The Federal Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, likes to think that the world is on his side when it comes to the 'rightness' of Internet censorship.
However, the real world has a habit of intruding..................
According to Computerworld: the voice of IT management this week:
The US Supreme Court has refused to resurrect a law requiring Web sites containing "material harmful to minors" to restrict access based on age, presumably ending a 10-year fight over whether the law violated free speech rights.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to hear an appeal by former President George Bush's administration, which asked that the court overturn a lower court's ruling against enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 (COPA). In July, the US Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit struck down the law, saying it was a vague and overly broad attack on free speech......
Opponents of the law, including the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Nerve.com, Salon.com, the Urban Dictionary and the Sexual Health Network, argued the law amounted to government censorship and was so broad that it would affect many Web sites, including those that included information on sexually transmitted diseases.
Opponents of COPA have successfully challenged it in court several times. In 2000, the 3rd Circuit upheld a lower court's injunction against the implementation of the law, and in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the injunction but sent the law back to U.S. district court. In 2003, the 3rd Circuit ruled that the law violated the U.S. Constitution.
Inconvenient facts also keep emerging in Australia...............
According to Crikey on Friday:
"Freedom of speech is fundamentally important in a democratic society and there has never been any suggestion that the Australian Government would seek to block political content," intoned Senator Stephen Conroy on Tuesday.
Yet the very next day, ACMA added a page from what's arguably a political website to its secret blacklist of Internet nasties.
The page is part of an anti-abortion website which claims to include "everything schools, government, and abortion clinics are afraid to tell or show you". Yes, photos of dismembered fetuses designed to scare women out of having an abortion. Before you click through, be warned: it is confronting. Here's the blacklisted page.
Mandatory Internet filtering, says Senator Conroy, is only about blocking the ACMA blacklist. The blacklist, he repeatedly insists, is "mainly" child-abuse and ultra-violent material. He's protecting us from ped-philes, stopping terrorists, that sort of thing. It's like the regulation we have for TV, films and books. Except it's not. It's not even close.
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