cpudney writes "The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has added several Wikileaks pages to its controversial blacklist. The blacklisted pages contain Denmark's list of banned websites. Simply linking to addresses in ACMA's blacklist attracts an $11,000 per-day fine as the hosts of the popular Australian broadband forum, Whirlpool, discovered last week when they published a forum post that linked to an anti-abortion web-site recently added to ACMA's blacklist. The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian government's proposed mandatory ISP-level Internet censorship legislation. Wikileaks' response to notification of the blacklisting states: 'The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship.'" So Australians aren't allowed to see what it is that the Danes aren't allowed to see?
The fine article also states that Thailand's blocklist [wikileaks.org] has been leaked. I thought you'd want to read it for yourself in addition to the Denmark one.
Aussie here, it has always been my contention that Conroy was in charge of the project to drag it out and make sure it DIDN'T happen, I think they are about to sign the death certificate...
Relevent info in amoungst the links...
"The Greens and Opposition also oppose the scheme, meaning any legislation to implement it will be blocked. The Opposition has obtained legal advice that "legislation of some sort will almost certainly be required", but others have said it may be possible to implement the scheme without legislation. Speaking at a telecommunications conference last week, Senator Conroy urged Australians to have faith in MPs to pass the right legislation."
Quoting myself here:
"[...]many of Australia's rights are "implied" in the constitution and exist merely through the High Court's "creative" interpretations.
Such as the implied right for Political speech in Australian Captial Television Pty Ltd v. Commonwealth (1992) which was also extended in 1994 in Theophanous v. The Herald And Weekly Times. Australia also took an active role in 1948 when drafting the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
Unfortunately, many attempts to introduce entrenched Human Rights into the constitution such Lionel Murphy in 1973 and 1985 with the Federal attorney-general have failed before they even reached the stage of a referendum."
by Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday March 17 2009, @09:29AM (#27224925)
We have no constitutional rights to free speech. We do have implied protected political speech, but that's not in the constitution. In practice, however, we have free speech. In fact, I can say things like s^@$[CARRIER LOST]
The Australian Senate (which is where such legislation would be blocked) is semi-proportional - and Senators sit for six years (twice the length as in the House of Representatives). Which means that a party has to win elections fairly comfortably two years in a row in order to be able to push through whatever they want.
And as our last (Howard) government found out, being able to push through whatever (Workchoices) they want can end in a political backlash. Australian voters don't like either party having too much power, many actually vote for third parties in the Senate precisely as a control on the system. A previously successful third party (the Australian Democrats) had an unofficial slogan, "Keeping the bastards honest."
Simply linking to addresses in ACMA's blacklist attracts an $11,000 per-day fine (snip) The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian (snip)
So you receive a letter on your mailbox saying that you were fined in AUD $11,000 , for linking to a site that you didn't know you could link, and if you knew that you couldn't link to it you would be even more penalized because that information is not for your security level?
Has someone on the Aussie's Government been playing Paranoia recently?
Simply linking to addresses in ACMA's blacklist attracts an $11,000 per-day fine (snip) The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian (snip)
So you receive a letter on your mailbox saying that you were fined in AUD $11,000 , for linking to a site that you didn't know you could link, and if you knew that you couldn't link to it you would be even more penalized because that information is not for your security level?
This is truly bizarre. Sounds like it's a law that's designed to be accidentally broken.
I don't think it'll stand up in any court. It's just wrong on too many levels.
The link in question was to an anti-abortion page containing some pictures of aborted babies. Apparently a member of the forum decided to test the filter by posting a link to the page and then submitting a complaint to the ACMA asking for such a link to be banned, for the purpose of seeing what would happen.
Lo and behold someone at the ACMA must of looked at the page, seen the pictures (I'm sure you can find much worse in any medical journal mind you) and decided that linking to the page was now illegal. So they sent a notice to the forum's hosting provider (bypassing the forum all together) informing them to take the link down within 24 hours or risk being fined $11K per day. The host then contacted the forum admin who obviously didn't want to put this on his provider took down the link.
I initially thought nothing would come of this ridiculous filter idea because it was just so plain stupid and so many people, including most ISPs, are against it. But I'm not so sure anymore.
Score +5 Informative, because there's no score -HolyFuck GougeMyEyesOutWithASpoon.
