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Australia Plans to Censor the Internet
MAXOMENOS writes "The Australian government is planning to block websites used to organize violent protests, as part of a larger effort to prevent crime from being planned on the 'net." Yeah this is gonna work really really. It's working
out great in China after all.
Caution must always be applied in the use of censorship. However, every state should be allowed the ability to prevent what it considers crime. If a website is complicit in some sort of criminal activity, then it should be shut down, by the same laws that apply to all other media.
What we should be worried about is who decides what material is considered criminal. I wouldn't consider these sort of decisions a loss of rights, as the reason behind them is to protect people and property from violence.
--T. Metcalf
We never know the worth of water until the well is dry.
Just like the last couple of times the government raised a stink, and threatened to block stuff, it will just be smoke in the wind. Look at their plans to stop Australians gaming online, and also the laws on hosting material 'not acceptable for children to view' in South Australia. They both had some sort of motions passed, and then got washed away into irrelevancy due to the complete inability of the govt to enforce the laws they formed on the matter. Either that, or the laws they formed were so watered down as to be pointless.
The Australian government can't and won't bring itself to the stage of actively proxying all international and national traffic and parsing it for hints of illegal plans for violent protests. Instead, they will pass some sort of motion that forbids Australians from hosting such a site on an Australian server, whilst completely ignoring the possibility of internation hosting etc. They will be seen to be doing something by the people who don't know better, and the people who do know better will just get on with life as if none of this ever happened.
Sure, this is a bad thing in so far as the precedence it sets, or rather in the precedence it re-enforces, but it will make no difference to anyone in the end.
Ray
Ultimately, it has been complete peaceful -- which is not odd, since absolutely no one had suggested any violence whatsoever. The only question was whether the CPD was going to instigate violence, but then with all the publicity they set up there were cameras everywhere. Not that most media won't bend over backwards to avoid showing police violence. But they were actually interupting programming to cover the protest, and the number of police were roughly equal to the number of protesters.
Anyway, it was hard for me to understand why the police and city government would do such a thing. The protest was looking to be pretty minor and not well organized -- the CPD practically saved it. Of course, they did it through fear-mongering (but there's no such thing as bad publicity, yada yada -- some will argue with that, of course).
But I've noticed, especially reading comments here and elsewhere, that a large portion of people have fallen under the sway of these reports. They believe that the protesters are violent thugs, even though by far most violence is caused by police. They believe these protesters are like locusts, who come into their cities and disrupt and destroy before moving on.
I suspect that the government is trying to sway people into thinking that empassioned political speach is inherently violent and should be made illegal. If this law does okay in Australia, I would not be surprised if it came up in the US -- probably under the guise of being anti-terrorist.
Shoddily and over-specifically summarizing centuries of legal tradition, America has the extremely circumspect definition that only speech which "directly incites" other parties to "violence" is not "protected speech" under the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
So in theory, in America, a website might be considered illegal if it were instructing protesters to take violent actions. But even in this, U.S. courts have at various times (though certainly not always) proved extremely conservative about what an "instruction" is - as a general rule, "let's teach the bastards a lesson" doens't qualify; not even "bring your baseball bats" would. The former could be considered rhetorical or non-specific, and the latter doesn't tell anyone what to do with the bats (could be self-defense, for instance). Only speech which names names, places, or specific acts in a totally clear and unambiguous way, such as "John, attack any police who come into your sector with rocks" has tended to qualify the speaker as a party to a conspiracy to commit a criminal act.
Despite this unprecedently liberal view of free speech, America has not degenerated into anarchy, much to the chagrin of a number of European political philosophers.
In the case of the websites being shut down, there are no examples of what qualifies, only a vague reference to anti-WTO organizations. Though anti-WTO protests have a repuation for violence, the organizations behind them are uniformly peaceful in nature and advocate nothing other than non-violent demonstration and, only at the most absolute extreme, vandalism or traffic violations. The most polite thing we can say is that it's often "unclear" whether or not the police or the protesters are the source of the violence in a given incident. Being more impolite, it seems that law enforcement is sent out in anti-protest activities with instructions that virtually guarantee violence ("There's a gang of young drugged-out commie agitators out there frightening citizens and stopping traffic. Here's all the clubs, pepper spray, and tear gass you need. We stand behind whatever actions you need to take 100%.") Telling it like it is, quite often the peaceful protestors get the shit gassed and jackbooted out of them without provocation, and when they post bail and go home, they see on the news that they were "violent" and thus, deserved it. Congratulations freshman, you've just passed Authoritarian Propaganda 101.
But I digress. It appears that by U.S. standards the interdictions being considered in Australia would be in gross violation of the 1st Amendment. Obviously territorial sovereignty means this should give an Australian politician little pause. But there is also relevant international law and widely-recognized (or so we all claim at Christmas) international declarations of human rights, which muddy the waters somewhat. Unfortunately, this doesn't give politicians much pause either - in the 1st world or the 3rd.
Ultimately, the American interpretation of the right of free speech is so strict because of constant and blatant experience with the abuse of police power to intimidate and silence political dissent - a totally undemocratic and illegal practice in almost every 1st world country... but politicians and police tend not to have themselves arrested and tried for it.
The bottom line is that (at least up until now - I don't want to speculate about the future) we've pretty much backed off silencing political speech in the U.S., no matter how inflamatory. The infamous example is the Nuremberg Files website, a hideous screed containing a list of abortion practitioners, where names are crossed off when one is murdered. Again - no specific instructions to murder any of them, so, despite a rough ride through the courts (this one is about as close as you can shave it), it is still running.
Americans do it this way because history has unambiguously taught them that what little reduction in "dangerous" activity you might get from trying to silence "dangerous" speech (and believe me, you don't get much) is far outweighed by the immense damage these things do to a functioning democracy.
Incidentally - when democracy breaks down, that's when you really get violence.
I think you're a poster child for propaganda. The moral of this story, as old as government itself, is that those in power will call any protest action "violent" or "illegal" in order to simultaneously suppress it and discredit it. Often, police agent provocateurs are even sent into a demonstration with instructions to commit violence themselves and urge others to as well, as "insurance" against particularly well organized protest groups. And that's happened in America. A loss of rights? Shutting the anti-WTO websites down because they "incite violence" is a classic case.
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