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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 "
The irony, the irony.
Not that this is actually happening, but this is typical of what you can expect.
I suppose that someone could do a distributed computing mapping of the australian black list space, and compare it with as database of the real DNS list from outside of AU.
This almost sounds like a version of the land of OZ where the wicked witch never died.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.
I mean really- if the people are allowed a glimpse at what they're missing, they'll just scream "GIVE IT TO US!!" And that's precisely what the government doesn't want.
Also, if they reveal the list, everyone will start second-guessing their judgements. Anyone can tell you that any slight lack of confidence on behalf of the people is very bad for people in the government. With some people out there, give them a slight reason, and you'll see pipe bombs coming through your front window.
If only there were a way for the government to publish the list without getting themselves deeper in the alligator pit, they would likely do it. But until then, I fear they're SOL.
I may not like our government, but I am thankful for what I have here in the US...
.
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
...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
Too bad we just can't blacklist the censors. (/joke)
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
That one of the sites they're censoring is google.com before some clever Aussie hax0r discovers it's cache feature.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
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
Think of what's on the list. :)
If I went to the US government and said give a list of the latest warez and porn sites, they'd toss me out on my ear!
This tagline is umop apisdn.
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.
We may never know.. ;)
-- Dan
This is interesting because it seems to be another take on freedom of information regarding what our governments do on our behalf. The EFA has a document that details the FOI requests released or denied.
In a similar vein, the US government won't even release information about how its own citizens are being profiled.
That familiar question from ancient Rome comes to mind:
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Who watches the watchmen?
When will the conservatives in Australia learn that just because you might want your kids seeing something, doesn't mean you have the right to stop everyone in the country from seeing it? Let parents make their own decisions about censorship, instead of having the government decide what to censor and force it on everyone.
It's obvious that the reason they are keeping the blacklist secret is because they are afraid of public scrutiny and backlash against it. No doubt, like virtually all censorware, they have censored many sites that clearly oughtn't be censored. Australia is not as bad as China, but is certainly working in the same direction.
Censorship accomplishes nothing, and does so at a very high cost: your freedom. Regardless, the government can't stop you from viewing what you want on the net, and there are countless ways to circumvent any censorship. The average computer literate 10 year old could probably bypass australia's censorshp.
-Tuxinatorium
Repeal the DMCA!
My guess is that the government is too embarrassed to show how pitifully few sites have been taken down for the money expended
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.
As far as I can make out, I still have unrestricted access to everything I have ever had
i saw 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...
...to actually find out for yourself. One guy down under, on guy in America, and start your counters at 0.0.0.0 and start pinging port 80 until you get to 255.255.255.255. After you are done, compare notes, and viola, there is your blacklist. In fact once this is done once, other groups could do this in other countries usuing the same "roadmap" of all the viable sites. I'm sure you could get a distributed.net project going that could get this done in a couple of days...
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
We like to believe that the early United States government was "by the people, for the people." Was it really, or is this another myth, another example of rewriting history?
I am not a scholar of history. I am not an expert on the world's governments. Are there any examples of a government that truly remained responsive to its citizenry over the long term? If so, what made them successful? What are we doing wrong?
We've run out of habitable continents. I think it may be time to start looking seriously at colonizing space. It may be the only way to get a representative government, at least for a little while.
The intent of Alstons bill is to shutdown sites WITHIN Australia or by Australians that publish content which is deemed inappropriate as per australia's publishing laws. This is not always a bad thing..
They do not filter incoming content, They just shut down those sites within the countries borders that, in effect are breaking the law (Kiddy porn etc..)..
How effective that is, well, thats another debate.
But at least this way there is some accountablilty for what these people put on the net.
There has (to date) been no policlitical/anti govt. sites closed down that I am aware of.
Burma?
... is worried that displaying the URLs will show how ineffective it has been on this?
