Autralian internet censorship backlash  

The SMH has a report on opposition to Australia's ludicrous internet censorship plans,. with iinet's Mike Malone dubbing the communications minister our "worst ever" and pointing out they are only participating in trials to demonstrate what an unworkable fiasco it will be if they ever try to implement it for real - Net censorship plan backlash.

As opposition grows against the Government's controversial plan to censor the internet, the head of one of Australia's largest ISPs has labelled the Communications Minister the worst we've had in the past 15 years.

Separately, in Senate question time today, Greens senator Scott Ludlam accused the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, of misleading the public by falsely claiming his mandatory censorship plan was similar to that already in place in Sweden, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.

Despite significant opposition from internet providers, consumers, engineers, network administrators and online rights activists, the Government is pressing ahead with its election promise of protecting people from unwanted material, this week calling for expressions of interests from ISPs keen to participate in live trials of the proposed internet filtering system.

Michael Malone, managing director iiNet, said he would sign up to be involved in the "ridiculous" trials, which are scheduled to commence by December 24 this year.

Optus and Telstra both said they were reviewing the Government's documentation and would then decide whether to take part.

But Malone's main purpose was to provide the Government with "hard numbers" demonstrating "how stupid it is" - specifically that the filtering system would not work, would be patently simple to bypass, would not filter peer-to-peer traffic and would significantly degrade network speeds.

"They're not listening to the experts, they're not listening to the industry, they're not listening to consumers, so perhaps some hard numbers will actually help," he said. "Every time a kid manages to get through this filter, we'll be publicising it and every time it blocks legitimate content, we'll be publicising it."

Dan Denning at The Daily Reckoning also had a few words to say about internet censorship earlier in the week, noting Australia could do with less intrusive government and a Bill of Rights to keep it in check.

--Are Gordon Brown and Barrack Obama reading from the same hymnal? Obama and his team are advocating a 'big bang' approach to their first 100 days in office. This approach uses the epic financial crisis as an excuse for the broadest expansion of government involvement in the economy and private life since LBJ's Great Society and Roosevelt's New Deal.

--What's with Obama? You mean it's not enough for him to be a secular Messiah? A kind of second coming of JFK? Apparently not. Not content with being the second coming on Earth, Obama wants to be the author of the entire Universe and become the Prime Mover in a Statist "Big Bang."

--Gordon Brown has more terrestrial ambitions. Brown is preparing to steal some of Obama's messianic thunder by laying out his vision for a Great and Just Global Society built from the ashes of the financial crisis. Speaking in London, Brow said, "The alliance between Britain and the U.S. -- and more broadly between Europe and the U.S. -- can and must provide leadership, not in order to make the rules ourselves, but to lead the global effort to build a stronger and more just international order."

--But wait, there's more.

--" Uniquely in this global age," he continued, "it is now in our power to come together so that 2008 is remembered not just for the failure of a financial crash that engulfed the world but for the resilience and optimism with which we faced the storm, endured it and prevailed."

--Delusional. But let's hear him out.

--"If we learn from our experience of turning unity of purpose into unity of action, we can together seize this moment of change in our world to create a truly global society... My message is that we must be: internationalist not protectionist; interventionist not neutral; progressive not reactive; and forward looking not frozen by events. We can seize the moment and in doing so build a truly global society."

--What is a truly global society? Does this mean we can have cocktails with Posh and Becks down at the George Public Bar on Fitzroy Street in St. Kilda? Is Putin coming over for tea? Will the U.S. soccer team win the World Cup?

--We don't know what it means, dear reader. But it doesn't sound good to us. At all. It sounds, in fact, like the financial crisis is being used at the excuse for an enormous push toward more integration of government at the international level. One world government, you might say.

--This is the most serious campaign against individual liberty in a long time. And it's just getting started. The Statists of the world (both Left and Right) will be dusting off all their favourite plans for more expansions of government power into commerce and private life. We feel compelled to mention in today because in their moral righteousness and fervour, the advocates of this huge expansion are not bothering to hide their real objectives, their motives, or their methods.

--The objective? Bigger, more intrusive government. The motive? Moral righteousness that people smarter than you know better what you should do with your money and your life. The method? Coercion, both through taxation and suppression of individual action (thought, expression, movement).

--Which brings us to Australia. A few readers have written to ask if we are aware of the internet censorship legislation being proposed by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. Yes, we are.

