Slashdot Mirror
Australia now has Net Censorship
Foley writes "The Australian Senate passed legislation today that requires ISPs to block any web site in the world that is classified as offensive by an Australian film board. The law is set to go into effect January 2000.
Check out
the news and
even more news. "
Does your employer, country, or program (net nanny, etc), track, or prohibit your free use of the
web? The Net Connection Radio Show is conducting a trail run on an answer... Get your web page
via email. It is simple. Send an email message (net nanny, your employer, or country doesn't
intercept outgoing email do they?) to:
web@glr.com
as the first line of the message, simple put in the url of the web page you want: ie:
http://pages.ripco.com:8080/~glr/net.html
The subject line will be ignored. By return email you will receive the web page's html code.
More info at:
http://www.glr.com/web.html
This is an email I posted to my local Linux user group (Perth linux user group)...
p erspective1.html...
-----Original Message-----
From: Buddrige, David
Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 1999 11:59 AM
To: 'plug@linux.org.au'
Subject: [plug] what we need is a good (generic) document describing why the legislated ISP requirements cannot 'reasonably' be implemented...
As you are aware, our clue-challenged government has decided to pass legislation making ISP's responsible for content on their servers and (more
importantly) to take _resonable_ steps to block porn sites...
However a clause which (might) be the saviour of the internet in australia is this (as understood from article --> http://www.afr.com.au/content/990508/perspective/
"We are only requiring ISPs to take reasonable steps. We are setting up a framework that allows regulation of the internet to be tested on an ongoing basis. It will be organic. It will evolve."
Ok, so if we are required to use "reasonable" steps, if we can (corporately) produce an on-line document that explains adequately why basically there are no reasonable steps to be taken, then no steps need be taken...
I suggest that the document should be Open content licensed or somesuch to avoid any problem with maximum number of ISP's simply posting the page (modified to suit their own needs) and be done with this stupidity.... what says everyone?
cheers
David... 8-)
If Aussie content is restricted to G-rated stuff, we might as well forget it. The whole thing is ridiculously unworkable, and only highlights
... of course, this opens a whole bag of worms over GST (balance of power? what balance of power?)
..........
the supreme ineptitude of our politicians. Don't blame me, I voted Labor.
it's the political *system* to blame. when was the last time Labor didn't vote against the Liberals on any issue?
I reckon Aussie elected representatives should be free to vote their conscience instead of along party lines all the time
hmmm
Aside from the generally outrageous nature of this legislation, a more serious concern should be how easy it was for a relatively minor industry to seize control of the Internet for all Australians.
Who's to say that the mining industry won't make the same move in Australia? What about the port operators (esp. after the big strikes last year)?
Before you know it, Australia will be the land of zero net usage.
Be worried. Be VERY worried. Every lobbying group you've ever heard of will be coming out of the woodwork if this legislation holds up.
Australia doesn't have a Bill of Rights. Parliament is charged with protecting the rights of the citizenry. If Parliament abuses those rights, there isn't much that can be done. (Under Australian law, Parliament can *and did a few years ago!* imprison a citizen without trial.) All we can hope is that either the highest court finds some obscure reference in the constitution that nullifies it (unlikely; need a case first) or that the despots get thrown out at the next election.
The Bill was rushed through Parliament with a special Senate research committee investigating the technical feasibility of the whole thing for all of a week.
- it.htm
You can read a PDF transcript of the Committee minutes - the technical presentations to them are HIGHLY interesting. The most alarming is the last - or second last: the CEO of some setup called Clairview presents a new advanced "dynamic filtering" technology. Lord save us! Of course, it's supposed to be flawless like all this crap.
Anyone who can set up a service for Australians to overcome this fascism will be a hero. I suggest the url www.alston-harradine.org - that's the names of the two Senators who rammed the Bill through.
Now: the Committee PDF file you need to read is at the Australian Parliament House website at:
http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/senate/commttee/s
This is a list of files.
The actual file you want is:
Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill 1999 03/05/99 Canberra
n.b. there is an error a third of the way through the file of a lot of blank pages. Just keep scrolling.
