censorship
evolvingthoughts | December 3, 2008
Note the careful ambiguity there: this is not a blog of another antipodean philosopher, but another blog of this antipodean philosopher. The ins and outs of Australian politics and policies are not of interest to much more than 0.3% of the world, so my asseverations are even less interesting to you all. Hence I have started an intermittent blog, The Drought Resistant Philosopher, wherein I will whine (or as we say here, whinge) about the latest stupidity from our representatives and public service, and so on. All ISP filtering posts will go there from now on.
No more mister nice silverback…
evolvingthoughts | December 3, 2008
When my kids were in school, I noticed an interesting phenomenon that went something like this:
Headmaster: No, your kids can't be being bullied. We have a policy against bullying.
I came to call this the "Policy policy": so long as there's a Policy in place for some longstanding problem, action is unnecessary and complainants can be silenced by reference to the Policy.
The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the present government (AKA the Clean Feed Censorship Party) wants to establish a Bill of Rights in Australia to protect citizens against laws that are unconstitutional and…
evolvingthoughts | November 27, 2008
The Greens (who I am considering joining, despite their unreasonable opposition to nuclear power) have said they will oppose the "clean feed" proposal in the Senate, so unless the Coalition decides it is a good idea after all, or put it to a conscience vote (because let's face it, a number of conservatives think censorship is a legitimate form of governance), it's dead. This is a Very Good Thing.
But it raises some more general issues: why is Australia so damned intent upon censoring anything? Why do we have among the most draconian censorship laws in the democratic world? Isn't it about…
evolvingthoughts | November 25, 2008
GetUp! is an excellent organisation that has been attacking the draconian laws of the "war" on terror, antigay laws, and so on. They now have a petition against ISP filtering. Go for it...
Hat tip Samuel Douglas
evolvingthoughts | November 23, 2008
At last the MSM seem to be picking it up. A Perth newsmagazine has reported it unfavourably (although are Xenophon and Fielding really waiting for the results, given they are major motivators of the idea?), and an online opinion site suggests that the ultimate source of this stupidity is Clive Hamilton and the Australia Institute, a reactionary "think tank", back in 2003. And a NSW Parliamentary Library report has challenged Conroy's claim, previously challenged by Greens Senator Scott Ludlum, that this is something already in place in various other countries. The report is available online…
evolvingthoughts | November 20, 2008
Frederick Toben is an awful man, who denies the plain fact that the Nazis killed six million Jews and between nine and eleven million Jews, Slavs, Romany, homosexuals, Soviets (civilians and POWs), Poles, disabled, and so on.
But what he thinks is not a crime, either in Australia, where he lives, or in the United Kingdom, where he was arrested on a German warrant for breaking German laws. And it was right that he was released by the British courts. If people can be arrested and charged for breaking laws online in jurisdictions where they do not reside, no matter how awful their views are,…
evolvingthoughts | November 11, 2008
The Greens have sought explanations from Minister Against Broadband Stephen Conroy in the Senate. In particular Green senator Scott Ludlam asked Conroy to take back his claim that what the ALP wants is like what is done in Britain, Sweden, Canada and New Zealand; in these cases the filtering is voluntary and restricted. Moreover, Conroy refused to say what "unwanted content" was defined as, and who would make that determination.
Michael Malone of iiNet called Conroy the "worst minister ever". In the meantime ISPs are being asked to trial the filtering. What effect a bad experience would…
evolvingthoughts | November 10, 2008
The internet filtering debacle raises some more general issues I have with my nation's governments' tendency to censor ideas it doesn't like. Sure, there's the "Won't somebody think of the children" justification, which is a Good Intention (suitable for paving roads), but surely the best bet is to go for the producers of child pornography through legal sanctions and encourage parents to take responsibility for their children's internet habits by using family clean feeds and monitoring their behaviour rather than penalise everybody to suit a few religious interests.
In a democracy, under…
evolvingthoughts | November 9, 2008
Read this article by Mark Newton. This gets murkier and sillier by the day.
