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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.
When we chose to have freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech in our rights and freedoms, we chose to enshrine it, for better or for worse; to take the good with the bad. That's right, we chose to occasionally hear or read utterances of foul words such as nigger, or other words of hatred or obscenity because within the realms of free speech also lie enlightened and uplifting works, such as those of Plato, Charles Dickens, or Danielle Steel.
If the politicians see fit to take away rights from us, or from any other country for that matter, we still lose. Why's that? Because of the nature of the internet, we are all censored. The problem with censoring hate speech is the potential for continual erosion of speech rights. Next after hate speech, is critical speech. Take Russia for example, where a show named Kukli depicting political satire has been banned from television because of its critical nature. I repeat, this sort of thing is bad for all of us.
?-|||-----x<*))))><
I'm not sure I get it? It IS working pretty effectively in China, right? I sent some links recently about the Uighur Turks in Xinjiang (Sinkiang)province to some Chinese friends (living in America) who kept up with Chinese news sources via the web and they had never heard of anything in these articles (the existence of a Uighur Independence movement, bombings in Xinjiang, protests in the capital city of Xinjiang, etc).
It seems to me that China's censorship works pretty damn well!
So in response, will the US violently ban Crocodile Hunter from TV? God I hope so...
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Shut up or I'll beat the crap outta ya!
If you don't see the humor, then by all means, moderate!
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
You miss the point: If people are influenced by websites like this then the problem lies with the person being so mentally weak as to be affected by it.
While blocking these sites may seem to be an effective solution, it's just like the whole 'ban guns' thing, people are the problem, not the guns.
Anyway, yeah. The risk of blocking sites is it's government censorship. It's blocking free speech, and it's another step on the road towards the government being able to censor anything it likes.
Governments shouldn't be allowed to censor free speech.
Did anybody ever really think applications like Peek-A-Booty would have to be used in "Free" nations? Perhaps we're not paranoid enough.
Can somebody with a clue about Australian law an politics explain what recource the Australian citizens have against this measure?
Um...in case you haven't notice, freedom os speech is in the United States Constitution, not the world constitution.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
I feel new sympathy for furriners who don't understand why there are two senators from Montana but only one representative.
E-Crime Law Reform Working Party,
What, like a political party?
State Opposition Justice spokesman Lawrence Springborg
So.... he's, like, the justice minister in the opposition's shadow cabinet?
A police ministers meeting in Darwin
WTF is a police minister? You have more than one? Is that like a District Attorney, like a chief of police, or something? It's a cabinet post?
Senator Ellison's decision to give the new Australian Crime Commission the power to investigate cyber crime.
I thought you had a parliament? Why is a Senator handing out new police powers, anyway?
I assume that the ACC is your shiny new sinister agency in charge of government repression.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
...the gov't is empowered to block communications aimed at organizing violent or illegal acts, such as a riot. Now, the rule is a strict rule, and so the threat of violence must be specific and imminent (the classic Supreme Court case held that a Klansmans calling for generic "revengement" at a rally was not censorable, despite his poor grammar). And criminal speech is not protected ("Let's rob that bank.").
The problem with the Australian move is not so much that it's anathema to free speech as it is stupid, much like the White House "encouraging" the craven networks not to broadcast Osama bin Laden's tape because it might have secret signals in it (more likely that was a cover story for plain old political reasons). There are far too many routes of alternative communication to make such measures any more than symbolic.
As the great Justive Homer would have said, "D'oh."
As somebody who organizes said "violent protests," I'd like to suggest that the Australian government ban access to websites like WashingtonPost.com and other media websites that routinely contain editorial content that advocates international violence (war) and terrorism (government violence that is illegal and violates human rights).
How about Australia? Are you hypocrites or just interested in censoring controversial opinions?
Check out Harvard project for the latest on the battle. Looks like the Chinese are pulling ahead.
Leaving aside the debate on wheter or not censoring can be a Good Thing, I just want to say that the Australian government at least does it the right way. They block sites they don't want their citizens to see, rather than suing them for something that might be perfectly legal in the country the site is located. The latter method, in my eyes, would amount to extending their jurisdiction beyond the borders of their own territory. At least they're not doing that, so they're not affecting the rest of the world. The Australians can decide for themselves what to do with the censorship.
---
The right half of the brain controls the left half of the body. This
means that only left handed people are in their right mind.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Glad i live in the US where speech is still sort of free and we can almost speak our mind.
As long as i dont discuss decryption, copy protection, anarchy, discuss political issues before elections, how to get around taxes....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It takes a coordinated effort by every provider out there, but it IS possible.
Though all that has to be done is filter your content at your ISP level.. what you cant see is *effectively* censored.
Lets hope we never see it come to that. Though i belive thats just a misplaced dream now. The future is at hand.. being built brick by brick.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
>> ...so mentally weak as to be affected by it.
...just like the whole 'ban guns' thing, people are the problem, not the guns.
What's that supposed to mean? You believe you can segregate people based on your opinion about their intellectual capacity?
>>
No, they're not. Guns are the problem. If you don't have a gun, you can't shoot me with it. This lame argument has been used for years by the jackals in the NRA, and it is just as false now as when those murderers invented it.
>> Governments shouldn't be allowed to censor free speech.
The Internet is a public place; if you plot criminal acts in public, the government has a responsbility to stop you.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
State Opposition Justice spokesman Lawrence Springborg said that despite the federal proposals, he would introduce a Private Member's Bill on defamation in Parliament today. It would call for defamation to be an indictable offence with up to five years' jail on conviction.
The case of defamation in the article might have certainly not been satire, but there is a wide blur line here.
How can somebody make an honest joke (about somebody) and not get penalized.