Cheers!
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
Ok, first of, I'll admit that there is a need to provide monitoring of Internet material for young children.
As a certifiable, card carrying member of the "I love smut club!", I am well aware of the amount of adult material out there on the net. I have no objections to such material as such ( being rather partial to it myself! ).
However, I do acknolege the need to provide some kind of monitoring system that will prevent young children from viewing such material.
The problem here though is one of censorship. In all cases to date, monitoring systems have eventually abused the poweres placed in them either as a result of personal bias or reaction from pressure groups ( such as fundementalist christians ).
While it is acceptable for the legislature to define minimum standards of behaviour on the Internet ( hey, you walk up to some babe and ask her for sex, you have to take the chanch that's she is going to slap you in the face. Just the way it is, ok...), what is important is that the public is directly involved in the descision making process.
In short, what I am suggesting to all of you is that rather than regard this is a threat to our freedom of speach, let us use this as an opportunity to send to our political representatives a clear and unambiguous message.
That while we are prepared to accept certain things in the name of basic decency, there is a limit to which we will accept the tyranny of the "moral minority".
To all Australian citizens who feel that they should become involved, check out
http://www.efa.org.au/Campaigns/may28/
and see what you can do to effect the outcome.
Maybe it is an effort to clear out all the little ISPs. They won't be able to afford to spend the time and money blocking every offensive site, and pay for the lawsuits/fines when one slips through. Only the major ISPs will be able to withstand this.
Does Telstra (the Aussie Telco) provide ISP services? Do they have the power and money AT&T used to have in the states? Maybe they are funding this in an attempt to become the one and only Austrailian ISP.
BTW, I'm not being serious.
?
I'll be checking how the people of Oz could be helped with this issue, but I hope something will be done.
"Ten years from now, they could do it in a few seconds." -- The Racketeer of the Hellfire Club, 1993, Phrack 42
Well, when the laws of your land do not guarantee free speech, this is what inevitably happens, eventually. Worse, it's only the first step.
But enough with that. What we need to work on are solutions to this problem. What I think would work well is what I call a "reverse proxy."
Basically it works like this. Proxies like the Anonymizer work such that all outgoing traffic from your site seems to come from the proxy, not from you. What I propose is the reverse: a person can log into the proxy, and then all Net traffic coming in to the user appears to come from that proxy server. Front it with a clearly nonoffensive Web page (for this to work, of course, the proxy aspect of the site would have to be covert), and voila: all of your Web traffic appears to be coming from a nonoffensive site, even though it does not (which would be next to impossible to prove). Since it appears to come from a nonoffensive site, none of it is blocked.
Even better would be a "meta-reverse-proxy" which juggled a user between different proxies. That would make it harder to detect, since any site caught doing this would likely be blocked. It also would lighten the load on each individual proxy, since the load could be spread between them.
Anyone know of current software that might be able to do something like this?
Censoring films is one thing, I don't agree with it, but its feasible. There's a finite number of movies produced that need to be examined and a whole industry that can just be disallowed based on the genre (the hardcore porn genre, or maybe even soft core, I have no idea what the Australian censorship board views as offensive)
Censoring web sites is pretty close to impossible. There are the obvious ones, I would expect that Hustler and any page attached to that domain would be blocked for instance. What about individual pages though? I can set up a page on a free web server such as Tripod or GeoCities with objectionable content. GeoCities would eventually yank it, but Tripod seems to not care. Personal web pages with material they would find offensive probably numbers in the millions. For an ISP to selectively block these pages isn't feasible, so their only choice would be to block sites that have one or more user pages with objectionable material. I.e. block GeoCities, Tripod, AOL and a large number of other providers. Great, except for the small fraction of objectionable pages on these servers there is a large number of non-objectional pages. A few of these even have useful material.
Basically the end result would be that a site such as slashdot could be censored from all Australian internet users if it ever were to fail Australia's movie screening process. Oh yeah, there's a small box on slashdot which contains the latest image from JenniCam as well as links to Rotten.com and so on.
