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.

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?

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.

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!

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.

Now I have been amongst the many – it seems to be the great majority of those who have expressed an opinion at all – to have commented (in this post and others) on both the sheer stupidity and the political danger of the Australian government’s proposals for mandatory filtering of the internet in this country at ISP level. It may seem, as the few supporters of this scheme might argue, that the Australian proposals are much weaker than those of China, Russia or Iran, and it might be claimed that we can trust the Australian government not to abuse the technical capabilities it wants in the way that those countries do.

Both of these defences have some weight, I freely concede. For the moment. For today. Doubtless also for next month, probably for next year. As for 5 or 10 years time – let’s say I wouldn’t want to take large bets on it. The point, of course, lies not in what the silly current scheme actually is, but where it is going – down the road to authoritarianism, to the evisceration of democracy, to state control of information and in that way to the state control of perception, of history and of thought. If in doubt, refer to China, where many modern Chinese seem to even doubt that Tiananmen Square even happened, let alone know anything of the tens of millions who died in the famine created by the Great Leap Forward, or that Tibetans really are unhappy about being oppressed, imprisoned and killed.

Anyway, all of the above is reasonably well known in the “free world”. Still. What I want to know, although I suspect that the answer is obvious, is this: what is being done in a positive sense to guarantee freedom of information? If a government were truly committed to democracy and freedom, then instead of funding research into internet filtering, it would be funding projects to do exactly the opposite – to develop computer and internet programs and hardware to guarantee such privacy and security that

1) those who provide information can do so without fear of identification or reprisal

2) anyone can access that information without being spied on; this would imply that they can search without the government knowing who is searching for what, and can see and forward information without the government knowing.

Some say we all have an inner child. I suspect that most of us have a inner little right-winger somewhere inside too, and at this point the inner little right-winger may be raising a fist and shouting “But, but… what about the terrorists? Won’t they have free access to learn how to make bombs! They will be able to plot in secret! And the paedophiles! Won’t these people all be able to e-mail each other without us knowing! And won’t terrorist cells be able to co-ordinate without the security forces knowing anything about it! What are you going to do about that?”

The answer has to be – yes, of course those people will do those things. And of course I find those things as evil as anyone else does, and of course we all want to stop them doing those things. But controlling information won’t stop them. Never did, never will. It is often speculated that paedophiles pass their files around in encrypted ways. Much was made a few months ago of a paedophile ring that had been using peer-to-peer networking having been cracked by the security forces – a success that, while perhaps genuine, was trivial. Software and hardware are both evolving at a dizzy rate, and the rest of the offenders, be they paedophiles or bomb-makers, will move on to new methods within weeks. That little success does not justify going further and faster down the path of authoritarian, government control of information. Are we so dazzled by the internet that we have forgotten that people still talk to each other? Still print things or draw diagrams on paper? Still meet in parks, and cafes and bars, still pass manila envelopes from one to the other? Total government control of electronic communications is awkward for such people, to be sure, but it would hardly present an insurmountable problem. Their activities are already, rightly, illegal, and there is no need for further authoritarian mechanisms to control them.

How far will we go to control these bogeymen, the “paedophiles and terrorists”? Destroy all the information we don’t like? Oh yes, book-burning has been done before now. Stop them talking about their ideas? Oh yes, tongues have been cut out before now, as have hands, eyes and ears.

Total government control of information is a genuine but minor hindrance to those bogeymen. The real advantage of such power is that it makes a whole population far easier to control, to manipulate, to swallow the “official story” and look away when elections are rigged, when workers’ health is destroyed or the earth is polluted by bad industrial practice, when people are held without trial and without knowing the charges against them, when the wealth of the powerful grows while the weak are exploited or even enslaved, when whistle-blowers are silenced and activists dissappear.

One test of a true justice system is that even the people for whom we have the greatest distaste, even horror, and whose guilt seems most obvious are given the opportunity to have the charges against them clearly laid, the evidence tested and a proper defence mounted. Similarly, a test of whether we truly support democracy in the information age is whether we allow the genuinely free exchange of information, even knowing that on occasion that freedom will be used for evil purposes, just as writing and talking, looking and listening have been used for evil in the past. And the genuinely free exchange of information can only come about with privacy and security software that protects the identity of publishers and makes information available, while government snoopers know neither what the information is nor who is looking at it.

We should be funding that research, not filters!

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.

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.

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.