On recent developments, and a prospective

So, we have a woman PM. I'm not particularly impressed by that - we should have had equal representation in the Parliament thirty years ago and it's no great achievement to get a female executive now. We beat the US. Hoobloodyray.

But that she is unashamedly unmarried, and took the affirmation rather than the Anglican Oath, now that impresses me. I wonder how long it will take for Cardinal Fang Pell to declare that she is anti-Christian and communist, or something, followed by Archbishop Lapdog Jensen soon after. And she's Welsh! That has to mean something heretical.

So fine, a Labor female unreligious PM. This is what Labor should have delivered years back, and not merely because, as is the Labor way, a woman is appointed/anointed in expectation of electoral failure shortly thereafter. Once it was a progressive party, back in the 70s, for about ten minutes.

No, the real issue is whether we will see Labor resile from the regressive social policies that it has pursued cynically and in the expectation of cheap success. Obviously I mean the internet censorship issue, but more importantly, gay equality in marriage and adoption, and a reduction of government interference in personal lives. Once we hoped for liberty; now we just hope that the "security" excuse won't mean we get called sex offenders, terrorists or witches.

I weep for my country. I'd really love not to. Julia, don't disappoint me like those other messiahs.

On preventing illegal content

Stephen Collins of EFA has a nice post to follow up Scott Ludlam's excellent speech to Parliament, in which he notes that the filter will not prevent child porn, and that there are more effective ways to deal with it. Here's my one-line summary:

The mandatory filter is a way to avoid having to do anything substantive about porn, because that would take effort, money and not get politicians a public profile.

The way to deal with illegal content is to prosecute, after police investigation. If that content is overseas, then contact the host nation. We all have pretty much the same goals.

This takes money, time, personnel, and will not get headlines in the Murdoch press, but it is the only way to deal with these crimes. It is also the only way that has worked in the past. If Conroy and Rudd really want to do this properly, then appoint more police and fund the states to have more police aimed solely at this sort of crime. Prosecute these crimes. Enact sensible laws against them. And most of all, stop hiding behind the Censorship Board. In fact, I think we would as a community be a lot better off if we abolished the Censorship Board entirely. It has shown itself to be easily manipulated by both political and special interests for decades.

Australia has become one of the most draconian of all democracies in its paternalistic control over what we can and cannot do and say. I am ashamed of my country's placing style over substance and passing off responsibilities to government and bureaucracies that should be taken up by individuals.

Ludlam gets Conroy to admit the filter is useless

The money quote:

Folks, we're spending a lot of money to build a small empire for which the emperor has already declared failure; and yet he persists.

Conroy's memory lapse

Usually, when someone forgets on the stand some crucial bit of information, we call it evasion. A convenient lapse of memory has now been had by Stephen Conroy, who now says (in the Senate, no less) that he never intended to filter peer-to-peer internet traffic. Since this is how the child pornographers he is using as a convenient justification for government control over the internet in Australia will share their illegal pornography, what's the frigging point?

I don't usually quote entire articles, but this one is too good not to, from Zeropaid News:

Aussie Minister: “I Never Wanted to Filter P2P”

Written by soulxtc

Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy responds to criticisms that the proposed “mandatory voluntary” Internet filter would try to block BitTorrent and other P2P programs, though is a complete reversal from earlier statements.

Opposition to Australian Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy’s plan for a “mandatory voluntary” scheme of filtering the Internet to “protect the children” is taking another beating these days with criticism from the Green Party over his refusal to release data on what proportion of illegal net traffic the government’s filter would actually block.

In Senate Question Time last week, Greens Communications Spokesperson Senator Scott Ludlam asked Minister Conroy to what degree his plan would filter BitTorrent and P2P traffic. For after all, it was he who said last December that “technology that filters P2P and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial.”

Minister Conroy, apparently suffering from a case of amnesia, denied any pans to filter file-sharing traffic.

“As Senator Ludlam well knows, there has never been a suggestion by this government that peer-to-peer traffic would or could be blocked by our filter. It has never been suggested. So for you to continue to make the suggestion that we are attempting to do that just misleads the chamber and the Australian public, Senator Ludlam, and you know better than that. We are not attempting to suggest that the filter can capture peer-to-peer traffic,” he said.

Senator Ludlam said the Minister was either trying to hide some quiet goalpost-shifting or was simply unaware he had contradicted himself.

“Maybe the minister doesn’t read his own blog,” Senator Ludlam suggested.

He also said that if that’s the case then the whole “mandatory voluntary” scheme is more pointless than ever.

“We received another vivid demonstration yesterday of why people are right to be suspicious of this pointless waste of $44 million,” Senator Ludlam said.

“The Greens support measures that will achieve better protection for children from objectionable online material, but Minister Conroy reminded us again that the mandatory internet filtering scheme started out as ill-conceived and has just gone downhill from there.”

Stay tuned.

More tales of incompetent filtering

So, the NSW Education Department put internet filters on school computers. The outcome? Students may access porn sites, but not educational or government sites.

Lesson #1: anything administered automatically can be mistyped...

Meanwhile, gay groups are waiting to see if their [legal] sites are going to be barred. They have every right to be concerned.

Lesson # 2: If bureaucrats are the ones who choose what the people may see or do, they will blindly follow badly written guidelines.