Meanwhile, join in protest actions around the nation on May 28. If you can ring your local member this week to express your concerns about the Bill, that may also be effective.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
I have objectionable content at work. Dejanews among other things was blocked for about a year. You know the usenet newsgroups where people can say anything and it might offend... Meanwhile, it just encouraged others to hunt for sites that would make it through the blocking software. So, in reality, having access blocked made it worse. It all came to an end when the plant manager (a woman) with a few customers entered a department manager's office and saw an animated lewd screensaver. The internet was to blame and there it went (for about a week.)
You might not believe this, but when the blocking software was removed, those naughty people started moving on to other challenges, like trolling the NRA chatrooms. I guess some people are determined to eternally rebel.
If you are worried about having access blocked, there are ways to circumvent the problem. People get creative.
When it comes to banning things, I'd have to say that this is the work of polititions at its finest. Its going to get ugly, but that is the way they like it.
As I understand, polititions are lawyers. Their friends are lawyers. Who benefits from stupid laws passed by polititions? Polititions! Even these bad ones are the experts in the field and will refer cases to friends.
When the internet exploded here in the USA, porn became controversial. A once tame internet with a few juicy pictures tucked away in the newsgroups were brought to public attention. The next thing I knew, porn was everywhere. It was popular. Every spectator trying to make a buck had to test the laws and put up a porno webpage. Porn was spammed. It was no longer hidden, but it would find you, and on a daily basis even if you just had email. All thanks to the religious and political nuts who brought this "evil" to our attention.
So, Australia is going to get a lot of porn. Most of it will be coming from within. Brace for it! You asked for it!
Can someone provide details on Australia's legal system? I.e. does Australia have a constitution (I know England hasn't) and a constitutional court which might provide a means of getting this law killed?
A lot of people here always have said that the Internet routes around censorship and problems like this. We should try and find some technical way to allow those in Australia that need to access web content a way to do it.
I'm thinking of something along the lines of mailing lists with listings of redirectors for web traffic. Surely the censors couldn't keep up if these change every day.
How about some sort of client that, once connected to an ISP, connects through another protocol to a site abroad, which will somehow reroute their network connection through there and allow web surfing?
Maybe make postings on newsgroups for the Australian folks with redirectors for web traffic.
Are there enough people out there who would try and circumvent the laws somehow? I don't see how any of it could be illegal, at least the way the law stands.
Does anyone have any other ideas on how Australians could circumvent these laws?
Also, another question I have that I couldn't really answer right now is whether or not this would hurt the cause. I certainly would want a way to bypass these draconian laws if the U.S. were to pass laws like that.
What kind of approaches do we have in case governments try to regulate sites like that? Will the Internet just shrivel up and die if enough countries censor content?
I think these are questions we need to start looking at if we want the Internet to remain free. So we can at least have these 'solutions' available as a last resort.
Losing the freedom of the Internet would be one of the worst things that could happen in the information age.
A representative is quoted as saying that this is
.. there go a lot of problems...
"unworkable". I'd go so far as to say impossible.
I dont think that it is impossible.. Isn't it the Chinese who do something simular to this already? I've heard that its pie to bypass their proxies though.. dunno
Sites that are possibly "offensive" can popup faster than an ISP, even using all their resources and time, can block it out.
What stops them from blocking entire domains, ip classes? *.geocities.com
I feel for the Australia ISPs, they have their work cut out for them.
As for the government, they will need to patrol full time simply to check if all "naughty" sites are blocked or not (which would be quite an interesting job).
Seems to me, the Australian government has just created the biggest national waste of time and energy with one vote. Why do I have the feeling the US government will try to follow suit?
Kinda pathetic if you ask me.. obviously the people don't want this, how can they claim its a democracy.. and all with one vote..
Im assuming the proxy will have set domains etc.. that it will filter out.. what stops people from using something like WinGate or another proxy on a machine in say, the united states and getting stuff unfiltered?
Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
SB.
The sheep of Australia are no different than any other country; since they've abdicated personal and parental responsibility, they're demanding their own government do the dirty work. What a bunch of lamers.