:)
The censorship laws were a joke when first proposed - a joke that could damage Australian content providers, but which could have little or no impact on Australian's access to illegal materials. At the recent ACIS 2001 conference, a paper was give (full text available as pdf) arguing that the whole thing was pointless as far as pornographic sites were concerned, as they were all offshore already (due, in part, to expansive hosting on Australian servers) and therefore outside of Australia's juristiction.
I can only think of two good reasons for not releasing this material - they fear that examination of the material will show that many of the sites should not have been blacklisted (as per peacefire's work), or that they fear it will show how ineffective the legislation is.
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
Is google blocked/censored down under? If not, then a good chunk of the blocked content should still be readily available.
Instead of using, say:
http://www.foo.com
prefix it with a string to access google's cache:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.foo.com
I'll be the first to admit it is far from perfect (robots.txt, not up-to-the-second, lose access to on-line interactive sites (e.g. e-bay, etc.)), nor is it easy for the casual user. Still, an enterprising user could readily get past some of the censoring. Further, a simple ssh to a host in a different, non-blocked host in a different country would afford access as well.
As for determining WHAT has been blocked, I would think a simple pair of scans across all IP addresses, once attempting access in Australia, and another from, say, USA; then just compare notes and voila! That would seem to be a heck of lot quicker than the months they've been at it trying to go through formal channels.
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.
Maybe there's a business opportunity in providing "banned" content to people in Australia and other countries like Communist China and Iran which similarly attempt to censor the 'net. (Australia should be sooo proud to oppress its citizens just like the army satraps of Red China and the radical clerics of Iran, by the way.)
Charge a nominal amount, say AU $5 or so per month, and run an offshore proxy server. Compare search-engine TLD addresses reachable from outside against those reachable from within the customers' country, and mirror all the blocked domains. Give customers PGP (and tell them how to set it up) to protect the emailed proxy address from the censors. Keep a few spare domain names and proxy addresses to jump to whenever the censors catch on, and email customers with the new proxy address in response to inquiries ("Where'd you go?) in order to avoid conspicuous mass mailings. It might work, I think.
I realize there are other anonomizers and proxy-relay operations out there, but has anyone tried a secure subscription model proxy service to bypass oppressive censorship?
Just to clarify, there is nothing in Australia stopping me from accessing any internet site. The blacklist is added to censorware which is sanction by the Government (coincidentally, the censorware companies were big proponents of this rather useless law). The censorware is supposed to be used by everybody and I think by law should provided by ISPs - but no-one is at all interested in enforcing this.
So this story doesn't affect me, or any other internet user in Australia, any more that the broadcasting act does.
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
Again, this is old, and modifications in the Australian law render it no longer applicable. I eventually came to the conclusion that the "Australian" blacklist bit never got implemented (at least in what I could examine). So it seems that the bans works, operationally, by the Australian government just sending the sites to various censorware companies. The blacklisted sites are then just mixed into the general huge censorware blacklist itself.
Amusing footnote: A little before everything broke loose in What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org), I actually tried to enlist Michael Sims' support in my first idea for a technical attack on the Austrialian blacklist. This was because at the time he was well-positioned (as a "journalist", and also with other contacts) to take certain legal risks which I found extremely worrisome. No help whatsoever, in any form. Luckily, it seems not to have mattered.
However, when the government actually looked at implementing the legislation, they realised that all they could practically do was require ISPs to *offer* commercial filtering software, and for those commercial filtering providers to filter stuff that the classification board deemed offensive. It's not like the Great Firewall of China, people.
In practice, everyone's happy. The government is seen to be doing stuff (thus keeping the wowsers happy), the Bloggs family installs the filtering package on their PC, young Joeseph Bloggs gets around the filtering package, and the rest of us keep downloading porn and bomb recipes totally unencumbered by any filtering software at all :)
I agree that an unenforced bad law is still a bad thing, but it's a hell of a lot nicer than an enforced bad law.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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
I am only too aware of how extremely dodgy our censorship laws are here. In reply to the theme that publishing the list would make people demand what's banned, think again.