4chan [4chan.org] Random image boards. Daily flood of random crap.
GNAA [www.gnaa.us] Internet Troll headquarters. Obnoxious text, but I'm not aware of any eye-gouging image content.
kids-in-the-sandbox [kidsinsandbox.net] Some men might scream in pain at the thought of a dildo being shoved INTO their penis.
2girls1cup.mpg [lucabartoli.info] The most famous video you really really don't want to see, unless you have a fetish for watching girls eat soft shit then vomit it into each other's mouths.
efukt [efukt.com] Tag line "Porn you wish you never saw". Assorted video collection: Anorexic sex, a donkey giving itself a blowjob, gay anal fisting nearly to the shoulder, etc etc etc.
Goatse [whitehat.net.nz] The original mammoth asshole you wish you never saw.
And how can we not include TubGirl [forumspile.com] Another image you really wish you never saw, unless of course you think getting blasted in your face with your own fountain of enema spray is really really HOT.
To be fair, the fine is for ignoring a request for deleting links to prohibited content. It would be stupid to significantly penalise someone for breaking a law they aren't allowed to know about... but if I had a dollar for every time I thought "That would be stupid, there's no way the ALP will possibly incorporate that into the net censorship plan", I'd be able to forget about this whole financial crisis and retire at 26.
What's just as concerning is the apparent recursive nature of the blacklist. Link to prohibited content, and your website becomes prohibited content. Therefore, any links to your website become prohibited content. Given the nature of hyperlinking and the internet, the whole web is probably only a few steps away from being banned. At this stage, I'm not even sure that's not what Labor wants.
It's actually worse than this - the blacklist doesn't just deal with "prohibited content", it deals with "potential prohibited content". In other words, material that has not been found to be prohibited, but which a single bureaucrat thinks has the potential to be prohibited if it was investigated. Given that even MA15+ (i.e. material that is legal for a 15-year-old to view) content can be prohibited, and a significant proportion of the blacklist is legal for 18-year-olds to view (i.e. R18+ and X18+), that's an extremely low threshold for something to be considered off-limits to Australian web users by our government.
Ugh... the whole thing sickens me. I was hoping it would have been dropped like a hot potato for now, but it's obvious they aren't backing down. Our only hope is if it goes to a vote in the senate and fails.
Isn't that what we brits used australia for in the first place?
And you used America to get rid of your puritans;) Seems pretty ironic that your convicted criminals were more loyal to the Empire than your religious zealots.
Of course the prisoner's were sent over with loyalist guards who became the power structure of australia. The Puritans were not sent with guards and the powerful folks opposed english rule.
The part I like to point out, in impolite company, is how the Puritans were so insufferable that the DUTCH actually threw them out as well.
The Puritans were so insufferable that they couldn't even stand each other, which is how Connecticut got founded (by one of the same guys the Dutch threw out...)
I'm not the mods, of course, so I can't say; but I'm sincerely hoping that the "insightful" mods are a mixture of "funny; but I think you deserve karma" and "Insightful; because you have correctly caricatured precisely the response that a creepy statist would actually exhibit".
I urge anybody who actually agrees with my original post to explore a fulfilling career in being on fire.
I know, it's like these people read Kafka for ideas on how to F things up.
OT, but I once had a friend in the Marine Corps who had his clearance suspended due to an investigation into his supposed leaking of classified information (for which he was eventually cleared). The investigation contained Secret information, so they couldn't show him the charges that were pressed against him. We had some good laughs about Kafka, especially once it was all over.
Step 1) Run a simple web spider that checks availability but never actually pulls content, from within Australia.
Step 2) Run the same spider in any non-censoring country.
Step 3) Compare the two lists.
Simple as that. Nothing more than a few hundred megs of shotgun-requests, and you can map the portions of the
web that look dark but shouldn't.
Step 1) Run a simple web spider that checks availability but never actually pulls content, from within Australia.
Step 2) Run the same spider in any non-censoring country.
Step 3) Compare the two lists.
You'd better be quick. The amount of non-censoring countries is drying very fast.
Yeah, that's a great idea. All you have to do to get a copy of the blacklist is check every URL on the entire internet twice. I'll get my iPhone started on that!
