Darkness at Noon

As most readers will no doubt be aware, the Federal Government, will introduce legislation into parliament early this year which will make ISP level filtering of the internet mandatory. The filter will block any material rated RC (refused classification).

The details of the way this will work are still sketchy, but on basic principle, the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice oppose the filtering of the internet. Our concerns are that, while the government assures us that it will not use the filter to block forms of political expression, history tells us that there will always be some sort of ‘creep’ with legislation like this. We also don’t have this guarantee from future governments (because that would be impossible). The filter will do nothing to stop the spread of child pornography which is supposedly the purpose of the filter. Finally, the way the debate has been framed to date gives concerned parents who are not as familiar with the goings on of the internet the false impression that their children are regularly stumbling upon highly objectionable imagery when the rest of us know this just isn’t true.

Electronic Frontiers Australia are doing a fantastic job to raise awareness of the issue and fight against it.

They have launched an online petition which I’d urge all of you to sign. It can be found here.

The internet has thrived because it is so open. Let’s keep it that way.

So Google have decided that they will no longer censor Google.cn. Hurray!!! To hell with censorship, to hell with these limits to freedom of speech and so on. Don’t you just hate Chinese human rights violations!
I hate Chinese human rights violations. I also hate Australian human rights violations. One thing I like though, is my privacy.

Reporting on Google’s decision to stop censoring Google.cn, the ABC reported:

Google said it detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on its corporate infrastructure in mid-December that resulted in the theft of intellectual property.

[Google chief legal officer] Mr Drummond says evidence indicated the attackers were trying to get access to email accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Now firstly, it is noteworthy that your GMail account is, to Google, their ‘intellectual property’. Legally, I get that. Intellectually I struggle with it.

Secondly though, Google knows a LOT about you. Where you eat, what books you read, who your friends are and your political allegiances. It knows your search history, probably has a fair idea of where you live and therefore has a picture of your house with your car out the front. Now Google isn’t the only organisation that can do that, but, other than ASIO, it is probably the only organisation that could cross-reference all that information. And all that is without even beginning to think about what Google might know about you if you are using Google Docs.

Google’s business model is built around trust and it doesn’t seem to be in short supply. As a result, there are probably few organisations that will protect your privacy with more vigilance than they will.

But at the end of the day, the ability for Google to protect your privacy has two vulnerabilities. Firstly, all its data is necessarily stored online making it vulnerable to a cyber attack as we have seen, this time in the case of the Chinese Government launching an attack. The other is that it is a legally incorporated entity with the associated obligations.

Do you remember the case of model Liskula Cohen? She took legal action against Google for hosting a blog called Skanks in NYC on Blogger which gave her the unenviable title of “Skankiest in NYC”. The blog was anonymous so a court ruled that it was reasonable for Cohen to sue the author for defamation and forced Google to reveal the identity of the blogger.

I am a staunch believer in privacy and think that it is an important ingredient for human rights – perhaps more so than censorship. So before we get on the “Google is championing human rights” bandwagon, let’s take a moment to reflect on the risk Google represents to our privacy and consider just how much trust we have placed in their ability to protect that privacy.

Given our Lobbyocracy campaign, I guess I can’t go without commenting on Rudd’s back-down. Problem is, what’s to say?

The proposed changes were pissweek and would have had little to know impact on donations to political parties, but now any additional levels of transparency will also go by the wayside.

I know the Centre put a lot of work into a submission to the Green Paper on electoral reform and I was sure Falkner was genuinely committed to reform. Whether or not Ludwig taking over from Falkner when Falkner moved to Defence had any impact is impossible to say.

It’s also not surprising that it would appear that it is Victorian Labor that has kicked up a fuss give Victoria has the worst record in the country when it comes to this sort of thing.

*sigh*

The report on the internet filter trial has finally been released (see here). The trial has been deemed a success as it had “negligible impact on internet speed”. However much remains to be seen.

Poor Report
As the EFA have noted:

“There are few surprises in this document,” said EFA spokesperson Colin Jacobs. “Given the pilot’s modest goals, it was designed from the beginning to pass. Although it may address some technical issues, what it leaves out is far more important – exactly what will be blocked, who will decide, and why is it being attempted in the first place?”

No appeal mechanism
The filter is based on a ‘black-list’ – a list of websites the Government (or someone else?) considers to be inappropriate for the eyes of Australians. Of course there are things that we shouldn’t be seeing, I don’t buy the ‘I’m an adult and I should decide what I view’ argument. The reality is that there is a market for child pornography so child pornography will always be made and that is a problem. But it’s not child porn that I’m worried about when it comes to this filter. What worries me is who decides what is banned filtered. Instructions on ‘illegal’ activities will be filtered, but lots of things are illegal, including civil disobedience so at what stage will instructions on protesting and direct action be filtered. And if you do find that your site has been filtered, what can you do about it?