Case in point: Royal Canadian Air Farce (note: you can download episodes off of their website)
Their entire show is pretty much satire on people. Politicians mainly. Their imitation of Chretien has to be the best. This show might be cut and dry humour. But many satires are not quite as far on the humour spectrum.
Please tell me how you can distinguish them.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
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
I'm thinking about smugly stating that "it will never work"
What difference does that really make? Some people will find out what they want, but the problem with taking away rights DOES have an impact wether or not it truly works. If some people can get around the blockage, there are still lots of people who do not have the knowledge to do so.
The same goes for taking away fair-use rights with copy-protected CDs and the like. The fact that they with lots of effort can be circumvented is besides the point.
"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."
If they're inciting a riot, then charge them as such and let them defend themselves in a court of law. It looks like this law is designed to let the government decide by itself whether a website is planning a crime and lets them block it all by themselves without first charging the owners with a crime.
Australia's government does not seem to like to the way the Internet is lacking restrictions to free speech, and neither do many other governments. And one has to wonder if this strategy will work. Violent protests can still be organized without the Internet. Have violent protests not been organized long before the Internet was used by protesters as a medium for communication? And how can they know which protests being organized will be violent or not? Many people may show up at a protest with no intention to be violent, but keep in mind that it only takes a few people to start a riot.
Read this, the best and most accurate report about the first "violent" protest in Australia, the unfortunately named "s11" protests on the 11th of September 2000.
.NET speech at the nearby conference centre. On the order of a hundred thousand protestors, all behaving themselves, standing in front of the gates to the site.
The police were indeed mad, there were thousands of protestors, all as calm and determined as could be, and successful. The first day they were forced to ferry in the conference candidates individually by helicopter. Bill Gates called off his
Violence - one or two people wanted to attack the police lines, they were well and truly calmed down by a dozen to half a dozen people each.
Anyway, read the article. It's all true afaik.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
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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How did this get modded Interesting, rather than Flamebait? If one reads the article, one finds that Australia has decided to pull the plug on websites that are used to organize violent protests. Such websites are illegal in the United States as well, however the legal tests for shutting down such sites are stricter in the US. The First Amendment does not protect speech that advocates specific criminal acts. That's why you're not allowed to put Wanted: Dead or Alive posters of abortion doctors on your web site. Similarly, posting notices to the effect of, "The WTO is meeting in Seattle next week, bring your Molotov cocktails" would also be illegal.
Only very specific threats are typically considered unprotected speech, however. You can publish bomb recipes in the States, or make general calls for revenge, that might be unacceptable in other jurisdictions. Australia has chosen to accept a slightly broader definition of what constitutes inciting violent or criminal activity. Slight difference in degree, not a difference in kind. Many other countries (Canada, for one) have similar policies. (And, IIRC, Canada is usually reviled on Slashdot for being a Socialist/Commie/pinko nation, rather than a Fascist one.)
They are the country the most wiretaps per citizen.
They are the country with the most reported wiretaps per person. I'm sure that the FBI, CIA, and NSA are just models of honesty and transparency about that sort of thing, since they're such good USAPATRIOTs. Ahem.
China is Australias morst important trading partner. Now wonder some strange ideas come back from China.
Canada is the United States' biggest trading partner. I'd love to know what strange ideas Americans are getting by that route.
~Idarubicin
Firstly, the NSW police minister asked the federal government to censor the site (and two others; noWTO and s11 , neither of which host any violent content) under the existing Australian internet censorship legislation. However, the Australian Broadcast Authority did not find anything illegal with the sites, and did not censor them. So the government has decided this is not good enough and wants tougher legislation to block dissent.
As for melbourne indymedia, the main post in question was one which does suggest to people different ways of dealing with police at protests. Being open publishing, the comment is the persons own view. Whether or not one agrees with the comment, it is important to have a discussion about it, and that is exactly what happened; a heated discussion follows the original post.
People always flail their arms about `protest being OK as long as it is within the law.' But what if the law is unjust? Are people not entitled to defend themselves against a fascist police force?
What I find particularly ironic is that the Australian Labor Party, founded on the ideals of civil disobedience (unions et al) are now the ones who are trying to quell any dissent whatsoever.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
You say "the web site in particular was very clear about advocating violence"; I didn't see that website cited anywhere. Do you have a URL?
Our concern is angry but peaceful political speech being intentionally mislabeled as an "incitement to violence" in order to silence it. I suspect this is the case literally, but regardless, the reasoning stands:
We are talking about people in the act of doing violence against an army of police. We don't need to split hairs over "dangerous" speech. You're already holding a big umbrella to protect yourself from the storm; don't try to arrest the wind for blowing it in your direction. Why? a) Stifling political speech is about as hard as arresting the wind - you still get the protest, b) The censorship powers are uniformly abused, c) the end result is the same, except with censorship your "democracy" loses its legitimacy.
Just as we say it is better to let a hundred criminals go free than one innocent be punished, we say it is a better society that looks bravely into the face of dangerous speech than one that cowers, like the Chinese, behind a firewall, against the perils of democratic ideals. This is not some idealistic caprice - these are hard-won and time-tested ideas.
If this is actually a case where there is a group openly and specifically organizing violent criminal acts against the police on the web, it's the exception that proves the rule. If that were the case, however, I'd expect (and hope, actually) to see real arrests and real trials, not administrative decisions and arbitrary censorship.
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Please offer me another speech about how it is "not I who flames"
You actually were not my intended audience, so dont flatter yourself that I would plead with you.
If you'll notice in the recent elections, many democrats were campaigning the very same issues. Furthermore despite the fact that the largest political party in the US is Democratic Party, the elections ended up as they did; this shows that many people are scared, not just republicans. There are alot of people makeing bad decisions dont try to blame a single party for the problems in our country. In a democracy we all take responsability.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni