Soapbox

I just took part in the “Soapbox” public speaking competition, a little part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House.

Well I didn’t get past the first round, but it was huge fun. The “facilitators” in the red, green and yellow hats (if you were there, you’d know what I mean) did a terrific job of making it go well.

Anyway, in order not to waste my speech, here is the text:

Democracy demands terrorist software

We know that the government’s proposed Internet filters are half-baked and unpopular – but worse than that, they are really the very opposite of what we should be doing.

We know that power looks after power– the law is framed that way. And we know that money looks after money – by and large, the rich stay rich. Those in power can lose huge amounts of other peoples’ money and still grow their own millions. Just think of Telstra or Goldman Sachs.

Those in power now want to get their hands on our information so that they can control us. Elsewhere at this festival David Mutton is putting forward the appalling idea that – I quote – “intrusive, coercive surveillance” is somehow a good thing, and that – again I quote – “issues of privacy, informed consent and free will are irrelevant“. Now that’s what I call a really dangerous idea!

Those in power, in this case represented by the Minister for Broadband, Stephen Conroy*, want to stop us from having free access to information. But at the same time, security organisations now want to intercept and store every electronic message that we send. They want to track the author of every bit of information that is out there.

Those in power want to do this because they think they can. The Gestapo and the KGB also wanted to record the thoughts of ordinary people. And for very much the same reason.

Are we serious about democracy? Then we need genuinely free exchange of information. That means we need privacy and security software that
·        protects the identity of people who publish,
·        that gives us free access to information, and
·        stops spies from snooping on our conversations.

We must do research into privacy software, not into filters! 

*I wanted to quip “… or should that be Minister for Narrowband, or even Minister for Narrowminds”, but I didn’t have spare seconds in the two minutes.