Darkness at Noon

Senator Conroy has decided that the internet offends his sensibilities. He subsequently wants to censor filter the internet.

This is possibly the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. I’ve rung his office and said as much already and I’ll write a letter today outlining my concerns. What I thought I’d do here is a quick roundup of the issue so that you can put together a well informed letter or email as well. This is an important one.

So first up, here are his contact details:

Email: senator.conroy@aph.gov.au
Phone: (02) 6277 7480 (it’s the Parliamen house number, no one answers his local office)
Address: Suite 1B, 494 High Street
Epping Vic 3076

So what are the reasons this is a bad idea:

Censorship
I’ll let Crikey’s Bernard Keane take this one:

The Ludlam-Conroy exchange is worth examining in detail because in it Conroy showed all of the reasons why he and his Department are not to be trusted on the internet filtering issue.

You could tell Ludlam got under Conroy’s skin pretty quickly because the Minister, who normally enjoys Estimates and is never short of some banter, rapidly defaulted to his now-standard suggestion that anyone quibbling with the Government policy on regulating the internet is a paedophile.

The immediate cause was Ludlam’s insistence on asking what other countries had mandatory ISP-level internet filtering. The answer, among democracies, is zero, but clearly Conroy and his officials didn’t want to admit that. Several times Ludlam tried and each time he got the runaround. First he was disingenuously told by an official that the UK, Canada, New Zealand and the Netherlands had ISP-level filtering, which prompted Conroy to say “this is not some one-off excursion,” about his own policy.

So which countries have internet filtering at the ISP level? China, North Korea, Singapore. Those that don’t would include, well every OECD country.

False Negatives
Time and time again it has been show that the only effective method of filtering is to have a list of banned sites. Only a country like China has the resources to do this. So you base the filtering services basically on keyword searchers. This means that 10,000 of every 1,000,000 websites will be blocked.

So let’s step through this one. I’m a 40 year old woman who has just found a lump in my breast. I want advice on what to do, what support is available and to understand what other women have gone though. So I type in “breast cancer” to my search engine. How many sites will be blocked? Too many I suspect.

One size does not fit all
I live in a house without children. Should my internet be filtered in the same way that a house with a 5 year old in it should be? I really don’t like porn, but am quite interested in the issue of euthenasia. How should my internet be filtered?

Expensive
If you want to filter your own internet, please go ahead. I just don’t think I should have to pay for that.

As Greens communications spokesman Scott Ludlam notes, it will come at a huge cost to internet service providers, and who will that cost be past onto? Consumers.

It will slow the internet down
Australia already has sub-par internet access. What, pray tell, do you think will happen if you have to apply a filter to every bit of data that is transmitted to your computer? I suspect it will slow it down a touch.

Australia already lags behind the rest of the world in terms of internet speeds. Compared to Japan and South Korea we are a back water shanty town that are lucky to have a telephone.

I want fast internet. I want what that can facilitate in terms of my communication, online business and media on demand:

The industry says mandatory filtering by internet service providers – as distinct from a “net nanny” that families can put on their own computers – will slow internet speeds significantly.

And again:

A recent ACMA report on ISP filtering products showed that all of the products tested degraded Internet performance, with two of them reducing speed by more than 75 per cent. One filter reduced network speed by only 2 per cent, but it was one of the least accurate at identifying inappropriate and illegal websites. It also mistakenly blocked many innocent sites. The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, seemed oblivious to this and hailed the trial a success.

This has never been show to work. If you are dead set on looking at kiddie porn there are always ways around these things.

Please give me a break, don’t abuse my civil liberties, stop being a nanny state and just drop this absurd idea.

I’ll leave you with this quote as it seems to get to the heart of it:

…experts say will break the internet while doing little to stop people from accessing illegal material such as child pornography.

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If you would like a copy please email centre@democracyandjustice.org and ask for our EFT details.

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The human rights Arts and Film Festival has contacted the Center asking us to give them a plug. it looks like a great program, one worth checking out.

Australia’s freshest and most innovative festival is only weeks away with a stellar program of film, art, music, speakers, forums and action hubs that will challenge, touch and inspire audiences from all walks of life.

From the riotous streets of 1960s Chicago, to discovering the true cost of bling in Africa with Kanye West; from inside the cells of a Burmese artist to the famous theorems of an indigenous Sigmund Freud, HRAFF’s program is both enriching and entertaining.

Featuring a diverse collection of world music including local hip-hop duo Diafrix and the multi-DJ collaborative outfit Uber Lingua, as well as special guests Corinne Grant, Martin Dingle Wall and Rev Tim Costello.

HRAFF’s Arts Exhibition runs from 12-30th November at Carlton Studios, Bourke St Melbourne.

HRAFF’s Film Screenings and Music runs from 13th – 23rd at Kino Cinemas and Red Violin.

Tickets on sale now! Purchase online at www.hraff.org.au or by phone 03 8352 4434.

