Slashdot Mirror
Few Contribute To Aussie Classification Review
dopeywan.kenobi writes "The Australian Law Reform Commission are conducting a review of the Australian Classification laws, the outcome of which will influence Australian internet filtering and/or the long awaited R18+ Video Game classification. Public submissions on the matter have been accepted since 20th May 2011 and will close on the 15th July 2011. From the article : '[A]s yet only 80 public submissions have been made — 80 per cent of them from people who believe in government intervention for the sake of child protection. Considering, the furious debates within Australia's technology communities, does this reflect the national balance?...'It's likely down to the media for failing to inform the public on the matter.' Having read the questionnaire, I can't help but wonder if their convoluted phrasing is contributing to reports that people are only partially completing the form without submitting." I wonder how much of it, too, is that people don't want to be tarred as favoring child pornography just because they're uncomfortable with by-domain censorship.
Thanks Slashdot for posting an article from a week ago, since then there have been at least 440 more submissions made - and my public submission from Saturday morning isn't up on the site yet, so there's a lot more probably made. You can read the public submissions at http://www.alrc.gov.au/inquiries/classification/submissions-received-alrc
Since the story hit kotaku there are now 547 submissions
Any Aussies should go to http://www.alrc.gov.au/content/classification-online-submission to fill it out while keeping the report side by side, and working through them together. Its the easiest way.
The report is linked at the top, and you have to register as well.
Cheers
Kactus
But I don't really have a problem with the concept of domain filtering or domain takedowns for child pornography.
I do. And my problem is: go for the ones that break the law, that is the solution.
Anything else is palliative care - not only it won't ever be effective, but also has side effects, can be easily abused and it also makes the "proper cure" harder (driving the illness bury deeper). .
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Additionally, despite the claim that the main aim of the filter is to block child pornography, only 313 of the 977 total sites blocked is on the basis of child porn. At $40M AU so far in taxpayers funds, the cost so far is around $40,900 per blocked URL. Government efficiency at work...
40 thousand dollars per URL. I think that's really all that needs to be said. Even if every one of those URLs was related to child pornography, I'm sure that spending the $40 million on actually catching people who abuse children would be an infinitely better allocation of resources.
Multiple legitimate businesses and Web sites have been banned including two bus companies, online poker sites, multiple Wikipedia entries, Google and Yahoo group pages, a dental surgery and a tour operator.
That was the /. article I was looking for before (with specific examples of baseless additions to the list). Turns out it was one page farther back in the results. The fact that Wikileaks had to provide the list speaks volumes for the sort of attitude the Australian government (though they're not alone) has towards the public in this matter.
so this has already happened
wikipedia sliped onto the list of baned sites
this page caused the problem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer
so what happens when its a smaller site ?
regards
John Jones
I don't see any problems with that. The parents would have to actually parent. It's not like the internet is a safe place to park young children anyways.
Whoa, wait a minute, nobody said I have to be a parent when I want to have kids! You can't change the rules of the game in the middle of it! I just wanted that child support payment and park my rugrat in front of a babysitting box, it worked for TV, why not the internet?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't know what happens in AU, but here in the UK (As I can personally verify from trying to look at the above link when it was blocked), ISPs tend not to actually give a block notice. Instead they spoof a 404 message, making it appear the file is gone. Unless the site admin is someone who checks the webserver logs and notices something is up, the owner might not even realise they have been blocked - only that they are mysteriously very unpopular in some countries. The users certainly wouldn't realise - unless you're poking around with traceroute, it just looks like a 404.
The most effective type of censorship is that in which the people don't even realise the censorship is taking place.
At what stage do you think media hysteria bombarded you sufficiently - as it has done with so many people - to think an image of child abuse is a special case, so much worse than any other sequence of bits which acts as evidence that some abuse has taken place? What about a picture/film of adult sexual abuse? If the adult is developmentally retarded? Animal abuse? A snuff film? An image of a dead baby? A woman executed for being raped? A war crime? Evidence of genocide?
Ask yourself whether your concern is with the image or with the discomfort you feel that someone enjoys the image. Then realise that people may enjoy any or all of the above. Then realise that almost all sexual abuse occurs within families or by other people in trusted caring roles - if you want to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut, you would stop far more child sexual abuse by outlawing the family unit.