It has absolutely nothing to do with what we want. This survey shows that less than 3% of Australian net users are worried about indecent content. What this is really about is the government trying to get the support of a single senator who happens to be very morally conservative.
I miss Meept.
So does this mean that all .au ISPs will have to implement either a mandatory proxy server or packet filters?
Probably. The government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to remain "technology neutral" - in other words, to ignore that their proposal is unworkable and expect the ISPs to implement it anyway.
If you have a look at the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts web site and follow to the "Newsroom" link, you find such brilliant statements as:
This, of course, conveniently ignores that most Australian citizens don't want to be protected.
I miss Meept.
The committee has been told, many times, in many ways, that this is technically impossible and that trying will cost heaps as people start using https: and such technologies by default. This seems to imply checking against an address list; let's run a sweepstake on how long it takes the first cracker to post the censorship site's own URL/IP on its list, plus a few others like *.gov.au.
You can't scan SSL and friends for content! Picture this:
This web page is being checked.
Please click on this link in approximately fifteen years after our server farm has broken your SSL key to ensure that what you're trying to fetch isn't naughty. We apologise for the inconvenience.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...then again, I wouldn't like it if the USA was judged entirely based on how the morons in our Senate and House vote.
What recourse do our Aussie friends have to fight this law? In the US, we fought the CDA in the courts with the First Amendment to our Constitution. And with phone calls to our local Congressmoron and ribbons on web pages, of course.
--JT
Take these gifs, stick them on your website somewhere, and make my government look like the drongos they are. Oh. and link'em to
b lack.gif w hite.gif
http://www.efa.org.au/Campaigns/stop.html
http://usrwww.mpx.com.au/~gths/freespeech/auban
http://usrwww.mpx.com.au/~gths/freespeech/auban
P.S. John Pilger is a moron.
... so sprach Graham the Happy Scum
The difference between a "democracy" and a totaltarian state is that while they can both try to implement censorship, it will only work in the totaltarian state because the people have no voice. while guns maybe helpful in a full scale revolution, words are much more powerful on a day to day basis.
Thanks to the public knee-jerk reactions to Littleton we can expect more of this net.censorship. The internet isn't just a pipeline for porno and bomb-making instructions. If it was then there'd be pictures of naked ladies building bombs all over /. - give me a break...
The reason why the EFF et al. were so succesful in defeating the CDA was because it was a grassroots effort to protect free speech. The problem was though was that it only happened when that free speech was already threatened.
We need to send the message to Washington now about the way we stand. We need to tell them about the true merits of the Internet that outweigh the 1% or so that consists of Anarchists' Cookbook and porno. Don't wait until some bill has been already passed, let's raise hell right now. If we don't tell them the truth, they'll get their ideas from the media.
A representative is quoted as saying that this is
"unworkable". I'd go so far as to say impossible. Sites that are possibly "offensive" can popup faster than an ISP, even using all their resources and time, can block it out. I feel for the Australia ISPs, they have their work cut out for them.
As for the government, they will need to patrol full time simply to check if all "naughty" sites are blocked or not (which would be quite an interesting job).
Seems to me, the Australian government has just created the biggest national waste of time and energy with one vote. Why do I have the feeling the US government will try to follow suit?
FinkPloyd
This is just one more step in the long road to complete govt. control of peoples lives in au. First it was the guns, now it's information. Next, who knows? I'm not sure how books and magazines are treated there in Australia, but seeing as the content will be controlled on their Internet connections, just changing the law to include all media types wouldn't be a big stretch. I hope that this serves as a wake-up call to people in the U.S.A., who currently have protection via the bill of rights, but whose protection is being chipped away every day in the name of safety. I think it was Hume that said "It is not often that liberty (freedom) is lost all at once."
"Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin,
After a bit of research, I've failed to turn up any names, but this is how the law got passed:
One independent politician holds the balance of power in Australia. The governing party recently wanted a (totally different) piece of legislation passed, and this guy's vote was the decider. To keep him sweet, they promised that they'd vote for his Internet ban later on. (Sorry the names are missing, but I just couldn't find them.) Stepping out of character for a while, these other politicians kept their word. So there you have it. It had nothing to do with the Internet; it was just politicians being what they are - evil old men so arrogant they honestly believe they know what's best for us.