The festival is also touring other major Australian cities

• Canberra – November 20th to 22nd at the ANU Finkel Theatre
• Perth – November 28th to 29th at the Film and Television Institute
• Sydney – December 4th to 7th at the Chauvel Cinema
• Brisbane – March 6th to 7th 2009 at the Powerhouse

www.hraff.org.au.

Slashdot and Techcrunch both have posts about Microsoft’s venture into “cloud computing” with Windows Azure.

I like the idea of cloud computing. If we get to the point were highend image and video manipulation programs are available on a virtual desktop that’s an exciting thing. All you need to do is log onto a website and there’s your own personalised computer.

But I just don’t trust Microsoft. That aside, I don’t think anyone should trust anyone with that much information.

Richard Stallman noted in an interview with the Guardian recently:

…cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

It is, as one would expect, genius on behalf of Microsoft. You can’t pirate cloud computing, and if every document you have ever used on a computer is accessible on a subscription basis, you’ll be pretty keen to pay that subscription every year.

There is a huge amount of potential for violations of your privacy.

But more importantly, software should be free. Microsoft’s are pretty keen to ensure that it will never be.

Global Trade Watch have caught onto this blog thing and started it’s own blog: Rethinking Globalisation. Full of all the latest trade related news, it’s worth popping in and having a look.

I know I’ve added it to my RSS feeds.

Comments should be back on now. Hopefully without a corresponding barrage of spam.

ACDJ have just put out the following media release after this article in The Age this morning.

The Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice today condemned the infiltration of activist groups by the Victorian Police saying that it will negatively impact the democratic process.

“Victoria Police’s actions are an abuse of civil liberties and negatively impact on our democracy,” ACDJ director Hammy Goonan today. “Healthy democracies have high levels of participation. When the Police start infiltrating the peaceful activist community people start to think twice about their participation – I don’t think anyone feels comfortable about the police collecting information on them.”

While the ACDJ was not one of the groups infiltrated, it had close ties with some of the groups that were, including the organising committee for the annual Palm Sunday rallies that the ACDJ endorsed every year.

“One can only assume that these actions are being carried out because there is some suspicion that the activists concerned are criminals or terrorists. Is that what the Victorian Police think of people that disagree with the government? It’s ridiculous that this can happen in present day Australia,” said Mr Goonan.

The ACDJ has also raised concerns about the 2006 amendment of the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act which prevents those being monitored from getting access to the information gathered about them.

“Democracy has two key elements, participation and access. Police infiltration will mean that concerned citizens are more reluctant to participate. The amendment of the FoI Act means the Australian populous has less access to information that is vital to the decision making process.”

The Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice calls for an immediate halt to this practice and for the information collected on these peaceful activists to be released.

From the Australian:

NSW secondary school students could be issued with $56 million worth of Linux-based laptops as part of Kevin Rudd’s digital education revolution.

The state wants government secondary school students to tote around computers built specifically for the education market.

Jim McAlpine, NSW Secondary Principals’ Council president, said sellers could look at offering non-proprietary software for the laptops, such as Edubuntu, the education version of popular Linux distribution Ubuntu.

“The laptops can run on an open source operating system with a suite of open source applications like those packaged under Edubuntu.

“This would include Open Office for productivity software, Gimp for picture editing and the Firefox internet browser.

“Students would also have access to thousands of other open source educational programs,” Mr McAlpine said in briefing papers sent to NSW Labor Party politicians and school principals two weeks ago.

A Microsoft Australia spokesperson said the company had not seen the document and could not comment.

Open source software seller Red Hat is deeply entrenched in the NSW government system but refuses to say which agencies it services. The company has been lobbying government officials at both state and federal levels on the benefits of open-source software.

In his first trip to Australia, Red Hat global chief executive Jim Whitehurst said he would be meeting federal government officials in Canberra, and other key customers.

“We’re seeing a lot more engagement across the commercial and government sectors,” he said.

“IT budgets will be constrained due to the financial crisis but that is the very reason to look at a more affordable way of doing things and ditch the proprietary way.”

Hey kids, apologies but I’ve had to turn comments off after a bit of a spam explosion.

I’ll rectify this in the next few days and turn them back on.

In the 1993 recession we had to have, Keating went to great lengths to maintain a budget surplus.

In the current financial crisis Rudd has come out and been decisive. This is an economic emergency so we must immediately spend half the projected budget surplus to prop up the economy. Sounds like a good idea to me. But (and I say this strictly as a non-economist) isn’t this a bit Keynesian? Not a bad thing if it is.

On a related note, it seems to me like Rudd and Swann are loving this. The economic meltdown is to Rudd what the war on terror was to Howard. Historically, people vote Labor when they aren’t too worried about national security or the economy. People vote Liberal when they are.

As Rudd shines, is there evidence of this pattern finally coming to an end?