What if I put up a post detailing how to circumvent the filter (which the report concedes is relatively straight forward)? What if you could route around your ISP? Not hard to do and all the information is in the public domain (really all you need to do is run Linux).

It will do nothing to stop child pornography
Of the child porn circulating on the internet at the moment very little of it is distributed via websites. Bit torrents, email accounts and so on are much stealthier ways to distribute and collect illegal material.

Hetrocentric
Essentially what will be filtered will be decided by someone’s sense of morality. I’m yet to come across a situation where a top-down sense of morality has not been hetrocentric. (Male) Gay porn will be over represented in the black list, you can guarantee. So will BSDM. BSDM may well be a fine line from time to time but it is also a legitimate expression of sexuality.

I think people have a right to choose when it comes to their sexuality and their expression of that sexuality. There are lines of course, that expression shouldn’t limit the liberty of others, but short of that, who am I to tell anyone who they have sex with or how they have sex (and whether they decide to film it or not).

(As an aside, I actually have real problems with porn, but I have much bigger problems with hetrocentric world views.)

RC is NOT illegal
As Conroy’s presser states:

“RC-rated material includes child sex abuse content, bestiality, sexual violence including rape, and the detailed instruction of crime or drug use. Under the National Classification Scheme and related enforcement legislation it is already illegal to distribute, sell or make available for hire RC-rated films, computer games and publications.”

However, it is NOT illegal to view. Not sure what the laws are around the importation of RC material but I know that you would get away with it. Moreover, you can by RC material from just about any Adult Book Shop. It just isn’t policed.

Slippery slope
Legislation like this rarely stays put. There is nearly always some ‘creep’ in terms of what is filtered and you can be sure that it will be used for political gain at some stage – history teaches us this.

All civil liberties need to be defended on principle. As soon as you start allowing some civil liberties to go by the wayside, others will follow. It’s the same with the intervention in the Northern Territory, the ‘anti-sedition’ laws and so on. ‘Anti-sedition’ laws were designed for terrorists but used on activists.

The line between terrorist and activist is often quite grey, Nelson Mandela is the classic example of someone who was an activist that was considered a terrorist by most western countries.

This just isn’t good enough. Stand up and fight this one (or at least send Conroy an email…)

I just sent the following email to Rob Hulls, John Brumby and my local members through the Your Voice in House Site (www.yourvoiceinhouse.org.au):

Dear Representatives,

I write to you to raise my concerns about the provision of police data on protesters to private corporations.

This is both a breach of any reasonable sense of privacy and our civil liberties.

I hope the Victorian Government shares my view that protest is a vital form of expression in any democracy. However, action such as this will reduce the number of people actively participating in the democratic process through protest and Victoria will be poorer for it.

Moreover, the potential for abuse of this information is far too high. We cannot have a situation where protesters face intimidation due to their political views and providing companies with these sorts of details opens up that possibility.

For the sake of a healthy democracy in Victoria, I urge you to call an immediate halt to this practice.

Regards,

Hammy Goonan

I encourage you to do the same – please feel free to use this text.

Kenneth Davidson writes in today’s Age:

The Rudd Government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS) is a thoroughly compromised version of an emissions trading scheme (ETS). It deserves to be rejected in the Senate even if it requires an unholy alliance between the Greens and the climate change deniers in the Coalition parties.

I honestly have no idea what I would do if I were currently sitting in the Senate chambers (for any party).

There is no doubt that Davidson is right – the CPRS is a joke – and to add weight to that, he quotes extensively from a report by Friends of the Earth who always do a fantastic job. So is it better to have a bad mechanism in place or no mechanism at all?

But if this is the best we can do in Australia, I can only assume that other countries are going through the same sorts of debates and, thanks to the structures that our global economy is built on, it is little wonder that there just isn’t the political will to get an effective Emissions Trading Scheme (in terms of genuine reductions in carbon emissions) of any form up.

The coalition are concerned that if Australia were to get on with the business of building a post-carbon economy that no one else would follow suite and we would lose any competitive advantages we may already have. Of course the flip side of that argument is that it would position us ahead of the pack so that when everyone did start to catch up we would be in a highly advantageous position.

So in the lead up to Copenhagen, I’m astonished that not one country can really stand up an say, “We have already reduced our carbon emissions to 20% below 1990 levels and are on track to be carbon neutral but 2020″. A lot of countries are doing a lot more than Australia, but no one can really stand up and say “we’ve done it”.