The noncommercial distribution of CP seems reasonably to be a privacy issue for the child, as any photo/video taken without consent. Beyond that, all the resources should go toward identifying and stopping the abusers and helping the victims. To inform the abused that money which you are claiming to be using in their interest is going to be invested in pushing images of his/her abuse underground (and as the thin end of the wedge for general censorship) is not only illogical, but cruel.
Also, let's be clear here: the IWF, one of the oldest Internet censorship frameworks in the Western world, doesn't even claim that its aim in blocking is to stop CP (it does help stop CP by acting as a clearinghouse for CP reports and sending evidence to authorities at home and abroad - but that's where its helpfulness ends). It claims that its blocking list is provided to stop people "accidentally" viewing CP. This shows how absurd the situation is: surely the correct response to accidentally doing something which isn't dangerous is to learn from your mistakes so you know how to minimise your chances of doing it again? But no, we're at the "punished for being raped" stage of hysteria, where I must worry about the legal implications of accidentally stumbling into CP. It's not that a single such incident is likely to lead to conviction, but that - in the UK at least - a single such incident may lead to arrest, and my arrest record can be studied by pretty much any potential employer.
Any good government knows how to make anyone a criminal or quasi-criminal at its whim. This is just another method. It has nothing whatever to do with stopping child abuse, and I say that as someone who has fundraised for kids' charities and supported certain groups for abuse survivors for as long as I can recall.
hear hear
What people hould understand is that child pornography is already illegal. It is already classified in other legislation and there is a mechanism for detecting and arresting those involved with it.
Forget the filter, give the money to the AFP so they can do some good with it.
The problem is what to do in edge cases. Obviously a site dedicated exclusively to child porn should be shut down. But what about a website that happens to have child porn? Surely such videos have been uploaded to youtube, should youtube be shut down? What about dropbox, surely criminals use that to share illegal files. How about encrypted services, where it's impossible to know whether or not the data being transferred is legal, should those be shut down?
How about a small website, run by a company without the resources of youtube/dropbox, if they get shut down are they going to be in a position to get their website back online after removing the illegal material?
And worst of all, how do we, the people, know that a website shut down for child porn actually had child porn on it? Maybe it was shut down for some other reason, we have no way to find out.
They should be working with site owners to get individual images/videos removed, not shutting down entire sites, and they should be going after the guys creating the content not the websites who allow anything to be uploaded.
2. I'd somehow accept the idea of a "content classification" if it would limit to being "advisory only"
FWIW, even "advisory" ratings result in censorship due to the economic impact of the ratings.
One example is how Wal-mart won't carry music with one of those "explicit lyrics" ratings. For really big acts, that means a wal-mart edition with the naughty words blanked out and an uncut edition for all the other stores. But for most acts, there is only enough money to produce one edition and since wal-mart is the largest music distributor, that one edition is usually the wal-mart friendly, censored version. (online distribution is changing the situation, but only after a couple of decades of damage)
Another example: MPAA ratings for movies consistently cause a "dumbing down" of movies in order to increase audience size by avoiding R ratings. Scenes get cut and sometimes entire movies won't get greenlit. Take the case of the current superhero binge, there have been no R-rated super-hero movies since Watchmen - which turned a decent profit but was still considered a financial failure. Even "Sucker Punch" (by the same director) which was conceived as a PG-13 movie from the start had a key scene cut in order to receive a PG-13 rating - a scene that didn't include nudity, simulated sex or really much of anything except obscenity-free dialogue.
In other words, there really is no such thing as an "advisory only" rating system, there will always be a price paid in censorship as the result of any ratings system. Some people don't have a problem with that price, but it at least needs to be acknowledged when talking about such plans.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Nursie, you're either an extremely dedicated (browsing quickly through your posting history) troll playing a typical Conservative, or your convictions are so mind-numbingly genuine that you think it's possible to simply deny the content of a post you made only a few minutes ago.
You have no problem with "domain filtering or domain takedowns" for CP.
That means, unless you're about to argue for vigilante justice, that you support government involvement in censorship at the domain level for CP.
At least have the cojones to either stand up for what you've actually said or to admit that your position needs review.