- Read fiction at www.espressostories.com
Some useful Links:
Global Internet Liberty Campaign www.gilc.org
Electonic Frontiers Australia, www.efa.org.au
and of course
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, www.eff.org
The Electronic Privacy Information Center
And here's an idea: this sounds like a PERFECT reason to boycott the Sydney 2000 Olympics. After all, it always works best to get a country by the short-and-curlies if you REALLY want its' attention. . . .
Current balance of power in the Australian government is held by an independant politician, Senator Harradine. The government is currently pushing to sell of Telstra, a national telco, the sale of which is worth very large amounts of money.
Opposition to the sale of Telstra (who do ISP service stuff like Big Pond) is everywhere, and without Harradine's vote, the sale would be abandoned.
Harradine is a vocal opponent of the internet, a defender of traditional Christian values, and in many ways opposed to the principles of free speech. He has tried on many occasions to propose legislation to either prevent public access to "questionable" material, or to make it an offense to view it. Until now, his proposed legislation has always been thrown out.
Basically, it looks a whole lot like Harradine and the government got together and said "you pass my legislation and I'll pass yours."
The consultation for the feasibility of content blocking was carried out in 1 week, which is on the narrow side of legal, and could be stumbling block if the law is appealed. The legislation was passed against a national outcry from ISPs and internet users.
The law can be appealed, and I would imagine that this is pretty much underway right now. Although the law states that ISPs must block the illegal content, no suggestion is made of how to do so. It is quite possible that an ISP appealing the law could very easily say they carried out a 1 week feasibility study exceeding the government's efforts, and have found that implementing filtering would put them out of business.
One final point is that the law is effective as of 1 Jan 2000, and subject to a review that could last until 2003. Combined with the fact that it bans material that is legitimately available through other sources (video and print for example), it is more than likely to be trashed in the near future.
Hmmm, indeedy. There is no way they could cope.
I sense the groundroots of a campaign here. It would be nice also if the ISP's could realise what thsi means to them and call for a one day net strike (hell, even 1 hour would be bad enough).
Actually, I wonder. What effect would a one day net strike have with our increased reliance on the internet? Anyway, I digress - some of you Aussie folks need to get a campaign to have as many sites submitted to the Film Board as possible. Creative protest has always been the most effective way of ridding dumb laws like this.
A little planning goes a long way...
This is a really bad decision for democracy in Australia. It all starts with censorship, then violation of human rights follows, etc, etc. In the 30th nazi started with burning books they didn't agree with, everyone knows what came after that. I hope that enough people will protest this law and have it overturned. And I hope no other country follows Australian example.
Continuing with questions, I'd like to know if there are any international organizations working to prevent this sort of thing? My instinct is that the people writing the laws have little to no idea what it is they are trying to control.
I do know that there were people trying to prevent this Australian bill from happening, and now I'm wondering if there could have been more done to help before this came to pass. And if we can prevent this from happening elsewhere.
Actually, most(?) ISP's in Australia already use transparent proxies,
.au people, good luck in fighting this.
because of the high bandwidth costs they have to endure.. (or so I'm
told - been a few years since I've been there..)
This just looks to me as if the Australian government doesn't want
thier populace connected to the rest of the world..
Two things leap to mind; the first is that the government has no idea
what the internet is or how it works, (in which case they shouldn't be
making laws about it.) the second is that they DO know how much work
this will be and they're trying to make jobs for more beauracrats (in
which case they shouldn't be making laws about it.)
For all you
How does that quote go? "The Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it." Even though we (or at least I) don't have all the details about the nature of the censorship, it is obvious that there will be legitimate sites that are blocked. And people who want to get around the censorship can easily do so. Such is the nature of online censorship. (Maybe the net effect is to make visiting a 'naughty site' a crime? Who knows.)
What is interesting is that a modern western nation of a significant size is doing this. It looks like it is going to be the experiment for the rest of the governments in the western world to witness. Here's hoping for miserable failure.
