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Australia now has Net Censorship
Posted by
Hemos
on Wed May 26, 1999 07:23 AM
from the fun-with-governments dept.
from the fun-with-governments dept.
Foley writes "The Australian Senate passed legislation today that requires ISPs to block any web site in the world that is classified as offensive by an Australian film board. The law is set to go into effect January 2000.
Check out
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Australia now has Net Censorship
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More than just that (Score:3)
Who's to say that the mining industry won't make the same move in Australia? What about the port operators (esp. after the big strikes last year)?
Before you know it, Australia will be the land of zero net usage.
Be worried. Be VERY worried. Every lobbying group you've ever heard of will be coming out of the woodwork if this legislation holds up.
Re:Legal recourse? (Bill of Rights NOT) (Score:3)
Read the technical details: how they'll do it (Score:5)
You can read a PDF transcript of the Committee minutes - the technical presentations to them are HIGHLY interesting. The most alarming is the last - or second last: the CEO of some setup called Clairview presents a new advanced "dynamic filtering" technology. Lord save us! Of course, it's supposed to be flawless like all this crap.
Anyone who can set up a service for Australians to overcome this fascism will be a hero. I suggest the url www.alston-harradine.org - that's the names of the two Senators who rammed the Bill through.
Now: the Committee PDF file you need to read is at the Australian Parliament House website at:
http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/senate/commttee/s
This is a list of files.
The actual file you want is:
Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill 1999 03/05/99 Canberra
n.b. there is an error a third of the way through the file of a lot of blank pages. Just keep scrolling.
Cheers!
What a massive shortsight... (Score:3)
I'll be checking how the people of Oz could be helped with this issue, but I hope something will be done.
Hmmm... (Score:3)
But enough with that. What we need to work on are solutions to this problem. What I think would work well is what I call a "reverse proxy."
Basically it works like this. Proxies like the Anonymizer work such that all outgoing traffic from your site seems to come from the proxy, not from you. What I propose is the reverse: a person can log into the proxy, and then all Net traffic coming in to the user appears to come from that proxy server. Front it with a clearly nonoffensive Web page (for this to work, of course, the proxy aspect of the site would have to be covert), and voila: all of your Web traffic appears to be coming from a nonoffensive site, even though it does not (which would be next to impossible to prove). Since it appears to come from a nonoffensive site, none of it is blocked.
Even better would be a "meta-reverse-proxy" which juggled a user between different proxies. That would make it harder to detect, since any site caught doing this would likely be blocked. It also would lighten the load on each individual proxy, since the load could be spread between them.
Anyone know of current software that might be able to do something like this?
Online censorship will collapse under its weight (Score:5)
Censoring web sites is pretty close to impossible. There are the obvious ones, I would expect that Hustler [hustler.com] and any page attached to that domain would be blocked for instance. What about individual pages though? I can set up a page on a free web server such as Tripod or GeoCities with objectionable content. GeoCities would eventually yank it, but Tripod seems to not care. Personal web pages with material they would find offensive probably numbers in the millions. For an ISP to selectively block these pages isn't feasible, so their only choice would be to block sites that have one or more user pages with objectionable material. I.e. block GeoCities, Tripod, AOL and a large number of other providers. Great, except for the small fraction of objectionable pages on these servers there is a large number of non-objectional pages. A few of these even have useful material.
Basically the end result would be that a site such as slashdot [slashdot.org] could be censored from all Australian internet users if it ever were to fail Australia's movie screening process. Oh yeah, there's a small box on slashdot which contains the latest image from JenniCam [jennicam.org] as well as links to Rotten.com [rotten.com] and so on.
Banning the Bible, etc... (Score:3)
As I understand, polititions are lawyers. Their friends are lawyers. Who benefits from stupid laws passed by polititions? Polititions! Even these bad ones are the experts in the field and will refer cases to friends.
When the internet exploded here in the USA, porn became controversial. A once tame internet with a few juicy pictures tucked away in the newsgroups were brought to public attention. The next thing I knew, porn was everywhere. It was popular. Every spectator trying to make a buck had to test the laws and put up a porno webpage. Porn was spammed. It was no longer hidden, but it would find you, and on a daily basis even if you just had email. All thanks to the religious and political nuts who brought this "evil" to our attention.
