced price to customers. We do not have to buy it if we don't want it.
Now can you Americans _please_ stop with this bullshit... Australia is not fascist, we are not oppressed, we are in fact one of the most free nations on earth, and to be told otherwise by people from a country that comes up with things like the DMCA, the US Patriotic act, and holds hundreds of innocent civilians WITHOUT TRIAL just because they are of arab descent.... well, who's the oppresive government again?
I disagree, something can be censorship even if it's technically accessible, and I think you'd agree if you thought about it for just a moment.
What if everytime before someone watched a program which criticizes the government, they have to first go to the store, purchase a special Dissent Card from the convenience store, come back from the store, step through a series of 99 arcane menus on the television to activate the Dissent Mode, stick the Dissent Card in their television, and then wait for a 2 day cooling off period before being able to view said content. The material is still accessible, but this is clearly censorship.
It becomes censorship at the point where it is made even slightly more difficult to access based solely on its content. Now even though it's not as extreme a case as the one I described above, that's still exactly what happened here at Slashdot.
I consider myself a pretty avid Slashdot reader, I mean, I post, and that in itself puts in like the top 10% of most avid Slashdot readers right there. And I had absolutely no idea what was going on and that posts had been censored through moderation bitchslap until it was brought up on Kuro5hin! How the hell is someone supposed to know to browse at -1 to see the censored posts when they don't even know they're there? You can't seriously expect me to browse at -1 all the time and wade through the ascii goatse and page extending posts just on the off chance that the Slashdot editors are 'not-censoring' posts do you?
If it is done in such a way that there is no reasonable chance of people ever finding out that material existed, then that sure as hell sounds like censorship to me.
And how, pray tell, would the government publishing the list of websites be different than them publishing the list of films that have been censored? They've been black-listing films for years, and I don't see any pipe-bomb toting militants demanding that Elementary School Spanking 16 be released or else they'll blow up the parliament building.
Frankly, I find my confidence to be even more 'slightly lacking' from their refusal to reveal what they're hiding than I would if they just showed me the list.
How do you know thats all they are shutting down if they wont disclose details of what they are blocking.
You just believe everything the censors say ?
Our government's policy of mandatory imprisonment for unauthorised refugees in subhuman conditions for indeterminate lengths of time seems pretty fascist to me...
How do you know that they are not censoring criticism of this and other government policies?
Why they're keeping the black-list secret seems pretty obvious to me. As soon as that list becomes known, well-meaning non-Australians will immediately start to mirror those sites, and those mirrors will be visible to Australians until the government is able to find the mirror and update their blacklist.
While censorship in and of itself is reprehensible, at least they're not going about it in a half-assed manner.
Stories like this should alarm people who believe in government by the consent of the governed.
Granted, Australia seems much more conservative than the US when it comes to freedom of information (and other things too). However, those of us in the States shouldn't let stories like this slide off our back.
In the US it is much more difficult for the government to censor free speech, but just as in this article, our own government has grown very interested in not telling its citizens what it is up to.
In particular, the Executive Branch of the United States has been less than forthcoming on numerous occassions regarding its own activities: President Cheney won't tell us who he & others talked to while they were drafting their energy policy, they won't identify people picked up in the post-911 dragnet (nor will they tell us the standard list of questions arab looking people were asked as part of that), various federal records have been destroyed and removed from availability [as noted in earlier Slashdot story], and in general the government has exuded a contempt of those outside the administration trying to figure out what it's up to. Of course this is on top of the government's long standing infatuation with secrets -- the most recent pattern is just an escalation of the existing mindset towards secrets.
Really people, this story has a moral for those outside of Australia: it's an example of the idiocy that can take hold when people don't demand oversight of their own government!
What's being censored? Well, unless you can look at the list, you simply have to trust that the bureaucrats are doing just what they're supposed to, and that they need to be doing it. This is inherently undemocratic.
Secrets give government the opportunity to mismanage without falling under the prying eyes of the people -- you and me -- whose job it is to see to the proper maintenance of government, and whom might be upset at the revelation of any such mismanagement.
This sort of thing shouldn't be tolerated in any democratic country.
I'll allow your basic principle for the sake of argument, although I dont agree, mostly because it has been used as an excuse to treat the asylum seekers in an inhuman manner.
The problems with our current system are many
- the asylum seekers are kept locked up for great lengths of times; two or three years
- most (around 90%) are found to be genuine refugees and accepted as permanant residents
- its expensive, about A$50,000 a year per person and we miss out on the economic benifits we could have had from them if they had been out in the community earlier
- the majority of our illegal immigrants arrive by plane and are US & UK tourists overstaying holiday visa's, so when we target boat-people we are missing the real problem, or maybe we are just being rasist
- some of the asylum seekers have been severly traumatised, and have risked a long sea voyage on unseaworthy boats, piracy, rape, murder etc to get to Australia, locking them up for another few years, means we deny them the chance to build a new life and repair some of the damage
- there have been local studies that have shown that after a short 2-3 year period, refugees tend to be a positive for our economy.
- we need the population, I'd like to know that if I needed it I'll get an old age pension, like I'm happy to pay for, for others, through my taxes.
Peter