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March 25, 2009
The time to man the decks and hoist the flag, or petard, or whatever else is handy, in the interests of the free flow of information is upon us. Again. Or still. Depending on what, precisely, is meant by the term 'hoist', which could have something to do with child porn or, more likely, unacceptable violence against things that innocently flutter in breezes.
Following a series of unfortunate incidents involving the ACMA's nasty nets blacklist, or not, depending on who you believe, the good Senator Conroy is set to appear on Q and A tomorrow night. GetUp encourages audience participation. I wonder whether the ABC keeps track of the volume of questions submitted to a given panellist? It's probably best we don't know. For our own good.
It's fairly inconvenient timing for the Minister With Some Doubts About the Benefits of Communication, to say the least. And given the nature of some of the fallout, it takes more spine than I can spare to link too generously on recent developments.
Somebody Think of the Children still appears to be functioning, but you never can tell. The status of Wikileaks is less certain, as is the situation of anyone else linking to the site, including the experimental DBCDE blog. Is that an example of short sightedness, or blindness? The Blog Which Cannot be Named in Front of Filters, Children, or Other Clean Minded Folk has some clever artwork which may or may not be classified unclassifiable and therefore unsuitable between now and tomorrow morning. 1984 or Fight Club. The first and second rules of fight club are currently being assessed by the ACMA and the decision will not be made public, considering that the first rule of...and so on.
Whirlpool may have attracted ire or increased its fan base. It's hard to tell. Depends what you mean by 'monitor', which could be as open to doubt as the meaning of the word 'blog'.
Whether an actual forum of actual people meeting in meatspace to discuss censorship and filtering, which are two entirely different things apparently, counts as offensive may come up for consideration, depending on their mode of transport. Or something else. When the appropriate secret body makes up it's mind about it, you won't know. (See the first rule. At your peril.)
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Libertus.net provide a detailed and informative background history to the ALP's current net filter proposal. Background Briefing did a program on the clean feed
My gut feeling is that it originated in the ALP's appeal to the Christian Right during the election. They were trying to outgun Howard + Co in how much they would stamp on the internet nasties.