1) The government publishes a list containing URLS for child pornography, bomb making, and anti-copyright law propaganda.
2a) Someone asks for the child pornography sites to be unblocked. Police jump on them. Quite rightly.
2b) Someone uses the anti-copyright law website in a campaign for freedom of speech. Quite rightly.
The problem is a complete lack of checks and balances on the governments ability to censor what we watch. In addition, the censorship process in Australia is very dodgy indeed.
So many of our censorship laws were enacted so that the Government could buy off Senator Brian Harradine who held the balance of power in the Senate. Brian Harradine, a Tasmanian senator, has extremely conservative views - vastly different to the mainstream views in australia.
Studies have shown, time and again, that the australian population does not agree with the TV and movie censorship ratings given out. The official classification almost always condones more violence and less sex.
mick
Americans should also realise that the overall political spectrum in Australia is considerably to the left of the US.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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?
About 20 years ago, a constitutional referendum to introduce a bill of rights was put up (by the other major party, the Australian Labor Party) and soundly defeated in a referendum.
There are reasonable (in my view, not sufficiently convincing, but credible) arguments to suggest that extensive bills of rights are unnecessary and that regular laws passed by a democratically elected parliament (whose functioning *is* constitutionally protected) are a better safeguard of human rights. Amongst others, it is argued that elected politicians are likely to interpret human rights more in keeping with the electorate's views better than unelected judges, and as views on human rights evolve laws can adapt better than constitutions can.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
They won't release the list because there's nothing in it.
Can anyone point to any situation where our (Aus.) Internet censorship laws have actually been enforced ? People charged? ISPs sued for
breaches?
I know of none.
'sapientia potestas est'
great. more 'internet censorship' bull that we australians have had to go thru before. if they arent banning classic games like GTA3, they are dictating that we cant display 'adult' material for other adults on the web, because 'minors' can have access to it. its a standard govt ploy to appeal to the voters thru scare tactics ... "the net is full of evil pornographers and blah blah blah that your children need to be protected from and WE are the people to do it".
:)
for some reason it seems to work well tho (see the basis for the current australian govts recent election win; keeping out illegal immigrants) so im sure it will be a big hit with parents so lacking in parenting skills that instead of thinking that maybe they might possibly need to be the person required to guide their childs internet surfing, they can just sit back and let the govt turn into criminals anyone who wants to display anything the current govt doesnt agree with.
and who can possibly claim to properly be able to regulate what is 'suitable' and what is not? surely not some out-of-touch politicians. it all comes down to a point of view thing. i am tired of being told what to do and what to look at and what i can buy based on rules that are applicable only to 'minors' (i am 24). is there some way of getting a transfer to another planet for people who dont need to be told what to think and what they can look at and what they can do? not that it matters, im sure the site for that particular travel agency is blacklisted as well
'This site is intended for people over 18, but only because kids shoot each other if they hear the word "fuck"' (seanbaby.com)
(btw, to all you other aussies out there who missed out on GTA3, order it from a UK games site, mine only took 7 days to get here, and it all up cost about the same as it would have to get it from here. but im sure you all knew that anyway)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, bomb making information is legal in the United States.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The responses I have seen fall mainly into these groups:
I think we can ignore number 5. As for the others;
2. There is no filter. As several people have pointed out, this legislation is to provide for the prosecution of ISPs for hosting a site which is mentioned on the blacklist. There is no consultation. And, as the list is itself censored, there is no appeal.
1. It also means that the public who is funding these actions, and are directly affected by them are forbidden from finding out a] what is being done in their name, and b] how effective it has been in eliminating the societal bane of being able to look at nekkid ladies.
3. Kudos to these people. Sometimes, you can be paranoid and they're out to get you.
4. Yes they have. Raymond Hoser's site may not be the prettiest, but deserves to be looked at for what he is trying to say. (just try to ignore the ugly banners and flashing GIFs.)