As you were...

Rudd to lobby Dalai Lama

In news to hand, the Prime Minster, Kevin Rudd, is dropping in on the Dalai Lama to lobby for the next Panchen Lama to be an Australian. He's also visiting London to ensure that the next Archbishop of Canterbury comes from Sydney.

How to tell if your country is illiberal

When the People's Republic of China is less censorial censorious than your own country, you might be living in an unfree country.

The PRC has bowed to demands by its own users and not put the Green Dam Youth Escort internet filtering software mandatorily on every computer sold in its borders.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the Great Wall of Australia will filter out adult games, including Second Life. Even the Christians recognise this is more draconian than censorship in China. These games aren't illegal, mind, just unclassified, because there is no adult classification category in the Censorship Board scheme, and the filter will block all RC (refused classification) games irrespective of why. This includes accessing Second Life domains, as well as downloading the game, which can still legally be bought in person.

Have we had enough of teh stoopid yet?

That's not the real blacklist, but you can't see what is

Really minister? We are supposed to take your word that the leaked list on Wikileaks is not the real one because you tell us there's a different number of links on the "real" list? Why would we believe you? You have steadfastly refused to countenance any criticism and have declared opponents like me to be supporters of child pornography, just because you don't want to hear us. We should take your word for it? You are a dissembler and it seems none too bright, so forgive me if I don't think that even if you are telling the truth about what you have been told, that you have the wattage to spot when you are being misled by public servants who like the control this ill-fated legislative bastard gives them.

If you want credibility, then give an independent watchdog, with community support, access to the list and the protocols for getting sites on it and more importantly off it. Like the American balls-up, the "no fly list", the default view everyone should have is that this will also be a balls-up.

And while I'm on default opinions, why are people like me called "freedom of speech advocates" by the media? Surely that's the default view, that one has the right to state what one thinks no matter who happens to find it unpleasant? That's the ground on which democracy walks. It is people like yourself who deserve a special designation. I suggest we call you restriction of liberty advocates from now on.

A balanced view on internet safety

Here's an essay by Peter Chen at Online Opinion that gives a good summary of the issues, concerns and problems with internet filtering and safety. I recommend it.

But one thing Chen does not address that I think is crucial here is the legal principle of not punishing people for criminal acts before they are committed. By inhibiting people's rights to see what they want online, so long as it is not illegal, clean feeding is an unfortunate step towards government oversight on what we do in any respect. It sets a precedent, and such precedents are hard to eliminate once they enter the domain of legal decision making (called stari decisis under common law).

Yes, I object to the fact that clean feeds are impracticable, will degrade internet performance, and not do what they set out to do (which is protect children), but fundamentally the main reason for not adopting them is that it gives power to governments and their instruments to decide sub rosa what we can and cannot see. Suppose that the present government and all the members of the department of telecommunications are exemplary individuals who not only have our best interests at heart, but do so intelligently and effectively. Can we guarantee that the next government, or a much later bureaucracy, will consist of these people? Not at all, which is why checks and balances are a crucial aspect of democratic government.

And I do not trust this government. They have made way too many religiously-based noises about what is and is not permissible in public. This is to my mind only the thin edge of the constant presumption of religious organisations and culture that they may rightly interfere with other citizens' behaviours, whether they are of that religion or not. That the balance of power is held by a religious political candidate in the Senate is only the tip of that iceberg.

We are a secular nation! It's in our constitution. We do not arrange our public polity on the basis of what suits pastors and cardinals and imams. We do so on legal principles of liberal democracy. For this reason, people are calling for our representatives to oppose the movement coming out of Islam to protect religions against "defamation" speech. Religions have no rights to not be offended by the behaviours of those who are not in their community (and no rights to impose upon their members by legal or other force the views of the hierarchy). And the very idea of handing to potentially religiously motivated censors the power to control what we read, see and hear is just frightening.

I'm not impressed either by the constant refrain by the minister and his allies that to oppose the clean feed is to support child pornography and abuse. Of course I do not. This is exactly the argument that George Bush's administration used to take away civil rights of thousands - if you oppose us you support terrorism. One can be vehemently opposed to child abuse, and terrorism, without wanting to grant unsupervised people unfettered rights to control us. Child porn is illegal - so use the frigging laws to prosecute child pornographers. Give the police the resources they need. There are sufficient criminal investigative powers and laws under which such activities may be prosecuted - you don't need to treat us all as criminals to do so.I think the reason why Labor are so hot for the clean feed is that they really don't want to give the police the resources and to manage them. It's so much easier to simply make other people, the ISPs in this case, stop the porn. Make it their problem and it's no longer yours.

So by all means point out the practical difficulties, but even if you have the perfect means, I am not sure the ends are justified, and I certainly want judicial, community and user oversight on what gets censored and why. And I want a redress system for those incorrectly included (which must include damages - if the authorities don't have to pay for their mistakes, then they'll be a lot less careful). And I also want prosecutorial avenues for those who do abuse this system. Put all that in place, and you may convince me of the rightness of this approach. But leaving it in the hands of Labor or Conservative party hacks who have obligations to religious figures who may have helped them get into power? No way. That takes us back to the Bad Old Days of Mannix. Learn from some history...

And they will *still* shift Dexter

Freeview: More of the Same Sh#t
by DanIlic