This is going to have a few minor repercussions, but I predict it'll turn out a lot like American Prohibition - interesting idea, but almost impossible to implement, and even harder to justify.
I've been living in Australia for 19 years and not once have I called or been called mate, asked to have someone throw a shrip on the barby, or throw a boomerang. Ahh beloved steryotypes.
All English people are on a Red Dwarf sized startship and all Americans are yellow and animated.
It's turtles all the way down.
There is such thing as a revolution not using guns, it's called, voting for the other party at the next election.
Yes, we banned semi and automatic guns after a very bad gun masacre, and since semi automatics should have no place in hunting or protection, ban them.
On the other hand, I want my damn net porn!
It's turtles all the way down.
The Government actually formed a Senate committee, getting advice from organisations such as the CSIRO about the feasibility of blocking undesirable content. And they got back a resounding answer that it was completely unworkable. This is worse than ignorance - to do the research, get an answer, and still make a contrary decision, presumably for political reasons.
I just hope this law can be repealed quickly, but I simply cannot see it happening. I don't think there's much in the way of constitutional rights on free speech here in Australia, like was used to defeat the CDA in the US. The only hope I guess is that the government realises how stupid they've been - but when was the last time you saw a politican admit to being wrong?
I hate to have to admit it, but my country sucks - big time!!!
We have an idiot for a prime minister who thinks that he has a "mandate from the people" for a GST purely because he got re-elected by our stupid preferential voting system, by people who thought they were voting for indepents, when in fact most of those votes were going to one of the two major political parties. This fool now has assisted in supporting this Draconian legislation in order to gain favour with some unreasonable moral crusader whose cause it was to try to force his view of moral standards on us, simply to garner his support for the GST - which backfired because Mr Morality told him in not so many words to shove the GST up his backside.
These are the same kneejerk idiots who took away all the rights of the people to bear arms, not just for self protection, but genuine sporting purposes too. I used to do a bit of hunting now and again, but these bastards took that away from me, now they are taking away my right to see the Internet through my own eyes, not just what they want me to see, I'm sorry - but that's not good enough!
They are real heroes when it comes to bullying the average man in the street, but look how spineless they are in the world stage, they fully intend to let 2 aussies fry in Belgrade, bloody aid workers for goodness sake, on some trumped up charge of spying for the US government. We might have a fairly weak defence budget - but I would spend a couple of bucks on a bomb or two to drop on those yugo pricks for this!
And on that subject, this is the same government who is doing nothing about the filthy kosovar refugee that tried to rape a bloody aussie girl who was doing volunteer work with the refugees *we* are sheltering, feeding and clothing. That sucks, something should be done, send that filthy prick back, the others may be ok, but that mongrel doesn't deserve to be here.
Australia sucks, I fully intend to get the hell out of here ASAP, time to start looking for that elusive greencard I suspect.
Here (I think) is the amendment that enables the .au govt to regulate the internet. Here is an ~summary~ of it. I don't have the time now to fully disseminate it or learn the ramifications of it but I will try later when I do have the time. Glancing through the summary, here is what I my take on it:
.au domain (As in where the .au govt has control).
-Purpose of the amendments to the Broadcast Services act is to enable regulation and control of the internet as it pertains to the
Amendment 5:
The first component of the proposed scheme is proposed Schedule 5 to the BSA contained in the Bill as proposed to be amended. Under this component, the Commonwealth will be responsible for regulating Internet content service providers and Internet content hosts. This component does not impose any obligations on producers of content on the Internet or persons who upload or access such content.
-It aims to go after the HOSTS of the content, rather than the PRODUCERS (I think that is totally wrong) or consumers.
The next line of the summary causes a mindpuck
The second component of the proposed scheme is proposed uniform State and Territory laws that will create offences for the publication and transmission of proscribed material by producers of content on the Internet or persons who upload or access such content. It is intended under the national scheme that the States and Territories will be primarily responsible for regulating the activities of persons who create, upload or access content.
-Does this mean they say the govt goes after the hosts while the local and "state" go after everybody else?
I will try to do a little more digging on this.
