Bambauer rains on Senator Conroy's parade - download full text of Internet censorship paper

FILTERING IN OZ:

AUSTRALIA'S FORAY INTO INTERNET CENSORSHIP

Derek E. Bambauer*

Abstract

Australia's decision to implement Internet censorship using technological meanscreates a natural experiment: the first Western democracy to mandate filtering legislatively, and to retrofit it to a decentralized network architecture.

But are the proposed restrictions legitimate?

The new restraints derive from the Labor Party'spro-filtering electoral campaign, though coalition government gives minority politicians considerable influence over policy.

The country has a well-defined statutory censorship system for on-line and off-line material that may, however, be undercut by relying on foreign and third-party lists of sites to be blocked.

While Australia is open about its filtering goals, the government's transparency about what content is to be blocked is poor.

Initial tests show that how effective censorship is at filtering prohibited content – and only that content – will vary based on what method the country's ISPs use.

Though Australia's decision makers are formally accountable to citizens, efforts to silence dissenters, outsourcing of blocking decisions, and filtering's inevitable transfer of power to technicians undercut accountability.

The paper argues Australia represents a shift by Western democracies towards legitimating Internet filtering and away from robust consideration of the alternatives available to combat undesirable information.

PDF of draft paper at SSRN

Image from The Sydney Morning Herald

Gaza '09: Reports from Israeli human rights groups

B'Tselem (Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in Occupied Territories) has this link to a blog reporting human rights violations in the Gaza Strip.

B'Tselem also documents the appalling mortality statistics between 29.9.2000-30.11.2008 which show 2,994 Palestinians (including 634 minors) in the Gaza Strip were killed by Israeli security forces/civilians compared with 136 Israeli dead (including 4 minors) in the same territory killed by Palestinians.

With totals across Gaza, West Bank and Israel for the same period showing 4,897 Palestinian dead (including 955 minors) and 1,062 Israeli dead (including 123 minors).

The current bombing and incursion into the Gaza Strip will of course swell these figures markedly in relation to the number of Palestinians killed or wounded.

When will enough be enough?

Philip Slater over at The Huffington Post expresses what must be a common sentiment:

I can understand that after centuries of persecution it's satisfying for a Jewish state to be the aggressor for a change, but there's a codicil that goes with that role. You don't get to act like a victim any more. "Poor little Israel" just sounds silly when you're the dominant power in the Middle East. When you've invaded several of your neighbors, bombed and defeated them in combat, occupied their land, and taken their homes away from them, it's time to stop acting oppressed. Yes, Arab states deny your right to exist, threaten to drive you into the sea, and all the rest of their futile, helpless rhetoric. The fact is, you have the upper hand and they don't. You have sophisticated arms and they don't. You have nuclear weapons and they don't. So stop pretending to be pathetic. It doesn't play well in Peoria.

B'Tselem 2009 testimony page.

A big round of applause for W.I.R.E.S wildlife rescue please

According to The Daily Examiner, last year WIRES Northern Rivers received 50,000 telephone calls from the public and made 25,000 rescues of injured animals.

Chris Lloyd, WIRES Executive Officer, said: " We live in one of the most beautiful countries in the world and it's heartbreaking to see how we are killing off our helpless animals. Many species are unique to this country and we must work together to provide these precious animals with a safe future."

In the Clarence Valley WIRES averaged 10 calls per day over 2008 for everything from injured eastern grey kangaroos, wedgetail eagles, parrots, and water birds, to various lizards and snakes.

WIRES volunteers are always prompt, polite and caring whenever they call to pick up injured or 'lost' wildlife from around the NSW North Coast and we are all lucky to have such an excellent service just a phone call away.

Thinking of donating?

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Download a printable donation form to send through the post to:
PO Box 260
FORESTVILLE NSW 2087

* Photograph of Tawny Frogmouths from WIRES Northern Rivers

It's official - the editor's an ars#h@le

The Daily Examiner at Grafton celebrates 150 years of news publication this year.
It's circulation covers the Clarence Valley, with a supposed readership of around 28,000 from Monday to Saturday.
A somewhat unnatural number given that there are only about 50,000 people living in the Valley.
Still, it is to be congratulated for hanging in there when so many in the print media are living on what appears to be borrowed time as teh teev and teh net make inroads into 'audience' share.
So it's a real pity that in a year of celebration this local paper should be lumbered with such a tactless, insensitive tabloid hack like its johhny-come-lately editor, Peter Chapman.

His latest effort on Tuesday was to berate Yamba small business owners for taking either Christmas Day, Boxing Day or New Year's Day off to be with their own family and friends.
Apparently everyone in Yamba should have been open comme la Gold Coast for the benefit of the editor, his extended family and friends (because not for one moment did I believe in the unnamed dissatisfied 'tourists' he was supposedly championing).
As an afterthought he also included Maclean and Grafton shopkeepers in his gripe - presumably the boofhead remembered that he currently resides in Yamba and has to face his neighbours once the paper hits the streets.

Map from APN

You go (you godless) girl! Part Two

In October 2008 I wrote a post about Ariane Sherine's efforts to raise funds to run a counter-message to advertising by religious groups in Britain.

Ariane was so successful that now at last the godless have a voice!

