Slashdot Mirror
Aussie Internet Censorship Minister Censors Self
An anonymous reader writes "Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, the minister attempting to ram the great firewall of Oz down everyone's throat, has been removing all traces of the unpopular legislation from his main website with a JavaScript filter. From the article: 'It was revealed today a script within the minister's homepage deliberately removes references to internet filtering from the list. In the function that creates the list, or "tag cloud," there is a condition that if the words "ISP filtering" appear they should be skipped and not displayed.' Bear in mind, this is the same minister that tried to get the ISP of tech forum Whirlpool to pull the site after users there posted a response email from the ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority)."
Their media releases trip our spam filters. I can't remember the exact rules, but they were the dodgy mail server kind.
We keep on asking for Conroy to shut up but this is not what we meant :(
There's federal elections later this year so I imagine the government will be wanting to keep this particular piece of extremely unpopular legislation on the down-low for the rest of the year so that they can do what they did last time and trot it back out after the elections with the statement that they received a mandate from the people to implement it, despite it not actually being a major part of their platform.
After all, no political party in a supposedly free country would want to start campaigning with something as undemocratic on their books as a secret censorship blacklist run by the government with no judicial oversight and no right of appeal which blocks 'undesireable' content as defined by the government's whim at that particular time of the day. Any competent opposition could make it into a very major issue.
They can't be trusted to not use it for political ends. You wont ever hear the words "We've legislated against the filter being used to block political material."
We're already got the ACL (Australian Christian Lobby) attempting to file its members into the classification board by applying for positions to put their own slant on approvals or most likely disapprovals.
Every little interest group that wants the particular vice that they're against is already lining up to whisper in the Senator's ear. He's ethically corrupt and making dubious shady decisions. $250 Million for the free to air channels around Australia with no strings attached. I wonder why there is little to no coverage in the main stream press now days?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
I am so embarrassed to be an Australian right now...
I'm getting tired of endlessly debating the filter with those who dont understand the wider ethical, moral and technical reasons on why its a bad idea. The center piece of their argument is "it stops you downloading childporn from www.kiddytown.com". If you're against that then you're as bad as a child molester. Around and around the argument goes and no matter how many well based points, researched articles or IT professional blogs you gently push them towards, it just comes down to "gotta protect them kids."
We're tried being nice and polite, no one listens. Either way no one is listening. I'm looking forward to running in the street laughing once the general populace work out what they've signed up for. A big fat "I told you so" from the entire IT industry would be in order.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
When I get involved in these arguments, I like to point out that in fact the vast majority of child abuse in this country has been carried out by members of the clergy, particularly the Catholic church, and that statistically the most effective way of reducing child abuse in this country would be to close all church-run orphanages and missions.
This would eliminate something like 99% of all child abuse, and wouldn't affect the everyday lives of anyone else. While implementing the Conroy Filter will create a burden on the rest of the country but will not stop a single child being abused.
Needless to say, this doesn't go over particularly well
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Don't worry ... we are still like that. Don't confuse a few fringe Senators' ideas with the status quo. Slashdot really gives you a warped view on anything that involves privacy/censorship and countries outside the US. Remember, this 'great filter':
- Is currently nothing more than a proposal. Not legislation, and not even an actual Bill that's been introduced formally into the House or Senate; ... it's not subversively being shoved down anyone's throat, despite what one or two loony Senators would like; ... and failing pretty badly. The Liberal opposition and the Greens are almost certain to prevent it ever passing the Senate;
- Is clearly being discussed and is a major topic in the news here. People are informed about it and forming their own opinions on it
- Is being attempted to be introduced via the normal democratic process
- And finally, even if it gets implemented, it is nothing more than a simple HTTP URL blacklist. Circumvented in about 5 seconds and doesn't do jack to P2P/usenet/IRC/any other protocol.
This is not to say that the filter is nothing to worry about and shouldn't be fought - it absolutely should be! But drawing comparisons to China or North Korea is a bit of a stretch.
Australia is still an open and free country, and probably still the country out there that's most similar to the US, culturally and ideologically. Sure there are those that would wish to reduce those freedoms ... but those kind of people exist in the US as well. But both countries have strong, independent legal systems and proper democratic process by which to challenge such things.
I'm a dual US/AU citizen and travel regularly between the two countries every year. I'm pretty familiar with the news and issues in both countries. Slashdot definitely puts a slant on most of these kind of stories, making things outside the US seem worse than they are. Same applies to their reporting on the UK and other European nations, to an extent.
Some come down and visit again some time. We won't bite :P
Indeed - but the surveyed people are naturally assuming that the filter would actually work. They are giving their opinions on a magical hypothetical filter that would block 100% of illegal content, block 0% of legitmate content, resulted in no slowdown of internet access speeds, and that could not be abused or misused by future governments.
If such a filter existed, then hell, even ~I~ would tentatively support it. So when a non-technical person is simply asked "would you like illegal websites blocked", then no wonder 80% of people say yes. But in the ~real world~, that can't be done without other negative effects and potential risks.
Dunno if it made the news down there, but well over a decade ago Sinead O'Connor tore up a picture of the pope on live television in the USA and said "Fight the real enemy" as she did it. She was hugely censured for it and although it did not kill her career as a musician it probably forever kept her off the pop charts here.
The thing about her protest that most people didn't even realize, was that she had just finished singing a version of the classic reggae song "War" in which the lyrics were repurposed to be about stopping child abuse. Her message was drowned out by all the media outrage - for a few weeks we learned that everybody in America was catholic, but nothing else really came out of the incident.
A decade later and the news media finally pick up on the abuses perpetrated by the catholic church - even the 'discovery' of an official super-duper-secret document detailing how to deny any molestation accusations and denigrate the accusers written by the guy who is now pope from back in the 70s - but not one of those people who took O'Connor to task for telling people the truth back then has come forward to apologize and say, "Sorry, guess you were right and we should have listened to you."
So yeah, it doesn't go over very well when you tell them and they sure aren't willing to give you credit when they can no longer avoid the facts either.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.