Pica Pica

 ”Australia is becoming the Iran of the South Pacific”

Crikey tells us that Reporters Without Borders has written to the PM urging him to abandon the invidious filtering scheme:

Quoting from Crikey:

The letter, signed by RWB Secretary-General Jean-Francois Julliard, spelled out the organisation’s disquiet with the broad criteria and uncertain goals of the censorship plan. In particular, they felt the lack of judicial oversight was a key problem:

Firstly, the decision to block access to an ‘inappropriate’ website would be taken not by a judge but by a government agency, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). Such a procedure, without a court decision, does not satisfy the requirements of the rule of law. The ACMA classifies content secretly, compiling a website blacklist by means of unilateral and arbitrary administrative decision-making. Other procedures are being considered but none of them would involve a judge.

Read more through the link above. Remember, this is not about the few unpleasant things they are talking about banning now – it is about the way they want to take power to secretly ban anything they feel like. Fascism is an easy insult, but it it not an exaggeration here.

You might also enjoy and learn from this spoof site.

So the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy has announced that he will introduce legislation before next year’s elections forcing ISPs to block a secret blacklist of “refused classification” (RC) websites for all Australian internet users.

The debate, thank goodness, has got vigorous. The issue, of course, is not the tiny number of sites – probably revolting and abhorrent in many cases – that are the ostensible target of this move. OK, there is indeed a question as to whether any information should ever be blocked – perhaps it should not. If we grant, for argument’s sake, that it should there is indeed a question as to whether we grant the little catholic boy Stephen Conroy the right to control the choice of what that blocked information is – in fact I don’t. And there are questions about whether it will bring any significant gains in terms of its ostensible target – probably it will be almost useless. And again, indeed, there is a question as to whether it will also block perfectly acceptable sites – the evidence suggests that it will.

But these are trivial questions. They suggest that the proposals are useless and stupid, and that makes us smell a rat.

The truly worrying thing is the proposal that the government will arrange, in secret, for otherwise public information to be banned, for reasons that it will keep secret. We will not be told what we are not allowed to see. An unelected committee will not tell us what is banned or why. We will be led to believe that, for instance, the blocks are being applied to child pornography. But further down the line, perhaps not under this government or even the next, you can just bet that some special circumstances will require a “small, temporary, provisional” extension of the blocked material. “National security” will demand, for instance, that sites explaining government involvement in environmentally unsound projects are blocked; or that sites that challenge the reasons for going to war will be seen as traitorous – WMDs, anyone? Perhaps sites with pictures of the PM cavorting naked with his/her illicit lover will be blocked; and we will not be allowed to know where it will end.

We therefore have a civic duty to learn about and use the technical tricks needed to circumvent these things. We should learn to encrypt the most innocuous e-mails, learn to anonymise ourselves when we wish our aunt a happy birthday. Otherwise we are conniving in the government cover-ups of the future. Does anybody believe they won’t want to?

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.

I’ve not only been splitting the old blog into these two new ones, but also seriously refreshing my work site. I’m impressed, both by WordPress in general (they have prepared some really good documentation) but also by the highly customizable Atahualpa theme I’ve used there as well as for the blogs.

The media here are making much of the young, net-savvy Iranians using social networking sites to get the news out. Most people believe the Iranian presidential election to have been rigged, most outside journalists have had to leave Iran, but the Iranians are said to be twitter-ing and facebook-ing away about what is going on. And don’t we just love it, because it is the Iranian regime that is threatened by the net?

So good. Freedom of information really does work in favour of democracy! Our governments should be financing research to keep information free, and to protect those who publish it – software to keep government snoopers out of our e-conversations, and to provide security and privacy. The Great Firewall of China, the Australian plans for ISP-level filtering, plans to keep logs of all e-mail exchanges – these are toys that would have made Big Brother green with envy.

Underlines my point!

First off, a declaration that this thought started with an article by Gary Feuerberg in the Epoch Times; the article also refers to a site concerned with undermining democracy.

Feuerberg’s article summarizes a report entitled “Undermining Democracy: 21st Century Authoritarians,” released on Capitol Hill, June 4 – the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre – sponsored by Freedom House, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia. Its 80 pages find that four authoritarian states—China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela—are setting forth a new authoritarian model for countries to follow, and that they have the resources and sophistication to be highly influential in the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Continue reading Global Free Information?

The Australian Government considers that knowledge about good methods of voluntary euthanasia should be forbidden, and would like to ban this website about the use of nembutal. Take note before it’s too late!

I guess I’m not entirely sure what I feel about euthanasia, but I’m quite sure that I don’t concede my right to know about these things to the government, or to a list that it draws up in secret.

I installed Skype a month or more ago, but with a new webcam with inbuilt microphone the thing is taking off. Friends! Install Skype! It’s free! It’s a now thing! Video-chat round the world at no cost!

And look what I can do with the new cam:

With such sophisticated tools at our fingertips, will we ever look back?

PS: In real life my nose is fairly small (Sarah says tiny). Just thought I’d mention that.

Well if not a prize, an honorable mention at least.

There is a well known saying attributed to Lord Acton in the late 19th century along the lines of “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”. I am looking for an equally pithy phrase to express the fact that secrecy makes stupid, top secrecy makes utterly stupid.

I’m not sure how many non-Australian readers will remember the Haneef case that I mentioned in 2007 in this old message. Actually that’s a collection of old bits and pieces, so if you go there you will have to search down for “Haneef” – alternatively you can just Google the name. The point is that the way the case was handled turned the Australian Federal Police into a laughing stock, and did the same for the Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews. All the authorities tried to hide their puerile bad judgement behind official secrecy. It would probably be fair to say that the atrocious handling of Dr Haneef was one of many things that led the public to perceive the Howard Government as out-of-touch, and more interested in their own status and power than in doing things properly. I daresay it even contributed to Howard’s party’s trouncing at the election, so perhaps there really is a small silver lining for every cloud, eh?

Now we have a new example in the mandatory Internet filtering proposed by the government. It is acknowledged by almost everyone that the proposed scheme could cripple the Internet here (which is not the hottest service anyway), and that it would not in fact make any significant dent in the circulation of child pornography, since seriously illegal material is passed around by methods other than the web. Every right-thinking person is of course offended by child pornography, and this is the cloak being used to push the scheme. But we know governments, don’t we? After child pornography it will be ordinary pornography, then anything about euthanasia, then things that the government finds highly sensitive and embarassing… and on it goes.

The funny thing though is that the existing secret blacklist of sites that are being used for the “trials” by a small and shrinking number of ISPs (Australia’s third largest internet provider, iiNet, has just withdrawn from the trials, saying it could not “reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility”) has recently been made public, and can be obtained from well-known sites such as Wikileaks. Somebody at the paper has taken the trouble to look at the sites on this list, and it turns out to contain “a wealth of legal material such as regular gay and straight porn sites, YouTube links, online poker sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites and even the sites of a Queensland dentist, a school canteen consultancy and an animal carer.” In other words, if an office junior with basic internet skills had been told to go off and browse for a week to find a few sites to ban, they would not have earnt much credit for coming up with this list! Some of the porn sites may be in what many of us may find in bad taste, but isn’t it up to us to make our own minds up there?

The Communications Minister responsible for this display of childish idiocy, Stephen Conroy, is, would you believe, not just a Catholic but a member of Opus Dei! Look him up in Wikipedia.

So an honorable mention will be awarded to whoever can come up with a really pithy version of “secrecy makes stupid, top secrecy makes utterly stupid”.

Much of the information here is thanks to the SMH.