Refer also to my reply to point 2. When we don't know what has been gone after, how the hell can we turn around and say "but they haven't gone after any political sites!" What is the evidence for this? More to the point where is the evidence? In that file, and the most likely explanations for its censorship are either a] reflexive beaurocratic obstructionist B.S. or b] the protection and hiding of potentially sensitive or incriminating evidence.
As I said before, Sometimes you are paranoid, sometimes they really are out to get you. How are we supposed to tell which is true when the official government line is "keep doing what you have been doing. If it is illegal, we (might) tell you."
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
- Commissioner Pravin Lal,
"U.N. Declaration of Rights"
I believe these words have a glimmer of truth in them. Unfortunately, in the western world I see the signs of an increasing desire to collect and conceal information from the public.
...that a nation that started out as a penal colony would have some of the most conservative censorship laws?
One has to wonder how many innocent people are taken from their homes, or all their property confiscated, or even worse: executed.
How's this for a start?
Someday we may see people trying to escape the US as those did in the day of the communist eastern bloc countries...
The exodus has already begun.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
I believe that no government in the world should censor information available on the Internet. The Internet should be a way to exchange information freely, even if that information is illegal to obtain through other means. In fact, the governments of the world should encourage people to obtain illegal information over the Internet, and should pass laws making such illegal information legal if obtained through the Internet. Also, if the information is really illegal, like more illegal than most other illegal information, the government should give both the sender and receiver a hefty reward of, say, one year's worth of wages, tax free.
In other words, ban Internet censorship!
By the way, I was being somewhat sarcastic above. Oh well.
The problem with an unenforced bad law is that it can be applied selectively (e.g. "we think this person is doing something wrong (or we don't like), but don't have proof ... oh, wait a minute, we can get him for this other thing"). There's then no comeback, becuase after all, the law was being broken. However, the bad law gets to stay on the books because there isn't a public outcry.
Also, it's surely not good for the integrity of the whole system of laws to have some that aren't "meant". Much better to have a clear set of laws and a justice system where the laws are enforced, and lawbreaking dealt with fairly (OK, there's a lot of things in this sentence that don't happen).
The best way to get rid of a really bad law is to rigorously enforce it.
Remember what they first said when they were seeking power:
"Government should be run like a business", which is a textbook definition of fascism, sell the useless for buttons and soap. They don't really believe that themselves - or they wouldn't have sold most of a telecommunications business that was making enormous profits.
They are however a government that make me cringe every time I read something about them in an international news source. They demoted someone to minister of defence as a PUNISHMENT for embarrassing the government and they sent the navy to Afganistan and the army to sea. Their IT policies can at least serve as light relief on slashdot.
Any residents of the US reading this should know that the september 11 disaster was used to stir up hysteria and racism here and get this government re-elected. Australia has commited some help to the US in Afganistan, but grudgingly, and far less than we have commited to keep refugees offshore. Grand annoucements were made, but the reality was different. We are not particularly good allies to anyone at the moment.
In this case the implementation sucks badly. The refugees are held in privatised "for profit" detention centres. Conditions are deteriorating all of the time for economic reasons.
Many refugees have been held for times in excess of two years. To a large degree that is due to appeals, but it is still a very bad situation.
The most recent turn of events is to persuade countries in the local area to take the refugees instead - this is known as the "Pacific Solution".
One journalist pointed out that if the refugees re-located to pacific islands had been given enough cash to qualify for the business migration scheme, then it would have cost only a small fraction of the pre-election stunt that occurred.
True, and it appears that in almost all cases people the people in the camps will stick it out for the hope of the future - and they don't have anything good to go back to. What most people don't realise is that this is not about the worthy or the unworthy - the government and apparently the majority of the population don't want any of them. The first thing the government did here as soon as the Taliban fell was to try to send all of the Afgans back.
A lot of people would consider every refugee here unworthy, since they had to be rich or have a lot of contacts to get here in the first place.
