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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.
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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!
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"However, I do acknolege the need to provide some kind of monitoring system that will prevent young children from viewing such material."
Yeah. It's called parental guidance and involvement.
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.
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...