...but when did Australia become the poster boy for blatant censorship and policies akin to fascism? I lived there for awhile back in the early 90s and it seemed like such a laid-back, friendly place where pretty much anything goes so long as it doesn't hurt anyone.
The irony of all this is I remember getting a "talking to" by a fellow in a bar who held up McCarthyism as one of America's saddest moments because it directly attacked free speech and free thought of individuals in the name of the "commie boogyman". With news like this coming out of Australia, I'm wondering if I'm going to see him again on TV in some show trial, being accused of thoughtcrime.
Actually, no, I won't, because unlike the McCarthy hearings, the ones in Australia would probably be censored.
I really don't understand it. Have we really fallen so far so fast?
This isn't a popular opinion but I think it's a natural consequence of people turning to Government for all manner of problems that Government wasn't originally intended to deal with. In the words of Thomas Jefferson: "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have"
welcome to what it feels like being an american during the bush administration. pariah, object of scorn and derision. you do realize what a joke this makes your country look like right?
1. sites blocked not for pornography, but ideological reasons 2. harsh punitive financial punishments just for linking 3. secret lists you, as a common citizen, don't have the right to see
i now think of australia the way i do iran and china in terms of freedom of expression. you better clean this disgrace up, you blokes can't let this continue, it is an embarassment
By far the nastiest and most insidious threat to democracy in Australia is the Catholic far Right. Their home has traditionally been the "right" of the ALP, although some Catholic militants, like Tony Abbott have gone joined the opposition conservative parties.
In years past, they've played mostly a spoiling role in Australia politics. As fascists, they know only how to destroy, not build, so they formed a right-wing fringe political party (the Democratic Labour Party, which in Whitlam's immortal words, was neither democratic, nor liberal, nor a party) kept the ALP out of government for 25 years and the country stagnated for decades under a conservative government. After B. A. Santamaria died and after the fall of Communism, they went back to infiltrating mainstream political parties.
These days, their strongholds are right-wing unions (the SDA , of which I was a member -- if I had known my union dues were being siphoned off by Phalangists and militant anti-abortionists, I would've quit instantly...), and the right wings of the ALP and Liberal parties.
Democracy and rational debate has always been anathema for these fascists. Their malign and destructive influence has been out there for all to see, although there has been very few political forces organised enough to challenge them head on.
If there's a vicious anti-democratic force in Australian politics, chances are, militant right-wing Catholics are behind it.
Hopefully this will not come to be in Australia or not be up held upon legal review. Two things I find are disturbing:
1) You will be held accounting for violating the law, but you can't see the law to know how to avoid violating it.
2) All of western democracies have shown a sharp turn towards the police state in the last decade. Something they all used to stand up against and accuse non-democracies of being evil for the same polocies.
The Finnish police have already censored the Wikileaks page on Finnish internet censorship; see my comment at the appropriate talk page [wikileaks.com].
If they block everyone, they reason, the sites will go out of business and the exploitation will stop. That's admirable.
And if we outlaw drugs, people still stop using them and drug abuse will stop. That's admirable.
But... since I'm an American.... I would rather let the people go to these sites, determine who is getting their jollies off looking at this stuff, and then let's round up all these sick f--- people and kill them.
That thought has occurred to me as well. Why block these sites when you could presumably get warrants to see who is going to them and actually investigate the people breaking the law instead of trying to impose a censorship scheme that will never work anyway?
Because it's not actually about stopping childporn, it's about imposing censorship. Whether childporn is weeded out is irrelevant, and these filters don't actually have be effective at stopping childporn to be effective at making people complacent.
I think you'll find that people with the most problems with freedom of expression are the right-wing (and extremely conservative) Catholics like Stephen Conroy and Nicola Roxon. The people doing the oppressing here are the conservatives and their enablers, not the small-l liberals.
This has nothing to do with fascism. The problem with fascism wasn't censorship. Censorship is bad, fascism included censorship as a matter of course, but it's not what was particularly bad about fascism. Soviet Russia wasn't fascist. It was bad too, just not in the same way. Today the United States are much closer to fascism than Australia, yet they enjoy incomparable freedom of speech. Militarization of the economy, dubious appeals to patriotism, booming prison population, the collusion between corporate interests and government, that's fascist-ish. Censorship, that's what you find in China, which is not nearly as bad as the US in the areas I just listed (but by no means any better overall, don't get me wrong.)
