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December 15, 2009
The Rudd Government sure is schizophrenic about the internet.
On the one hand, we have the commitment to open government, the public sphere initiative, and building the national broadband network that promises greater democratization. This is Internet as a new public sphere (Gore's agora idea). On the other hand, we have the introduction of mandatory internet censorship through the proposed legislative amendments to the Broadcasting Services Act for material that is deemed to be "harmful to minors" (eg., cyberporn) based on suburban families interpretation of "contemporary community standards".
This schizophrenia undercuts the Australian Government's policy of promoting "a civil and confident society online", since the plans to censor the internet go far further than purging it of child porn. Those dreams of cyberspace as a utopian commercial space are long gone. The future has arrived as the past as the coupling of paranoid control with freedom.
There is a need to broad the issue out to questions about the complex interplay between control and freedom in the digital age in the context of the repressive tendency Australian political culture that sees censorship and banning as a panacea to moral panics. This discussion paper can be interpreted as one step towards this.
The ALP's conception of “cyber-safety” has shifted away from a liberal policy of providing tools to shield minors plus education on the web to a Conservative one of disciplinary power in the form of a mandatory black list of “almost exclusively RC (Refused Classification)” content aimed at adults.
The pro-censorship Rudd Government will proceed with its controversial plans to censor the internet after Government-commissioned trials found filtering a blacklist of banned sites was accurate and would not slow down the internet.
Conroy announced that legislation will be introduced before next year's elections to force ISPs to block a blacklist of "refused classification" (RC) websites for all Australian internet users.
So who decides the blacklist, which the government says provides cyber-safety for families from material such as child sex abuse, sexual violence and instructions on crime and or drug use? It would be compiled using a public complaints mechanism, Government censors and URLs provided by international agencies.
Relying on public complaints from the conservative Christian Lobby indicates that the scope of the filtering would extend significantly beyond child porn to include naked bodies and sexuality. Will it include online gambling? Or “R” rated computer games? Or anti-abortion websites? Or Wikileaks? The pool of material is going to be large.
So exactly what will be blocked and who will decide? We don't know, as the list will be secret and the reasons for any ban will be secret. An example of what can happen. Not only are the URLs censored, but the list of censored URLs is itself censored. So much for an open Australia.
The Rudd Government's rhetoric about cyberspace is that it is protecting us from pedophiles, stopping terrorists, and all that blacklisted bad stuff on the big bad internet. Since internet filtering is about what information may or may not flow through the public internet, it's heavy Nanny state--authoritarian--foot enters the freedom of speech and individual freedom territory of liberalism.This is a conservatism that is anti-liberal. Some references for this control v freedom debate.
Update
Catherine Lumby makes a good point in The Punch. She says that according to Minister Conroy’s announcement yesterday the mandatory filtering of internet content in Australia will proceed according to a list drawn up on the basis of the RC classification, and that her concern is about the a wide scope of content that could be prohibited under the proposed filtering regime. She says that the RC classification is:
a category that doesn’t just deal with abhorrent material like child pornography, bestiality and active incitement to violence. Given the current broad terms under which material is slotted into the category it would also potentially embrace sites where people talked therapeutically about child sex abuse experiences, accessed information about safe sex and drug injecting practices, or engaged in serious political dialogue about what motivates terrorist groups.
ACMA has form in blocking social advocacy sites that are not pornographic. As Mark Newton says on Unleashed:
The vocal minority has always known that censorship quells robust dissenting speech by projecting doubt and fear of prosecution onto the fringes of legality. Our classification system is so broad that it cannot help but hoover-up political expression on the margins, and it inevitably influences and shapes political debate in this country.
So it is a freedom of expression issue. Is it the role of the government to decide what people can see and do on the Internet? Or are these personal decisions that should be made by individuals and their families?
But it is more than that, since sex's re-emergence as a "new" public concern exposes failures in traditional forms of disciplinary power and the emergence of control-freedom.
Update 2
The ALP claims that it took a mandatory election filtering policy to the election in 2007 and that it is just delivering on that election committment. However, there has been a shift since what was actually proposed is different.Thuss On page 2, the document states that Labour intends to:
Provide a mandatory ‘clean feed’ internet service for all homes, schools and public computers that are used by Australian children. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will filter out content that is identified as prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). The ACMA ‘blacklist’ will be made more comprehensive to ensure that children are protected from harmful and inappropriate online material.
The word mandatory is there, but it is qualified with “for all homes, schools and public computers that are used by Australian children.” So the mandatory nature of the policy could well be interpreted as applying only to those computers being made available to children. This implies that it will not apply to those of us who live in a child-free household? So it is not mandatory for all Australians.
Secondly, on page 5, under the subheading Mandatory ISP filtering the ALP document states:
A Rudd Labor Government will require ISPs to offer a ‘clean feed’ internet service to all homes, schools and public internet points accessible by children, such as public libraries. Labor’s ISP policy will prevent Australian children from accessing any content that has been identified as prohibited by ACMA, including sites such as those containing child pornography and X-rated material. Labor will also ensure that the ACMA black list is more comprehensive. It will do so, for example, by liaising with international agencies such as Interpol, Europol, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre and ISPs to ensure that adequate online protection is provided to Australian children and families.
The word “offer” is used here in relation to internet points accessible by children. Offer implies optional in that we adults can take up the offer or not. It does not imply mandatory internet filtering for all adults in Australia.
Conroy's policy, therefore has shifted to a mandatory filtering regime for all Australians and so goes beyond protecting children from child pornography and X-rated material. The ALP is now "protecting" adults from bad things, and the rhetoric of “protecting the children” is now being used as a cover for the implementation of a censorship regime on the internet.
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Lucky I checked before I published another post on this.
ABC report
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/15/2772467.htm
350 comments and counting after 2 hours
The EFA response points out that none of the censorship or transparency concerns are addressed in the report, although the pilot wasn't designed to do that anyway.
Perfectly reasonable question raised by Robert Merkel at LP
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/12/15/net-censorship-zombie-rises-again/
Apparently Conroy shared the report and his intentions with the Australian Christian Lobby some time ago. I guess if you consult with the right people you'll always get the answers you want.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/161533,christian-lobby-buoyant-on-filtering-after-meeting-conroy.aspx