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. "
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!
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.
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.
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.
It's all pretty sad really. The senator who was being bribed with the censorship legislation voted against the new tax system anyway.
In the end, the balance of power was with two independent senators, the abovementioned, and another who left a major party due to fraud charges (but who was deemed to ill to face these, but somehow competent to vote for the legislation).
The situation is pretty fucked up. I think part of the problem is that most of the population simply don't understand the issues that are at stake, and the government is playing on this naivety.
The legislation was tabled very quickly with only a month for public input into a senate enquiry. There were around 104 submissions from industry and community groups, all but one coming out against the legislation. The government even ignored it's own research from the CSRIO on the issue.
It was then raced into the senate with a few ammendments, and voted in with no understanding or regard for the impact on civil liberties, or the long term economic and social implications.
As an Australian, I find this embarassing and disgusting. Depressing even.
Worse however, will be explaining to my grandkids that I was part of the generation that failed to stop this.
This is a very dark day in Australian history.
- James.