Only if you have a willing HTTP proxy to actually connect to. Far too often the technical solution of "Lets just setup a VPN!" or "We'll just encrypt it and use a proxy!" gets thrown up without realizing that you have to have a working endpoint in a lax country to work with. If you're relying on the "free" ones that pop up here and there - good luck. While you MIGHT get the HTTP proxy setup with them (VPN ain't happening), they tend to flitter in and out of existence so quickly that you're playing a game of cat and mouse more than actually using the net. You're certainly not going to perform a few keystrokes and make the problem go away.
And without using them or finding some pay equivalent (that you can trust), you have to work in a data connection, server space, and power in some nonrestrictive country. When you start factoring in collocating a server in Mexico then we're beyond the "Just encrypt it!" stage.
Oh great, there goes slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Any Australians fined yet for coming here?
Re:Oh great, there goes slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
The fine article also states that Thailand's blocklist [wikileaks.org] has been leaked. I thought you'd want to read it for yourself in addition to the Denmark one.
Parent
Re:Oh great, there goes slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
Relevent info in amoungst the links...
"The Greens and Opposition also oppose the scheme, meaning any legislation to implement it will be blocked. The Opposition has obtained legal advice that "legislation of some sort will almost certainly be required", but others have said it may be possible to implement the scheme without legislation. Speaking at a telecommunications conference last week, Senator Conroy urged Australians to have faith in MPs to pass the right legislation."
Parent
Re:Oh great, there goes slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Have they blocked SSH access out of the country? It's hard to block a tunneled connection...
2. Have they blocked TOR access?
Maybe I'm just being naive but firewalling off an entire country (noted exception: China) seems really impractical.
Parent
Re:Oh great, there goes slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe you can answer a couple of questions...
1. Have they blocked SSH access out of the country? It's hard to block a tunneled connection...
2. Have they blocked TOR access?
Maybe I'm just being naive but firewalling off an entire country (noted exception: China) seems really impractical.
No they just banned the sites hosting the proxies and sites listing the location of proxies.
Parent
Re:Oh great, there goes slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't Australia have a constitutional document guaranteeing freedom of speech?
No.
Parent
Re:Oh great, there goes slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
"[...]many of Australia's rights are "implied" in the constitution and exist merely through the High Court's "creative" interpretations. Such as the implied right for Political speech in Australian Captial Television Pty Ltd v. Commonwealth (1992) which was also extended in 1994 in Theophanous v. The Herald And Weekly Times. Australia also took an active role in 1948 when drafting the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
Unfortunately, many attempts to introduce entrenched Human Rights into the constitution such Lionel Murphy in 1973 and 1985 with the Federal attorney-general have failed before they even reached the stage of a referendum."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=436328&cid=22244392 [slashdot.org]
Ironically it may turn out that my comment towards the end was a bit too quick to judge.
Parent
Re:Oh great, there goes slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
We have no constitutional rights to free speech. We do have implied protected political speech, but that's not in the constitution. In practice, however, we have free speech. In fact, I can say things like s^@$[CARRIER LOST]
Parent
Re:Oh great, there goes slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:5, Insightful)
Simply linking to addresses in ACMA's blacklist attracts an $11,000 per-day fine (snip) The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian (snip)
So you receive a letter on your mailbox saying that you were fined in AUD $11,000 , for linking to a site that you didn't know you could link, and if you knew that you couldn't link to it you would be even more penalized because that information is not for your security level?
Has someone on the Aussie's Government been playing Paranoia recently?
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:5, Funny)
What is your security clearance, citizen?
Parent
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:5, Funny)
I loved that game.
Parent
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:5, Insightful)
Simply linking to addresses in ACMA's blacklist attracts an $11,000 per-day fine (snip) The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian (snip)
So you receive a letter on your mailbox saying that you were fined in AUD $11,000 , for linking to a site that you didn't know you could link, and if you knew that you couldn't link to it you would be even more penalized because that information is not for your security level?
This is truly bizarre. Sounds like it's a law that's designed to be accidentally broken.
I don't think it'll stand up in any court. It's just wrong on too many levels.