So, Australia is going to get a lot of porn. Most of it will be coming from within. Brace for it! You asked for it!
Legal recourse? (Score:3)
Can someone provide details on Australia's legal system? I.e. does Australia have a constitution (I know England hasn't) and a constitutional court which might provide a means of getting this law killed?
Re:Mandatory proxy or packet filter? (Score:5)
So does this mean that all .au ISPs will have to implement either a mandatory proxy server or packet filters?
Probably. The government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to remain "technology neutral" - in other words, to ignore that their proposal is unworkable and expect the ISPs to implement it anyway.
If you have a look at the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts [dcita.gov.au] web site and follow to the "Newsroom" link, you find such brilliant statements as:
This, of course, conveniently ignores that most Australian citizens don't want to be protected.
Embarrass my Government. (Score:3)
http://www.efa.org.au/Campaigns/stop.html
http://usrwww.mpx.com.au/~gths/freespeech/auban
http://usrwww.mpx.com.au/~gths/freespeech/auban
P.S. John Pilger is a moron.
It's time for a pre-emptive strike! (Score:4)
The reason why the EFF et al. were so succesful in defeating the CDA was because it was a grassroots effort to protect free speech. The problem was though was that it only happened when that free speech was already threatened.
We need to send the message to Washington now about the way we stand. We need to tell them about the true merits of the Internet that outweigh the 1% or so that consists of Anarchists' Cookbook and porno. Don't wait until some bill has been already passed, let's raise hell right now. If we don't tell them the truth, they'll get their ideas from the media.
Unworkable (Score:3)
"unworkable". I'd go so far as to say impossible. Sites that are possibly "offensive" can popup faster than an ISP, even using all their resources and time, can block it out. I feel for the Australia ISPs, they have their work cut out for them.
As for the government, they will need to patrol full time simply to check if all "naughty" sites are blocked or not (which would be quite an interesting job).
Seems to me, the Australian government has just created the biggest national waste of time and energy with one vote. Why do I have the feeling the US government will try to follow suit?
FinkPloyd
How it happened - political horse-trading (Score:3)
One independent politician holds the balance of power in Australia. The governing party recently wanted a (totally different) piece of legislation passed, and this guy's vote was the decider. To keep him sweet, they promised that they'd vote for his Internet ban later on. (Sorry the names are missing, but I just couldn't find them.) Stepping out of character for a while, these other politicians kept their word. So there you have it. It had nothing to do with the Internet; it was just politicians being what they are - evil old men so arrogant they honestly believe they know what's best for us.
Time to Turn the Web Black. Again. (Score:4)
Some useful Links:
Global Internet Liberty Campaign www.gilc.org [gilc.org]
Electonic Frontiers Australia, www.efa.org.au [efa.org.au]
and of course
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, www.eff.org [eff.org]
The Electronic Privacy Information Center [epic.org]
And here's an idea: this sounds like a PERFECT reason to boycott the Sydney 2000 Olympics. After all, it always works best to get a country by the short-and-curlies if you REALLY want its' attention. . . .
Pathetic Personal Agendas (Score:5)
Current balance of power in the Australian government is held by an independant politician, Senator Harradine. The government is currently pushing to sell of Telstra, a national telco, the sale of which is worth very large amounts of money.
Opposition to the sale of Telstra (who do ISP service stuff like Big Pond) is everywhere, and without Harradine's vote, the sale would be abandoned.
Harradine is a vocal opponent of the internet, a defender of traditional Christian values, and in many ways opposed to the principles of free speech. He has tried on many occasions to propose legislation to either prevent public access to "questionable" material, or to make it an offense to view it. Until now, his proposed legislation has always been thrown out.
Basically, it looks a whole lot like Harradine and the government got together and said "you pass my legislation and I'll pass yours."
The consultation for the feasibility of content blocking was carried out in 1 week, which is on the narrow side of legal, and could be stumbling block if the law is appealed. The legislation was passed against a national outcry from ISPs and internet users.