Why?

So, Murdoch is upset because Google is ’stealing’ ‘his’ content. It just defies belief. Presumably he is a man of at least a modest intellect, but he still can’t grasp some pretty basic concepts.

Google is sending content to New Ltd websites which is surely good for News Limited. I read somewhere that The Age now earns more revenue from its online advertising than it’s print advertising (please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong) – presumable the figures aren’t too different for New Ltd. So surely you want to utilise this revenue stream and have more people visit your site? No, says Rupert, that’s stealing!

So to combat this, News Ltd is teaming up with Microsoft (has there ever been a less holy alliance of copyright evangelists?) to de-indexing New Ltd websites from Google and include them in Bing instead – presumably at a not quite so small fee.

Two things come to mind. Firstly, go right ahead, you’re shooting yourself in the foot, I will never use Bing and it’s pretty rare for me to look at a New Ltd site and this move is making both less likely. Secondly, isn’t there some Antitrust/Competition Law implications to this? Doesn’t it massively restrict a competitive environment? Could someone let me know?

I’m about to lose all faith in the Obama administration – not sure if I’m surprised it took this long or not.

Boing Boing has pointed out that “internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad.”

The Treaty would place a strong emphasis on ISPs playing police, even on user generated content, which would pretty well kill sites like You Tube and Flickr as monitoring this information is simply too resource intensive.

It would see people’s internet being switched off if they were caught infringing copyright and enforce “take-down-notice” arrangements in the Treaty.

Michael Geist has a more detailed breakdown. I have no doubt that Australia will sign up to this treaty which is just madness.

If only we would ignore treaties like this the way we ignore other treaties that deal with human rights and refugees.

Quick hat tip to this Monbiot piece:

A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world’s population growth and just 2.4% of the growth in CO2. North America turned out 4% of the extra people, but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three per cent of the world’s population growth happened in places with very low emissions.

Even this does not capture it. The paper points out that around one sixth of the world’s population is so poor that it produces no significant emissions at all. This is also the group whose growth rate is likely to be highest. Households in India earning less than 3,000 rupees a month use a fifth of the electricity per head and one seventh of the transport fuel of households earning Rs30,000 or more. Street sleepers use almost nothing. Those who live by processing waste (a large part of the urban underclass) often save more greenhouse gases than they produce.

Many of the emissions for which poorer countries are blamed should in fairness belong to us. Gas flaring by companies exporting oil from Nigeria, for example, has produced more greenhouse gases than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa put together. Even deforestation in poor countries is driven mostly by commercial operations delivering timber, meat and animal feed to rich consumers. The rural poor do far less harm.

The sea is already rising at an increasing rate because of climate change.

Scientists are predicting seas will rise globally by more than a metre by the end of this century, and perhaps much more. For example, melting of the Greenland ice sheet is accelerating, it contains the equivalent of about 7 metres of sea-level rise. Around the world many thousands of communities will be lost, millions of people will be displaced, and the map of the continents will be changed forever.

In early summer, we are planning to walk the eastern side of Port Phillip Bay, to highlight the impacts of sea level rise on people, communities and landscapes along the way. We will leave Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula, and head north along the coast, marking the one metre level where we can with a simple marker (a stick with piece of blue ribbon).

We aim to walk between 15 and 20 kilometres a day, and we welcome local people and organisations to join us for sections of the walk. We will hold a number of public forums on the way (possibly one in the southern Peninsula, one in Frankston, one in St Kilda). We aim to finish the walk at Port Melbourne, where we will hold a press conference on the morning of friday Nov 27.

Early next year the walk will continue along the western side of the Bay.

During the walk, we will collect still images and video grabs of people, asking them to explain their reaction to climate change and what they want to see the state and federal governments do to respond, including Kevin Rudd at Copenhagen. We will also ask people to talk about where they live and what sea level rise would mean for them. We will do daily video and written updates on our website so people can follow the walk. We also expect that a range of local environmental issues will emerge and be featured on the website. The site will also contain substantial background materials on sea level rise and Port Phillip Bay.

The walk will finish shortly before the international climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. While walking, we will encourage people to sign our ‘demand climate justice’ postcards, which call on the Australian government to show leadership at Copenhagen. We are urging the government to unconditionally commit Australia to a minimum of 40% cuts in emissions by 2020 and a global target of well below 350 ppm of carbon dioxide-equivalent.

The walk has been initiated by Friends of the Earth Melbourne in partnership with the Victorian Climate Action Centre.

More info here: http://www.melbourne.foe.org.au/?q=node/576

There will be a stand-alone website operating here soon:

www.portphilliprising.org