The road to hell

In the final chapter of Terry Pratchett's Eric, the wizard Rincewind and the boy Eric are climbing out of hell on steep steps.

He looked down at the broad steps they were climbing. They were something of a novelty; each one was built out of large stone letters. The one he was just stepping onto, for example, read: I Meant It For The Best.

The next one was: I Thought You'd Like It.

Eric was standing on: For The Sake Of The Children.

"Weird, isn't it?" he said. "Why do it like this?"

"I think they're meant to be good intentions," said Rincewind. This was meant to be a road to Hell, and demons were, after all, traditionalists.

Pay attention to the Prophet here: For The Sake Of The Children is a good intention. And it leads to hell.

The minister in the UK who is the equivalent of Conroy in Australia, Andy Burnham, has proposed a mandatory age rating of websites. He wants the US administration to cooperate. His next comment is important, for it shows the "For The Sake Of The Children in all its glory:

“If you look back at the people who created the Internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that governments couldn't reach,” he said. "I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now.”

Governments have always hated the free exchange of ideas outside their control, and European governments more than most have a history of restricting the right of free expression. Sure, some people express things that are malign and illegal. When they do, they should be prosecuted under the law. But it is nobody's right to tell me what I may or may not say or think, and it is no government's right to evaluate in private what I say and determine if I have the right to say it. Even if the present party in power is benign and well intentioned (ahem), which is always a very bad assumption, what is to keep the next one from misusing this power to control speech? Have we learned nothing from the past two centuries?

In particular we should be careful of the For The Sake Of The Children ploy. It leads to witchhunts where 19 year olds who sleep with 17 year olds get listed for life as pedophiles and sexual offenders. It leads to censorship of anything that upsets influential religious figures. And it leads to a loss of freedom. Others overseas agree.

Peer to peer next. After that, email?

Conroy has finally responded to criticisms that URL filtering is a fail by saying "Well, we'll also filter peer to peer". But how? What filters can tell if child p-rn is being sent across the intertubes? Only a human can tell, which suggests a whole department of internet censors. Is anyone feeling 1984ish yet? Will they next read all our emails? I have a hypothesis: this isn't about p-rn. It's not about illegal sites. This is about RIAA copyright. They're setting up the machinery to look for copyright theft through a backdoor, and without anyone overseeing them.

In the meantime, the opposition has forced the admission there is a report to the previous government that argued that filtering is a flawed strategy. Gosh. Apparently we of the general public, you know, the users of the internet, are not worthy to read it.

Earlier this morning, Australia's Shadow Minister for Communications, Senator Nick Minchin, put out a release demanding that "Communications Minister Stephen Conroy should today publicly release an expert study, which he has kept buried since February, and is reportedly damning of the type of Internet Service Provider (ISP) level filtering being proposed by [the Federal] Labor [Government]."

What's more, the report highlights some of the egregious problems with filtering.

Senator Minchin's statement noted that the report said "centralised mandatory filtering will "significantly slow Internet speeds", inadvertently block acceptable content and be ineffective against peer-to-peer file sharing networks, chat rooms, email and instant messaging."

In addition, the report said: "entire user-generated content sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia could be blocked because of a single suspect posting."

We have seen hints of this around the world already, with Wikipedia being blocked in Turkey for a short while, and so on.

And just so nobody thinks I am pro-Coalition, the report that said nobody was being political in the unfounded charging and expulsion of Haneef by minister Kevin Andrews, AFP Chief Mick Keelty and the rest of the "Terrorised". Bullshit. It was political - it was all about race. Andrews and Keelty are racially prejudiced against Muslims and non-European foreigners, or nothing like this would ever have occurred. They allowed their prejudice to override evidence and judgement. Welcome to the war on terror, folks.

The lies of the internet censors: Your. Filter. Won't. Work.

The title is the title of a nice essay at Crikey. I especially like this:

Bernadette McMenamin of ChildWise, you've crossed the line, defaming everyone who’s protested the government’s plans. "Most of these people are not fully aware of the facts and secondly, those who are aware are, in effect, advocating child p-rnography," you said. How dare you!

Ms McMenamin, to really stop child abuse we need to spend our resources efficiently. Let's run through it one more time. And let's skip those hysterical, made-up "statistics" you still peddle. Child abuse is bad enough without heading into your paranoid fantasyland.