The law can be appealed, and I would imagine that this is pretty much underway right now. Although the law states that ISPs must block the illegal content, no suggestion is made of how to do so. It is quite possible that an ISP appealing the law could very easily say they carried out a 1 week feasibility study exceeding the government's efforts, and have found that implementing filtering would put them out of business.
One final point is that the law is effective as of 1 Jan 2000, and subject to a review that could last until 2003. Combined with the fact that it bans material that is legitimately available through other sources (video and print for example), it is more than likely to be trashed in the near future.
Re:Revolution in Australia... (Score:3)
Yes, we banned semi and automatic guns after a very bad gun masacre, and since semi automatics should have no place in hunting or protection, ban them.
On the other hand, I want my damn net porn!
Some words from an Aussie... (Score:3)
We have an idiot for a prime minister who thinks that he has a "mandate from the people" for a GST purely because he got re-elected by our stupid preferential voting system, by people who thought they were voting for indepents, when in fact most of those votes were going to one of the two major political parties. This fool now has assisted in supporting this Draconian legislation in order to gain favour with some unreasonable moral crusader whose cause it was to try to force his view of moral standards on us, simply to garner his support for the GST - which backfired because Mr Morality told him in not so many words to shove the GST up his backside.
These are the same kneejerk idiots who took away all the rights of the people to bear arms, not just for self protection, but genuine sporting purposes too. I used to do a bit of hunting now and again, but these bastards took that away from me, now they are taking away my right to see the Internet through my own eyes, not just what they want me to see, I'm sorry - but that's not good enough!
They are real heroes when it comes to bullying the average man in the street, but look how spineless they are in the world stage, they fully intend to let 2 aussies fry in Belgrade, bloody aid workers for goodness sake, on some trumped up charge of spying for the US government. We might have a fairly weak defence budget - but I would spend a couple of bucks on a bomb or two to drop on those yugo pricks for this!
And on that subject, this is the same government who is doing nothing about the filthy kosovar refugee that tried to rape a bloody aussie girl who was doing volunteer work with the refugees *we* are sheltering, feeding and clothing. That sucks, something should be done, send that filthy prick back, the others may be ok, but that mongrel doesn't deserve to be here.
Australia sucks, I fully intend to get the hell out of here ASAP, time to start looking for that elusive greencard I suspect.
Infectious regulations (Score:3)
...from a father of 2, who doesn't *want* anyone removing his children's freedom in the name of "protecting" them.
Re:Amen and Hellelujah brother! (Score:3)
Yeah. It's called parental guidance and involvement.
Technology lag (Score:3)
Of course, I'd like to know how a web site will be nominated for review, and exactly how much time the censo--I mean, film board will have to make their decision. If they're planning on reviewing the entire Web, they'd better get started now. And the manpower requirements would pretty much deplete the entire Australian legislature, including aides, security guards, secretaries and janitors.
Re:How it happened - political horse-trading (Score:5)
In the end, the balance of power was with two independent senators, the abovementioned, and another who left a major party due to fraud charges (but who was deemed to ill to face these, but somehow competent to vote for the legislation).
The situation is pretty fucked up. I think part of the problem is that most of the population simply don't understand the issues that are at stake, and the government is playing on this naivety.
The legislation was tabled very quickly with only a month for public input into a senate enquiry. There were around 104 submissions from industry and community groups, all but one coming out against the legislation. The government even ignored it's own research from the CSRIO on the issue.
It was then raced into the senate with a few ammendments, and voted in with no understanding or regard for the impact on civil liberties, or the long term economic and social implications.
As an Australian, I find this embarassing and disgusting. Depressing even.
Worse however, will be explaining to my grandkids that I was part of the generation that failed to stop this.
This is a very dark day in Australian history.
- James.
Re:Legal recourse? (Oz==democracy) (Score:4)
This bill has basically been rammed home by two politicians, the two that control the balance of power in the senate (upper house), one of these two recently brought the proposed Goods & services tax to its knees (we are all waiting to see if it gets up or finally dies or what...
It will be interseting to see how it goes...