Parent
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:5, Informative)
Lo and behold someone at the ACMA must of looked at the page, seen the pictures (I'm sure you can find much worse in any medical journal mind you) and decided that linking to the page was now illegal. So they sent a notice to the forum's hosting provider (bypassing the forum all together) informing them to take the link down within 24 hours or risk being fined $11K per day. The host then contacted the forum admin who obviously didn't want to put this on his provider took down the link.
I initially thought nothing would come of this ridiculous filter idea because it was just so plain stupid and so many people, including most ISPs, are against it. But I'm not so sure anymore.
Parent
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:5, Informative)
Score +5 Informative, because there's no score -HolyFuck GougeMyEyesOutWithASpoon.
4chan [4chan.org] Random image boards. Daily flood of random crap.
GNAA [www.gnaa.us] Internet Troll headquarters. Obnoxious text, but I'm not aware of any eye-gouging image content.
kids-in-the-sandbox [kidsinsandbox.net] Some men might scream in pain at the thought of a dildo being shoved INTO their penis.
2girls1cup.mpg [lucabartoli.info] The most famous video you really really don't want to see, unless you have a fetish for watching girls eat soft shit then vomit it into each other's mouths.
efukt [efukt.com] Tag line "Porn you wish you never saw". Assorted video collection: Anorexic sex, a donkey giving itself a blowjob, gay anal fisting nearly to the shoulder, etc etc etc.
Goatse [whitehat.net.nz] The original mammoth asshole you wish you never saw.
And how can we not include TubGirl [forumspile.com] Another image you really wish you never saw, unless of course you think getting blasted in your face with your own fountain of enema spray is really really HOT.
-
Parent
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair, the fine is for ignoring a request for deleting links to prohibited content. It would be stupid to significantly penalise someone for breaking a law they aren't allowed to know about... but if I had a dollar for every time I thought "That would be stupid, there's no way the ALP will possibly incorporate that into the net censorship plan", I'd be able to forget about this whole financial crisis and retire at 26.
What's just as concerning is the apparent recursive nature of the blacklist. Link to prohibited content, and your website becomes prohibited content. Therefore, any links to your website become prohibited content. Given the nature of hyperlinking and the internet, the whole web is probably only a few steps away from being banned. At this stage, I'm not even sure that's not what Labor wants.
It's actually worse than this - the blacklist doesn't just deal with "prohibited content", it deals with "potential prohibited content". In other words, material that has not been found to be prohibited, but which a single bureaucrat thinks has the potential to be prohibited if it was investigated. Given that even MA15+ (i.e. material that is legal for a 15-year-old to view) content can be prohibited, and a significant proportion of the blacklist is legal for 18-year-olds to view (i.e. R18+ and X18+), that's an extremely low threshold for something to be considered off-limits to Australian web users by our government.
Ugh... the whole thing sickens me. I was hoping it would have been dropped like a hot potato for now, but it's obvious they aren't backing down. Our only hope is if it goes to a vote in the senate and fails.
Parent
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:5, Funny)
They could save a few steps and just ban Kevin Bacon.
Parent
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:5, Funny)
Nope, they're immediately detained on some manner of prison island, no questions asked.
Yeah, but it's also filled with lots of women with Australian accents. Please excuse me while I go find some felony to commit...
Parent
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't that what we brits used australia for in the first place?
And you used America to get rid of your puritans ;) Seems pretty ironic that your convicted criminals were more loyal to the Empire than your religious zealots.
Parent
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course the prisoner's were sent over with loyalist guards who became the power structure of australia. The Puritans were not sent with guards and the powerful folks opposed english rule.
Parent
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:5, Funny)
The part I like to point out, in impolite company, is how the Puritans were so insufferable that the DUTCH actually threw them out as well.
Parent
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:5, Funny)
The Puritans were so insufferable that they couldn't even stand each other, which is how Connecticut got founded (by one of the same guys the Dutch threw out...)
Parent
That's Kafkaesque (Score:5, Insightful)
Eh, what?? A $11k fine for breaking a secret law? How are you supposed to stay clear of it if you can't read the list of things you can't do?
Re:That's Kafkaesque (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:That's Kafkaesque (Score:5, Insightful)
I urge anybody who actually agrees with my original post to explore a fulfilling career in being on fire.