--The government wants to "filter out" content that is already illegal in Australia by forcing internet service providers to censor content which you can access from your computer. The original legislation would have filtered content for households and schools. The next version of it applied to all internet users, but would have allowed users to opt-out of the filter. The latest version is compulsory for everyone, everywhere, no questions asked.

--What websites would be blacklisted? Well, we asked around at the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), the agency in charge of the list, and didn't receive an answer. Is the list maintained by a person? By an algorithm? By a modern day Joe McCarthy? No answers as of yet.

--And does ISP-level filtering it even work? An in-house government trial of the filtering software showed that the filters don't prevent access to content deemed to be illegal, block content that is legal, and slow down network speeds dramatically. Based on that poor result, the government is proceeding with a live, voluntary trial conducted by real Aussie ISPs.

--Like all campaigns that take away a measure of your freedom, you're being told this is done to protect "the children." For example, Conroy told a national radio Audience that, "Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the Internet is like going down the Chinese road...If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor government is going to disagree."

--Right Minister (moron). Because so many people equate freedom of speech with child pornography. You could not possibly defend civil liberties and freedom of speech without being a pervert, a drug user, or a terrorist. Could you?

--The trouble is, there is no protection of freedom of speech at the Commonwealth level in Australia; at least none that we're aware of. According to a June 2002 research note by the Parliamentary Library in Canberra, Australia is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), passed by the U.N. in 1948.

--Article 19th of the UDHR affirms that, "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

--No specific Act of Parliament has been passed at the Commonwealth level to incorporate this article into Australian law and "no government has implemented the free speech provisions and therefore they are not enforceable by Australian courts." Why don't you get on that Malcolm Turnbull?

--In early 2006, Victoria passed a kind of Bill of Rights called the Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities which DOES include freedom of expression (see page 15). You should also note that Victoria's Act isn't like a Constitutional right to free expression. It says the right of free expression, "may be subject to lawful restrictions reasonably necessary," such as "for the protection of national security, public order, public health or public morality."

--The Australian Capital Territory passed its own Bill of Rights in 2004. Its language does not suggest that freedom of expression is proscribed by any limits at all. On page 13 it states, "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right includes the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of borders, whether orally, in writing or in print, by way of art, or in another way chosen by him or her."

--Maybe it's time the Commonwealth of Australia had a Bill of Rights. From our early investigations, we see that the subject has been debated on and off throughout Australian history. Maybe it's time for a new debate.

--The big advantage of having constitutional protection for freedom of expression is that it stands over and above common law. Public tastes and morality change with the times, and common law generally reflects these gradual changes in tastes. But certain rights ought not to be subject to the passing whims of legislators. There are very few such rights, but that's why they are enshrined and protected in a Bill of Rights.

--Constitutions and Bills of Rights do not exist to spell out what the government allows you to do as a private individual. They are not lists of legal and illegal private behaviour. Just the opposite in fact.

--The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights describe the precise limits of Federal power. They do not list what you and I can or cannot do. But they do specify acts which the government must almost always refrain from doing. They exist to define and limit government power, not to define and circumscribe individual liberty.

--Most people forget that these days because they are used to being bossed around by the government at all levels. But Bills of Rights generally prevent the government from telling people how to worship, what they can or cannot say, and who they can or cannot assemble with in public. In the U.S., it also includes the right to bear arms.

--To the extent that the Bill of Rights describes what the government can do, it's usually things the government HAS to do once it's already infringed on individual liberty. This includes a trial by jury, right to confront accusers, and the right to counsel. But these again are designed to guarantee the private individual's rights are respected by the government.

--Why the long digression into liberties, rights, and law? It seems like a timely subject these days. So many things that are described as "rights" by legislators are not rights at all, in the strictly legal sense. They are morally and politically desirable outcomes. But the government has no legal responsibility or authority to guarantee those outcomes through coercion.

--Would it be better if there was no child pornography on the Internet? Of course. Does the government have the right to try and guarantee that outcome by restricting and censoring internet access for all Australians? Maybe so.

--But if there's any decent opposition party left in Australia, perhaps it should begin asking the question and treating Australians like adults and free people, instead of children who must protected from themselves and the world at large.

The SMH has another article on the theme of freedom from endless expansion of government power - The courage of individuals is the currency of our freedom.

An individual's dissent can be the price of freedom for the rest of us. The novelist Marilynne Robinson writes: "A successful autocracy rests on the universal failure of individual courage. A democracy relies on its exercise. I think we would be wise to learn to cherish it in one another."