Enjoy
RB
I just hope it gets struck down or repealed. Otherwise I could easily see it getting used as a model for regulations in other countries. I can just hear it now: "It works in Austrailia..."
...from a father of 2, who doesn't *want* anyone removing his children's freedom in the name of "protecting" them.
I think it's pretty damn funny that they'll be using the Australian film board to review the content of these web sites. Just think if Jack Valenti was in charge of rating /.
Of course, I'd like to know how a web site will be nominated for review, and exactly how much time the censo--I mean, film board will have to make their decision. If they're planning on reviewing the entire Web, they'd better get started now. And the manpower requirements would pretty much deplete the entire Australian legislature, including aides, security guards, secretaries and janitors.
In this case, the legislation is apparently requiring the use of systems that will block from a list of URLs (or IPs). That is very easy to do.
Basic human rights are, by definition, not tied to one's nationality. Different philosophies have different ideas of what basic human rights are. In America, people discussing basic human rights refer to those laid down in the Declaration of Independence. These are enumerated life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The interpretation of these has been hashed over by greater scholars than I.
The rights concerning privacy and censorship are laid down for Americans in the Bill of Rights. This is why the CDA could be shot down: because what it attempted was forbidden by the US Constitution. The US government has provisions for the judicial branch to declare laws as unconstitutional.
I am not familiar with the Australian laws and legal system, but would be keen to hear from somebody who does.
It is worth noting that this is not a privacy issue, but rather a censorship issue, unless blocked URLs are logged.
The software is trivial to write. Some parts have been written, and the rest combine programs that are already availible. Look at your ISP's home page; they have a link to that sort of software.
Clearly, lots of people feel strongly about this. This means that there will be funding to hire people to maintain the lists.
The issue isn't a technical one. There are no technical impediments to implementing this. It's easy. The issue is one of censorship and of law.
--
Fourth law of programming:
Anything that can go wrong wi
As a oz resident - i can tell you a bit aboutAustralian legal system. We are a parliamentary democracy based on the Westminster style of govt. We have a constitution but all that basically does is carve up responsibility for 'everything' between the Federal govt. and the States (6 of + 2 Territories). We dont have a 'bill of rights' as such, nothing that really comes close to it either.
This bill has basically been rammed home by two politicians, the two that control the balance of power in the senate (upper house), one of these two recently brought the proposed Goods & services tax to its knees (we are all waiting to see if it gets up or finally dies or what...
It will be interseting to see how it goes...
Another poster made reference to "knee-jerk reactions" by politicians and how dangerous they are, and I think that there is a bad epidemic of that raging around the globe. Look at what's happening here in the US:
Some kids build some bombs, plant them in a school and then go nuts, killing their classmates. There were two knee-jerk reactions to that:
First, we started to push new gun legislation. And no matter what your position on gun control, I think that it doesn't take a member of the Jedi counsel to tell you that this is a fear- and shock - induced reaction that we should probably step back and think about a little bit after we get our emotional repsonse to such a story in check.
Second, there's a lot of rumblings saying that 'the internet has bomb building instructions, ergo , we must ban the internet, or ban kid's access to the internet,' etc. etc. etc. Another fear-induced reaction that, so far, has been resisted.
It's not a logical jump, really, to say that if we can use fear to cause the abridgement of some constitutional rights, we can have more rights that flow from the same source trampled on. The lesson from .au is that we need to remain vigilant , lest the same thing happen here. And it could.
People, I think, forget how precious freedom is, and what we all sacrifice for it. Security comes at the price of liberty, and I think that is too high of a price to pay. Just ask the folks that died in Tiennemen Square.
Hrm.. this reminds me of a certain Orwellian novel. (-; I've heard that there is only a 100M landline (~=100 T1's?) going into Australia, and other providers rely on sattelite service. I'm sure that if the ISPs are not willing to comply, the landline can be censored, but how could sattelite reception be monitored? Much more difficult. I forsee an onslought of All-Porn ISPs. Much more hardcore than the average Australian porn-viewer sees today.
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." Impart information through any media regardless of frontiers.
And I thought the CRTC was going overboard... (-;