According to The Telegraph last Tuesday:

Organisers originally hoped to put the message on just a handful of London buses, as an antidote to posters put up by religious groups which they claimed were "threatening eternal damnation" to non-believers.

But after the campaign received high-profile support from the prominent atheist Prof Richard Dawkins and the British Humanist Association, the modest £5,500 target was met within minutes and more than £140,000 has now been donated since the launch in October.

Enough money has now been raised to place the message – "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life" – on 200 bendy buses in the capital for a month, with the first ones taking to the streets .

A further 600 buses carrying the adverts will be seen by passengers and passers-by in cities across England, Wales and Scotland, from Aberdeen and Dundee to York, Coventry, Swansea and Bristol.

In addition, two large LCD screens bearing the atheist message have been placed in Oxford Street, central London, while 1,000 posters containing quotes from well-known non-believers will be placed on Underground trains for two weeks starting on Monday.

They feature lines doubting the existence of God, and celebrating the natural world, written by Albert Einstein, Katharine Hepburn, Douglas Adams and Emily Dickinson.

It is the first ever atheist advertising campaign to take place in Britain, and similar adverts are now also running on public transport in America and Spain.

Ariane Sherine, a writer who first thought of the atheist bus adverts, said: "You wait ages for an atheist bus, then 800 come along at once. I hope they will brighten people's days and make them smile on their way to work."

The Guardian also reported:

Atheists in Australia have fared badly with their campaign. Attempts to place slogans such as "Atheism – sleep in on Sunday mornings" on buses were rejected by Australia's biggest outdoor advertising company, APN Outdoor.

The Australian Federal Government's Yellow Pages of Evil

Adelaide Now has this opinion piece by Mark Newton:

The blacklist would need to be distributed to several hundred ISPs, and would be accessible to several thousand technical staff. The information security implications of this are obvious. Taking such a sensitive, secret resource and distributing it to thousands of people guarantees that the blacklist would eventually leak.

When it leaked, it would be published on the internet. If the list is even half as accurate as the minister claims it will be, the effect of that publication will be to make what has beeen dubbed "The Australian Federal Government's Yellow Pages of Evil" available to every child-exploiting abuser on the planet, directing criminals in all corners of the world to a smorgasbord of illegal content.

The Labor Government would need to explain why it thought that unknowable quantities of "collateral damage" all over the world was an acceptable price to pay for Australian internet censorship.

Of course, that somewhat alarming outcome is predicated on the trustworthiness of Senator Conroy's claim that only the most outrageously illegal material would be blocked. A diligent enquirer might wonder whether that is true.

In a Senate Estimates Committee hearing on 20 October, 2008, Senator Conroy confirmed that ACMA's existing prohibited online content list would form the basis of the mandatory "illegal material" censorship scheme. The problem is the ACMA-prohibited online content list doesn't actually restrict itself to illegal material.

In addition to the illegal material Senator Conroy would like to ban for adults, the list also contains material the Office of Film and Literature Classification has refused to classify, but which may still be legal to possess (if not to sell, hire, exhibit, or import) in Australia, as well as material rated X18+, also R18+ material not protected by an adult verification service, and some MA15+ material. Material in these categories is mostly legal in Australia.

The ACMA-prohibited online content list also contains a class of material that hasn't been examined by the OFLC, but which, in the opinion of ACMA bureaucrats, "would be" classified into one of the categories of prohibited content.

But because the blacklist is secret, unaudited, and specifically exempted by legislation from the Freedom of Information application process, the OFLC would never get a chance to check the accuracy of these classifications - unless they downloaded the list once it was leaked. That brings us to the most pernicious of unintended consequences: nobody would know (at first) what had been banned.

Our society accepts that it is up to the courts to determine what is illegal. We do not then expect faceless public servants to be the real arbiters of an internet content blacklist. Yet Senator Conroy, who has established a remarkable track record of being wrong in this area, expects Australians simply to take his word for it when he says that "illegal material is illegal material".

IT is clear that a great many Australians disagree, despite Senator Conroy's hysterical accusations that to do so is to endorse child pornography. In a nation that has enjoyed uncensored access to online services (including those that predate the internet) for over three decades without ill effect, imposing a national censorship regime such as the one proposed by Senator Conroy is a radical act requiring radical justification.

We are over a year into this debate, and still none of these concerns has been addressed. It time for the Labor Government to abandon this policy. To the Government I ask: "Please, won't somebody think of the adults?"

Snapshot is of ISP filtering poll at mid-morning 6 January 2008, click image to enlarge.

NASA's James Hansen: the pot calling the kettle black?

According to News.com.au NASA's James Hansen has told Barack Obama that Australia is destroying much of life on earth.
Reporting which is accurate only in certain aspects.

A draft document by Hansen does make this claim:

(3) Other cases are described on my Columbia University web site, e.g., Switzerland finances construction of coal plants, Sweden builds them, and Australia exports coal and sets atmospheric carbon dioxide goals so large as to guarantee destruction of much of the life on the planet.

However, the final document does not mention Australia in this context and, more importantly, this letter has not yet been delivered to the President-Elect.

Either way, Hansen is drawing a very long bow when he initially blames one of the smaller total greenhouse gas emitters for much of the global destruction and News Ltd is guilty of misrepresenting Hansen's final position in the quoted letter.