Individual courage is necessary for democracy because, as Lord Acton famously put it, "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely".

Absolute power is power unchecked by a free press (I mean that as shorthand for intellectual freedom), an independent judiciary, the separation of the executive government, the legislature and the law.

It is a cycle: absolute power is power unchecked by individuals who, themselves protected by the free press, the independent judiciary and the ballot box, can find the courage to say: "No - that is going too far."

Because a society is a changing, living organism, competing interests are always shifting in relation to each other, gaining or losing ground. But they do this in an environment that has laws as firm as Newton's: just as gravity makes things come down, power sucks more of itself to itself. It centralises control like a magnet pulling iron filings from every direction, like a black hole sucking matter into itself. In order to do this without protest, power must stifle dissent.

I have spent many years examining this phenomenon - the Iron Filing Manoeuvre and the courage of dissenters. I looked at it in the German Democratic Republic, where power was absolute, centralised and where speaking out against it was dangerous.

I spoke with people who disagreed profoundly with the need for other voices commenting on and limiting centralised power. These men were, unsurprisingly, members of the ruling party and its security service. They believed that they knew what the people wanted without asking them; in fact, they knew better.

They considered democratic freedoms a front for capitalists to buy access to power (control politicians) and to exploit workers. They were not entirely wrong. These are two weaknesses of democracies: think of Halliburton's links with the US Government; the ethanol producers or media tycoons in Australia; "Work Choices" and neoconservative disregard for a living wage generally.

But while the one-party dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic protected those in power in their uneasy seats, it came at a great human and economic cost, a cost that can be counted in lives ruined, people imprisoned and state bankruptcy.

Back to the SMH once again, this time for an article on rising levels of paranoia in Western societies - Paranoia on the rise, experts say. One of the key themes in Brunner's book The Shockwave Rider was the paranoia induced by asymmetric access to knowledge, which might provide one clue.

If you think they're out to get you, you're not alone.

Paranoia, once assumed to afflict only schizophrenics, may be a lot more common than previously thought.

According to British psychologist Daniel Freeman, nearly one in four Londoners regularly have paranoid thoughts. Freeman is a paranoia expert at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College and the author of a book on the subject.

Experts say there is a wide spectrum of paranoia, from the dangerous delusions that drive schizophrenics to violence, to the irrational fears many people have daily.

"We are now starting to discover that madness is human and that we need to look at normal people to understand it," said Dr Jim van Os, a professor of psychiatry at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Van Os was not connected to Freeman's studies.

Paranoia is defined as the exaggerated or unfounded fear that others are trying to hurt you. That includes thoughts that other people are trying to upset or annoy you, for example, by staring, laughing, or making unfriendly gestures.

Surveys of several thousands of people in Britain, the United States and elsewhere have found that rates of paranoia are slowly rising, although estimates of how many of us have paranoid thoughts varies widely, from five per cent to 50 per cent.

A British survey of more than 8,500 adults found that 21 per cent of people thought there had been times when others were acting against them. Another survey of about 1,000 adults in New York found that nearly 11 per cent thought other people were following or spying on them.

Dennis Combs, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas, has been studying paranoia for about a decade. When he first started conducting paranoia studies, mostly in college students, he found that about five per cent of them had paranoid thoughts. In recent years, that has tripled to about 15 per cent, he said. ...

The post-September 11 atmosphere and the war on terror also have increased levels of paranoia in the West, some experts said. "We are bombarded with information about our alert status and we're told to report suspicious-looking characters," Penn said. "That primes people to be more paranoid."

I'll close with Robert Anton Wilson, from the preface to "Prometheus Rising".

In the 1970's, I simply did not realise the extent to which the 1960's "youth revolution" had terrified our ruling Elite, or that they would try to prevent future upsurges of radical utopianism by deliberately "dumbing down" our educational system. What they have produced, the so-called Generation-X, must rank as not only the most ignorant, but also the most paranoid and depressive kids ever to infest our Republic. ...

Fortunately, this Age of Stupidity cannot last very long. Already, most people know that if you want a good TV or VCR, you buy Japanese; for a good car, Japanese or German; etc. Eventually, in order to compete, the Elite will have to allow a bit more education for American youth, before we sink full to the level of a Third World nation.

Well - you'd hope so, but once the elite itself is dumbed down and paranoid as well (cf. Dubya) it may be too late...