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.

Comments

Another horrible loss of rights

[EggplantMan]

Yet again our rights are being eroded.

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.

Re:Another horrible loss of rights

[pineappleboy]

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.

Sarcasm?

[Moridineas]

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!

Retaliation

[DarkHelmet]

The Australian government is planning to block websites used to organize violent protests

So in response, will the US violently ban Crocodile Hunter from TV? God I hope so...

Re:Uh

[Angry White Guy]

Shut up or I'll beat the crap outta ya!

If you don't see the humor, then by all means, moderate!

Any Aussies wanna explain the local polibabble?

[sam_handelman]

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.

Re:Any Aussies wanna explain the local polibabble?

[fishexe]

I thought you had a parliament? Why is a Senator handing out new police powers, anyway?

Because the Emperor has just ordered the Imperial Senate disbanded, and the senator in question made grand moff. Fear will keep the local systems in line, fear of this battle station!

Re:Any Aussies wanna explain the local polibabble?

[Goonie]

E-Crime Law Reform Working Party,

Is a council of the relevant cabinet members in the six state governments (and the two territories), and the federal government, to coordinate their reponse to the "monstrous threat of E-crime".

State Opposition Justice spokesman Lawrence Springborg

Is the opposition Party's spokesperson on justice matters. Yes, he's in the shadow cabinet.

WTF is a police minister?

The minister responsible for the oversight of police. Each of the six state governments has one. Yes it's a little strange, but law and order is one of the state government's major responsibilities. They aren't a chief of police, they are politicians (but here the chief of police isn't an elected position so the political element of a US police chief's role is handled by the minister).

I thought you had a parliament? Why is a Senator handing out new police powers, anyway?

Either this is something that can be done by regulation (ministerial decree, essentially) or the legislation will get through Parliament without much debate (which seems likely if all the States have agreed to it as well, as every single state and territory government is run by the party in opposition federally at the moment).

Even in the holy US of A...

[MacAndrew]

...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."

Re:Even in the holy US of A...

[Ian Bicking]

Interestingly, we recently had a global justice protest here in Chicago (you know, WTO/IMF, etc -- in this case it was an associated organization, Trans-Atlantic Business Dialog). It was rather odd, because by far the biggest publicizer of the event was the Chicago Police. It had far, far more coverage than the Oct 26 peace protests, despite being a last-minute organization effort, much smaller, and generally not a big deal among the leftists in the city.

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.

Goes along with illegal *expressions* of hate...

[nurb432]

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....

Hold your horses

[NightRain]

Aren't we all maybe jumping to conclusions here? I mean there is one throw away line about blocking certain websites.

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

S11 - I was there, this is true

[Anarchofascist]

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.

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 .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.

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.

Your hair splitting is worrisome

[Featureless]

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.