Refugees from Europe made this country what it is now, and probably made the changes that kept Australia from going the way of Argentina (another country that had nothing but primary industry in the 1940's).
Here the majority don't want immigrants BECAUSE they might work and take good anglo-saxon jobs. The reality is different to the fears, but you can't hold over a hundred years of history up to people with a wall of invincible ignorance.
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.
The more I hear about pointless censorship in Australia, the more I'm convinced that the hole in the ozone layer down at the south pole has expanded to affect southern australia. All that extra UV has begun to cause rampant mental illness among the politicians in that country. Why only politicians? Well I'm not sure of that yet but I don't think that matters much since its clear they're going mad.
The solution? Boot them out of office. If you can't do it at the ballot box, do it with the business end of a rifle. Oh, wait, they've already taken everyone's guns away down there and succeeded in convincing the population it was a good idea. Come to think of it, I wonder just how censor happy they would be if the citizens there were armed? One way or another the Australians really need to clean house down there since its hardly the government's job to tell anyone what they can look at.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
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
Your use of the misnomer "illegal immigrant" makes it pretty clear that you've swallowed the rhetoric that our Immigration minister spouts at every opportunity. He knows that demonising these people in this way strikes a chord with the large numbers of Australians who need someone to blame for their misery. As far as he is concerned, it's better that unhappy Australians blame their problems on a bunch of faceless, voiceless, suffering people who they don't understand, than on his government. Who do you think is most responsible for your problems?
These people are not illegal immigrants, they are asylum seekers. They are fleeing their own country because they fear for their lives. Is this a situation that you have ever had to face? How do you think you would deal with it?
Australia is a voluntary signatory to the UN's 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. Because of this, Australia is obliged under international law to offer support to those fitting the (very specific) definition of a refugee.
If you still don't accept this, how do you suggest that these asylum seekers obtain "legal" entry into Australia? We don't have any diplomatic presence in Iraq or Afghanistan. The queue that they are supposedly jumping does not exist.
I certainly think that my taxes are better spent helping these people than on a pointless attempt to censor the Internet.
I'm happy to discuss this topic with you further, if you like, but off-site. It's getting way off topic.
Back on topic...
Yes, I realise it would be technically difficult to implement a national filter to effectively censor the web content available to Australians, and that there would always be ways arounds it. But surely that doesn't mean that a partially-effective solution could be implemented. Australia only has a finite number of ISPs, and a handful service the majority of the market.
You may not be aware that by law, Australian telecommunications companies are required to provide government agencies with the ability to intercept communications. I have worked for a large Australian telephone company, and I know that various law enforcement agencies use this provision on a very regular basis.
Given that:
- the government has the legal ability to force carriers to intercept communications; and
- I know they regularly use this ability to intercept telephone calls
I'm not willing to discount the possibility that they're not doing this to some extent with Internet content. I'm not insisting that they are doing this, I'm just not as certain as you that they're not. The fact that they're not willing to be transparent with their blacklist certainly doesn't make me feel any better.Dima's [dima.gov.au] web site had details on some of the reasons that these detainees are being held. Many of them refuse to provide any ID and fit descriptions of people wanted in different parts of the world.
This dosn't really make the task of identifying genuine asylum seekers any easier. Since someone leaving their country because they fear for their safety is unlikelt to do so as a tourist. With bogus criminal charges being a very obvious method an opressive state can employ...
The fact that this is +4 insightful is probably the straw that broke the camels back for me and /.
These people are supposedly fleeing for their lives from places like *Turkey* (UK travel agents sell package cruise holidays to Turkey for f***'s sake )
Is there any logic here? UK Travel agents will ship you anywhere for cash. China! Random african countries! Russia! Israel! You think none of these places abuse human rights enough for anyone to be fleeing their life? Please. As for turkey read this
Just ask any UK citizen which system they think is better, Australia's or their own.
The UK's. And I'm not the only one, even if we are a minority.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
FYI: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is a story about how bad big business got when government gave big business handouts -- not when the market was deregulated. Get your facts straight.
Secondly, unemployment insurance IS cheaper than government insurance -- and is made better, too. Government likes you unemployed, that's why we have so many aweful nanny state programs. But private unemployment insurers would have a reason to get you back to work... By helping you find another job.
I am so sick of liberals who think big government works. The facts are that the U.S. grew more during the deregulated era than we have during the regulated new deal era we've been living in. Or have you forgotten about the $30 trillion in debt our governemnt, individuals, and corporations now harbor?
Maybe you should go look up the definition of Godwin's Law now. I do not think it means what you think it means.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
The last moderation, which took it to 5, was "funny". The other preceeding moderations were not for "funny". Of course, it has been down moderated since then. Now, as to why:
Australia, where there are aussies, sometimes pronounced "auzzies", is sometimes called the land of OZ by Australians.
You then have this line:
This almost sounds like a version of the land of OZ where the wicked witch never died.
which must have tickled someone funny bone. A bit of dry humor which requires a certain amount of familiarity with the venacular given above.
So there were several moderations done, including one for humor, and several by humorless folks who thought that the +5 meant that everyone had said it was funny. Which is a bug in the moderation system
[shrug]
and now you know.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You swallow and spout the anti-government line so well. Of course you forget that until the status of these people is determined they are, in fact, illegial aliens and not refugees and deserve no special treatment.
Back on topic:
The telecommunications act does not require any ability to block communications to be present. If you actually read the document you linked to, you'd see that "interception" is merely defined as listening/recording and nothing more. This is quite easy to do if you could be bothered making sense of the gigabytes per second running through the ISPs networks.
I'm quite sure the government can sniff traffic and may even do so. This does not consitute blocking the traffic however.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
From The Age Under the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill, the public will be able to lodge complaints about offensive material with the Australian Broadcasting Authority, which will have the power to direct Internet service providers to remove it or face hefty criminal penalties.
As quoted from Australian Personal Computer The government has a rather interesting interpretation of 'success' when it comes to Internet censorship. When the first (decidedly rubbery) figures on the Internet censorship scheme were released a mere nine months after it started, officials decreed that a system which had only managed to identify and shut down 62 'offending' sites was an outstanding success. When APC did a quick check using a search engine, we found roughly 7 million potentially offensive sites. Drop in the ocean anyone?
What's worse about this is the laws were passed to gain the support of two independant senators so that the government could press ahead with the second sale of Telstra. (Telstra is the federally owned telco company, of which the government has sold 49% of). 62 sites, most of which hosted porn without AVS controls, or bomb-making instructions, isn't something to get up-in-arms (excuse the pun) about.
The big difference is the alternatives you have for getting access to the banned material. If the blue-nosed thugs ban a movie, and you know they've banned it and want to see it, you *might* be able to buy a copy by mail from Amazon.com that arrives in a brown paper wrapper, you politically incorrect pervert, but you won't be able to go to a theater in Oz and see it, so they've still protected the morals of otherwise-innocent Ozzies.
By contrast, if they list the banned web pages, you can just nip over to anonymizer.com or The Wayback Machine or Google or some other cache or anti-censorship relay site and view it anyway, plus they've publicized a whole bunch of sites you otherwise wouldn't have thought to look at. That's especially important for political censorship (drawing attention to "Aus.Gov't did *this latest* stupid thing" as opposed to burying it), but also important for basic prudish censorship, because there are all sorts of nasty kinky immoral things that average upstanding moral Australians simply wouldn't have thought of if the Government hadn't told them "Here's the stuff we don't want you looking at! Especially *this stuff*".
More seriously, though, somebody else made the comment that the censorship is actually very minimal, and it's a facade that's designed to tell a few noisy right-wingers "yes, we've done what you want, so you can be happy and stop bugging us", and if you actually made the list public it would be obvious want a small fraction of the stuff *some* people might want banned is actually on there - so if the anti-censorship people don't complain loudly about it, you'll actually get a lot less censorship because we can leave it quietly buried in some bureaucratic back room keeping a couple of blue-noses off the streets hunting for pr0n on the internet instead of bothering politicians. It's not the ideal social position for a free and open society, but pragmatically it's possibly better for everybody, and maybe we can task some of the censors to go fight that Other Deadly Sin, Greed, by adding spammers's sites to the blacklists.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But filtering speech by Australians, and deciding which speech is "appropriate", is still an outrage in a free society - it's basically saying "if you say things we don't like, we'll send you a Threatening Letter, and if you ignore that we'll send a bunch of armed policemen to beat you up and haul you away to jail", no matter how polite a face they try to put on it. Sturgeon's Law does usually apply to censored publications as well as uncensored ones - 90% of the stuff they shut down is crap, and almost nobody will miss it, but shutting it down is still wrong.
As far as "accountability" goes, refusing to publish the list of banned material is deliberate evasion of accountability.
If they do an effective job of censorship, you *won't* become aware of political sites being shut down, but that won't be because they aren't shutting them down. I doubt they'll be that successful, but they'll still reduce access to material they dislike, and reduce the public's awareness of what they're censoring. The Internet has its own methods for providing accountability, which are that speech is cheap enough that if you disapprove of some web site, you can put up your own web site disagreeing with that other site, or insulting it, or disproving it, or just telling people that it's bad stuff they shouldn't read. The remedy for bad speech isn't policemen, it's more speech, and the Internet makes more speech cheap and easy.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Of course.
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Bwahaaaaahaaaaaahaaahaaaahaahahahahahahahahahaha ha hahahah!
The moral: Those who make the rules must **N**E**V**E**R** follow them.
......oooooooooooooooh well
The populations of most 'Western' countries, including all of North-West Europe and, IIRC, Australia, are either shrinking, or will do very soon. Indeed, Germany's population has been shrinking at a rate of about 0.3% for the past decade, after immigration is taken in to account. Combined with the aging of the population, the tax burden upon the workers of the elderly and infirm (pensions, etc.) is going to rise at a very high rate. Thus there is, and will contine to be, an increase in the demand for workers. Economic migrants can and do fill this gap well, and often work harder than those around them, determined to be sucessful in their new country of origin - 2nd generation immigrants make up a (proportionally) large number of the students at university in the UK, for example. This gives rise to a high level of xenophobia in the (ignorant) people who feel that 'their' jobs (which they would not have taken anyway) are being 'stolen' from them. Thus, if anything, those that complain should be exiled from their country, as they do less for their country than immigrants would for their intended new home. Economic immigration, far from being the scourge of modern government, is a great way of increasing the overall quality of life, and increasing GDP/capita, etc.
All this is, of course, completely off-topic - the Australian government is breaking international law by not allowing potential refugees into their country (and, incidentally, violating the human rights[1] of those claiming asylum, in their treatment of them), whether Australia is the 'first port of call' or not.
Just ask any UK citizen which system they think is better, Australia's or their own.
Well, as a UK citizen, I would say that my country's system is superior, both morally and economically as well as legally, but that it is still not particularly 'good'. Australia has an average population density of about 2 people per square kilometre; the UK has an average of about 260, and the Netherlands has an average of approximately 370. Who would you think has the greatest ability to 'absorb' immigrants? Who would you think had the best immigration system?
[1] - Human rights, such as the right to life, are unwaivable under any circumstances (yes, this means that the US, along with Iraq, Iran, China and Korea, etc., breaks international law by executing people for their civilian crimes[2][3]).
[2] - Yes, I am aware that other 'Western' countries violate these laws, such as the UK (trespassing on the royal docks, defacing the image of the current Monarch, and other acts of High Treason are potentially punnishable by death), and do submit that it is somewhat
[3] - The term 'civilian crimes' means any crime that has not (individually) been decided by an international, impartial court to be an act of war.
James F.