Parent
Re:That's Kafkaesque (Score:5, Funny)
OT, but I once had a friend in the Marine Corps who had his clearance suspended due to an investigation into his supposed leaking of classified information (for which he was eventually cleared). The investigation contained Secret information, so they couldn't show him the charges that were pressed against him. We had some good laughs about Kafka, especially once it was all over.
Parent
And it sucks more for Australians (Score:4, Interesting)
At least in Denmark, you can drive a little ways and get your Internet uncensored.
For those unlucky souls in Australia who can't access their favorite aberrent websites don't really have any good recourse.
Re:And it sucks more for Australians (Score:5, Funny)
At least in Denmark, you can drive a little ways and get your Internet uncensored.
For those unlucky souls in Australia who can't access their favorite aberrent websites don't really have any good recourse.
Wifi outside the US embasy?
Parent
No Internet For You (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't we just block Australia from the internet altogether until they learn to use it properly?
Re:No Internet For You (Score:4, Funny)
but but but.. urrgh... fair enough.
Parent
Good luck with that... (Score:5, Insightful)
These guys just don't "get" it still, do they?
Step 1) Run a simple web spider that checks availability but never actually pulls content, from within Australia.
Step 2) Run the same spider in any non-censoring country.
Step 3) Compare the two lists.
Simple as that. Nothing more than a few hundred megs of shotgun-requests, and you can map the portions of the web that look dark but shouldn't.
Re:Good luck with that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Step 1) Run a simple web spider that checks availability but never actually pulls content, from within Australia.
Step 2) Run the same spider in any non-censoring country.
Step 3) Compare the two lists.
You'd better be quick. The amount of non-censoring countries is drying very fast.
Parent
Re:Good luck with that... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, that's a great idea. All you have to do to get a copy of the blacklist is check every URL on the entire internet twice. I'll get my iPhone started on that!
Parent
I'm sorry, I must be new here... (Score:5, Insightful)
...but when did Australia become the poster boy for blatant censorship and policies akin to fascism? I lived there for awhile back in the early 90s and it seemed like such a laid-back, friendly place where pretty much anything goes so long as it doesn't hurt anyone.
The irony of all this is I remember getting a "talking to" by a fellow in a bar who held up McCarthyism as one of America's saddest moments because it directly attacked free speech and free thought of individuals in the name of the "commie boogyman". With news like this coming out of Australia, I'm wondering if I'm going to see him again on TV in some show trial, being accused of thoughtcrime.
Actually, no, I won't, because unlike the McCarthy hearings, the ones in Australia would probably be censored.
Re:I'm sorry, I must be new here... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's as if countries in the "western" world these days are in a race to see who can remove citizen rights the fastest.
I really don't understand it. Have we really fallen so far so fast?
As always, it's just a matter of following the money and/or who has the most to gain from these measures. Find that, then you can combat it.
Parent
Re:I'm sorry, I must be new here... (Score:5, Insightful)
I really don't understand it. Have we really fallen so far so fast?
This isn't a popular opinion but I think it's a natural consequence of people turning to Government for all manner of problems that Government wasn't originally intended to deal with. In the words of Thomas Jefferson: "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have"
Parent
Re:I'm sorry, I must be new here... (Score:5, Informative)
In the words of Thomas Jefferson: "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have"
I like that quote, but have never heard it before. It didn't quite ring right for Jefferson, so I dug. According to WikiQuote [wikiquote.org], it's actually from Gerald Ford's address to Congress in August, 1974 [bartleby.com].
Parent
Actually... (Score:5, Interesting)
The anti-abortion website was purposely reported to ACMA (the gov dept looking after the censorship) to test the waters in reporting websites.
All it took was one email.
dear all australians: (Score:5, Insightful)
welcome to what it feels like being an american during the bush administration. pariah, object of scorn and derision. you do realize what a joke this makes your country look like right?
1. sites blocked not for pornography, but ideological reasons
2. harsh punitive financial punishments just for linking
3. secret lists you, as a common citizen, don't have the right to see
i now think of australia the way i do iran and china in terms of freedom of expression. you better clean this disgrace up, you blokes can't let this continue, it is an embarassment
Catholics (Score:4, Interesting)
By far the nastiest and most insidious threat to democracy in Australia is the Catholic far Right. Their home has traditionally been the "right" of the ALP, although some Catholic militants, like Tony Abbott have gone joined the opposition conservative parties.
