The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, more commonly known as ASIO, has the right to detain a person, even when they are not suspected of a terrorist offence, for at least seven days if it is believed that they can “substantially assist in the collection of intelligence”. The Attorney General (an entirely political appointee, be it noted, nothing to do with the judiciary – in the Prime Minister’s pocket, in essence) must consent to the application for a warrant. The application is made to certain magistrates and judges who have volunteered for this job, but these seemingly judicial persons do not act in their judicial capacity, just as designated persons. The application is made without the prospective detainee being present, and the detainee is not informed of the reasons for the application. If the detainee wishes to challenge the sufficiency of the grounds, their legal adviser is not allowed to see any of the supporting documentation; the detainee, in any case, does not in fact necessarily have a right to legal advice, or even to contact anybody at all.

On top of this vile law, it has been made an offence to disclose that someone is subject to such a warrant; journalists are not allowed to report the existence of a warrant, even when trying to expose abuse or misuse of the system. ASIO and the AFP have made themselves into laughing-stocks over, for instance, the Haneef case, so we can be quite certain that sooner or later these powers will be abused again.

In the face of such severe threats to our safety, it would be helpful if we all know how to publish anything that we know about such things, whether we are reporters, friends of the detained or just concerned about human rights. We should know how to publish any information anonymously, to do our best to ensure that ASIO and the AFP are held to account. It is, however, ethical but illegal.

 See the Australian Human Rights Commission for more details.

But do remember, it is legal to know about these techniques, it is unethical for ASIO and the AFP to have such powers, but if you actually publish information such as the existence of the kind of warrant mentioned above, you are breaking the law. I cannot urge you to do it.

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.

The club has now, it seems, received “written threats from a leading Maori lawyer”, claiming that “the dance trespasses on Maori rights and disrespects their cultural heritage”. The club management, it appears, intends to go ahead, as indeed they should.

There are legal issues here, and there are also issues about modern culture. As to the legal issues, I am of course not an expert, but if the original “haka” is indeed traditional, then by definition it was not composed by those represented by the lawyer. Their claim is presumably based on genetic and cultural descent from those who first developed the dance. As an Englishman, do I have a right to prevent Maoris from performing (possibly bad) versions of Shakespeare? I think not, even though I do believe there is a Shakespeare way, way back in my ancestry. The dance has been used as part of the pre-match entertainment by Maoris for many years now. The idea that someone in New Zealand has some kind of intellectual right by means of which they can prevent someone doing a modified version of that dance in Liverpool, England, seems to be stretching the law a bit far. The club has indeed hired people of Maori appearance to do this dance, so in any case shouldn’t they be the target of the lawyer’s action? Those Maoris are the ones who are selling the dance to the club, after all. Here it is:

The whole question of the extent to which we have “rights” over the culture that was developed by earlier generations is one that interests me. (The meaning of “aboriginal painting” is an example of these muddy waters to which I hope to return one day.)

And then there is the question of culture. According to the article:

Intellectual property lawyer Maui Solomon told the Herald on Sunday he thought the haka, which starts “Everton! Everton! He, ha, he, ha!”, was “totally disrespectful”

As the Germans might say – “Na und?” And so? I have, of course, no knowledge of the hearts of the Everton management, and cannot comment on whether or not they respect Maori culture. In an ideal world we would all respect each other’s differences, although I certainly hope that would still allow us to make fun of them. Let us, for the moment, assume (perhaps unfairly) that they really are being disrespectful. Frankly, I do not want to live in a world where the appearance of respect is enforced by the law. Too many people have fought too long and too hard to win us the moderate freedom that we now have to speak our minds to have that thrown away for the sake of every group that feels threatened by the way it is represented elsewhere. We can make comical drawings and jokes about Muhammad, we can say that the Queen of England is a frosty old bat, we can satirise Christian priests, the Pope, Nelson Mandela, our Prime Ministers and other political leaders, not to forget the Dalai Lama or, indeed, “Western Buddhists” like myself. And we can giggle at Maoris sticking their tongues out, stamping the floor and going “Ha Ha”. I am not sure whether blasphemy is still on the statute book, but it has become, thankfully, a pretty irrelevant law. I would, let me repeat, hope that we have respect for each other in our hearts, and that we would therefore refrain from doing things like the above under certain circumstances, especially those where they are particularly likely to cause hurt or offence. But it would be a grim, grey, oppressive and oppressed world in which the law was used to impose the personal taste of the few on the general taste of the many.

Or so it is said.

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.