Late addition: From the comments at the linked site:
As a young person ( 22 ) who has been brought up on the internet and as a ALP member myself working for a Labor State Govt. I have told my boss the state MP that I will seriously think about resigning my memberhsiup to the ALP should this pass.
Used to be, the ALP was the party of liberalisation and freedom of expression...
Late late note:
From here, courtesy of Jason Grossman
Later note: It's picking up in the media at last... see ITWire, and now The Age.
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2008
Hmmm... cool name for a song. Anyway, here are a few things that caught my eye while I was trying to ignore some politics.
The Internet filtering debacle has reached the pages of Nature. With luck this will blow up in Conroy's face. It really does look like this was pandering to the religious right here in Australia.
Siris has one of his usual erudite and evocative pieces, this time on herbs (i.e., drugs) making people beasts in classical sources. I wonder if the notion that drugs take us upward rather than downward was an invention of the moderns?
David White argues that intelligent…
evolvingthoughts | October 28, 2008
As I feared, the internet filtering issue has now been taken up by special interests. The conservative Christian political party Family First, run largely by the Hillsong evangelical denomination, has one senator, but the balance of power is so tight they wield disproportionate power, and as PM Kevin Rudd and several of his cabinet colleagues are themselves religious, the FF interests are likely to be pandered to, as they were by the conservative Howard government. Senator Steve Fielding wants the filtering to include pornography and gambling, both of which are legal for adults in Australia…
evolvingthoughts | October 26, 2008
Users, or Lusers as they are known, learn early not to piss off the sysadmin, who is God. Federal minister Stephen Conroy's ham-fisted attempt to gag critics of his stupid paternalistic and ultimately failure-ridden net filter scheme has managed to piss off the whole lot of them. This could be fun. Anyone got the popcorn? I have the beer...
This, by the way, puts Australia in the company of such civil liberties havens as China, North Korea, and Burma. Yay us.
evolvingthoughts | October 24, 2008
I told you so 1: High cost of internet filtering and controls stricter than Iran's, oh and critics bullied.
I told you so 2: Terrorism laws unsafe, court rejects charge of breaking laws that did not exist when the "crime" was done
evolvingthoughts | October 17, 2008
The Labor plan to interrupt Australian internet access, which I have previously excoriated, has been, as I feared, extended. Electronic Frontiers Australia reports that the government has a second, secret, list that even opting out doesn't free you of. So the technical overhead is still there and there's no control or oversight on what gets put on that black list. Who gave the government this power?
As I said last time I mentioned this:
And of course once it's in place, no government will be able to resist blocking other unpleasant sites, like those that, say, give the Arab perspective…
scientificactivist | May 28, 2008Oh, the things we do in the name of "the global war on terror." And, not just in the US. Here's an example from the UK. From The Guardian:
A masters student researching terrorist tactics who was arrested and detained for six days after his university informed police about al-Qaida-related material he downloaded has spoken of the "psychological torture" he endured in custody.
Despite his Nottingham University supervisors insisting the materials were directly relevant to his research, Rizwaan Sabir, 22, was held for nearly a week under the Terrorism Act, accused of downloading the materials…
scientificactivist | March 17, 2008As demonstrating and rioting against the heavy-handed Chinese occupation of Tibet increased in intensity this weekend, it's not surprising that China cracked down using one of its favorite tools: internet censorship. As of sometime Saturday, the Chinese government had already blocked YouTube in response to protest/riot footage on the site, and recent reports indicate that Google News has also been blocked. The government's crackdown has already caused the loss of about 80 lives, and it's doing its best to prevent footage of the crisis from reaching the rest of China (through internet…
evolvingthoughts | January 2, 2008
I'm going to have to start a "freedom watch" thread, I can see.
Australia, under the ALP government, is to impose an "opt-out" internet filtering system on all lSPs, leading to the question asked by IT-Wire: what happens if I do opt out? Will I be listed somewhere as a potential child porn user? Or a potential terrorist? And anyway, why make the end user suffer because the authorities cannot prosecute or even find the child porn sites?
I will get back to philosophy and science (although this is an exercise in moral philosophy and philosophy of law and politics). But it seems to me that…