In years past, they've played mostly a spoiling role in Australia politics. As fascists, they know only how to destroy, not build, so they formed a right-wing fringe political party (the Democratic Labour Party, which in Whitlam's immortal words, was neither democratic, nor liberal, nor a party) kept the ALP out of government for 25 years and the country stagnated for decades under a conservative government. After B. A. Santamaria died and after the fall of Communism, they went back to infiltrating mainstream political parties.
These days, their strongholds are right-wing unions (the SDA , of which I was a member -- if I had known my union dues were being siphoned off by Phalangists and militant anti-abortionists, I would've quit instantly...), and the right wings of the ALP and Liberal parties.
Democracy and rational debate has always been anathema for these fascists. Their malign and destructive influence has been out there for all to see, although there has been very few political forces organised enough to challenge them head on.
If there's a vicious anti-democratic force in Australian politics, chances are, militant right-wing Catholics are behind it.
Slope (Score:4, Insightful)
Hopefully this will not come to be in Australia or not be up held upon legal review. Two things I find are disturbing:
1) You will be held accounting for violating the law, but you can't see the law to know how to avoid violating it.
2) All of western democracies have shown a sharp turn towards the police state in the last decade. Something they all used to stand up against and accuse non-democracies of being evil for the same polocies.
Finland is way ahead of you (Score:5, Informative)
The Finnish police have already censored the Wikileaks page on Finnish internet censorship; see my comment at the appropriate talk page [wikileaks.com].
yo dawg (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's all child pornography. (Score:5, Insightful)
If they block everyone, they reason, the sites will go out of business and the exploitation will stop. That's admirable.
And if we outlaw drugs, people still stop using them and drug abuse will stop. That's admirable.
But... since I'm an American.... I would rather let the people go to these sites, determine who is getting their jollies off looking at this stuff, and then let's round up all these sick f--- people and kill them.
That thought has occurred to me as well. Why block these sites when you could presumably get warrants to see who is going to them and actually investigate the people breaking the law instead of trying to impose a censorship scheme that will never work anyway?
Parent
Re:It's all child pornography. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's not actually about stopping childporn, it's about imposing censorship. Whether childporn is weeded out is irrelevant, and these filters don't actually have be effective at stopping childporn to be effective at making people complacent.
Parent
Re:It's all child pornography. (Score:5, Insightful)
> The vast majority of the list looks like kiddie porn sites
Please post ACMA's blacklist so we can verify.
Parent
Re:The progressive criminalisation of conservatism (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you'll find that people with the most problems with freedom of expression are the right-wing (and extremely conservative) Catholics like Stephen Conroy and Nicola Roxon. The people doing the oppressing here are the conservatives and their enablers, not the small-l liberals.
Parent
The F word is not helpful (Score:4, Interesting)
This has nothing to do with fascism. The problem with fascism wasn't censorship. Censorship is bad, fascism included censorship as a matter of course, but it's not what was particularly bad about fascism. Soviet Russia wasn't fascist. It was bad too, just not in the same way.
Today the United States are much closer to fascism than Australia, yet they enjoy incomparable freedom of speech.
Militarization of the economy, dubious appeals to patriotism, booming prison population, the collusion between corporate interests and government, that's fascist-ish.
Censorship, that's what you find in China, which is not nearly as bad as the US in the areas I just listed (but by no means any better overall, don't get me wrong.)
Parent
Re:No problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if you have a willing HTTP proxy to actually connect to. Far too often the technical solution of "Lets just setup a VPN!" or "We'll just encrypt it and use a proxy!" gets thrown up without realizing that you have to have a working endpoint in a lax country to work with. If you're relying on the "free" ones that pop up here and there - good luck. While you MIGHT get the HTTP proxy setup with them (VPN ain't happening), they tend to flitter in and out of existence so quickly that you're playing a game of cat and mouse more than actually using the net. You're certainly not going to perform a few keystrokes and make the problem go away.
And without using them or finding some pay equivalent (that you can trust), you have to work in a data connection, server space, and power in some nonrestrictive country. When you start factoring in collocating a server in Mexico then we're beyond the "Just encrypt it!" stage.
Parent