Kiddie-p-rn is hard to find. As Inspector John Rouse, former head of Queensland Police's Taskforce Argos told the authors of The Porn Report, "the chances of stumbling across this material… are minimal as it isn’t really distributed on web pages." P-dophiles use peer-to-peer software and, as Crikey reported six months ago, none of the filters can deal with P2P. The filter will not work. The. Filter. Will. Not. Work.

Catholics, on the other hand, really like the filtering scheme. So do the major political parties. Can't imagine why - and I can only guess what they will want to be filtered next.

As ITWire says, it's time for a great debate. Now, not after it's in place. In the meantime, iiNet's defence of the suit brought against it for not taking action against its users who had been accused of copyright infringement proceeds. It seems to me that they did the right thing, and if the laws say they didn't, the laws are wrong. Overuse of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act by aggressive corporations and interests are rife, with people being taken down just on the sayso of an accuser. iiNet passed on the complaints to the police, and in the absence of action by them, they shouldn't have acted. This case needs to be settled the right way to set a precedent.

Why copyright is censorship

Here's an excellent discussion by Lawrence Lessig on the creeping nature of regulation through copyright. Quite apart from anything else it's an amazing use of presentation software. Sure, it's 2002, but things have only got worse...

No shit?

Here's an article, by MSN no less, that explains the problems with broad filtering. A fellow named Herman Libshitz can't get an email account from Verizon because his name contains "shit". Residents of Scunthorpe in the UK apparently have similar problems. God only knows what the residents of Testiclebreastpenisvaginaville can do...

Rudd does too little on climate change

I received this from GetUp today. I wonder if the politicians recognise that no amount of economic manoeuvring or political RealPolitik will avoid the laws of nature? If we do too little, then our children - not even our grandchildren but the very next generation - will suffer and badly. The ALP (sorry, the Clean Feed Censorship Party) is starting to look like More of the Very Same... again.

I'm writing from Canberra with an urgent message. I've just finished reading an advance copy of the Government's White Paper on climate change. They aim to reduce carbon pollution by only 5% by 2020, with an option to go to only 15% if the rest of the world drags us there.

A 5-15% target means Australia is aiming for a global deal so weak scientists predict it will destroy the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu and the Murray Darling Basin. The window is still open, however, for Australia to become a world leader on climate solutions - if we demand it.

Many Australians voted for change at the last election on the promise of strong action to solve climate change. Kevin Rudd has today failed the mandate he was given to act; but we as a community can still show him that action to combat climate change is non-negotiable.

Since the Government isn't listening to your concerns about climate change, let's translate it into the language they will listen to: votes. So we're asking the entire GetUp community:

Regardless of who you traditionally support, does today's announcement make you less likely to vote for the ALP at the next election?

Yes

No

The PM has said he'll be doing some holiday reading; so we'll collate the results and make sure they're on the desks of every member of the Government before Christmas. Who knows how weak the targets would have been without your efforts so far, but we know 2009 will take a renewed effort - beginning with the results of this poll.

Here in Parliament House, there's a feeling the importance of this decision will be lost in the distraction of the holiday season. That's why we think the best Christmas present we can give the Government is a reminder of the importance of strong climate change action.

Thanks for all that you do, Simon Sheikh GetUp National Director

PS - We're translating community concern about climate change into the language all politicians speak: votes. Tell us: Regardless of who you traditionally support, does today's announcement make you less likely to vote for the ALP at the next election - Yes or No?

Latest bits on the Clean Feed

I have an infected foot, and couldn't attend the protest yesterday. If anyone has pics and info (for any city) let me know. Late note: APC has an article with pics of the Sydney event here.

The New York Times is now reporting the Clean Feed proposal. A PC World blogger has attacked it here. Blog Critics blogger Jonathon Scanlan has a discussion on the feed here.

Greg Laden has a discussion of the subjective nature of the filtering criteria in general, not just in Australia. The problem seems to be wider than just Aus: lawmakers are asking the FCC not to filter a proposed free internet network. British and German ISPs filtered links to Wikipedia because they pre-emptively decided that the content was child pornography, making it hard for Wiki to filter trolls and hackers.