Newton zings Conroy over claims that Internet filter was never going to be the complete answer to Net nasties

Ah, yes: "Not a silver bullet," which is politician-talk for "We know this won't work but we're going to do it anyway."

"The rest of the policy is largely ignored by those who oppose it" because if you take the "clean feed" out of the ALP's (ridiculously-named) Cyber Safety policy you end up with something that's largely supportable.

But even there the Minister isn't quite on-point, because he misses the fact that some of us actually have spent time talking about other parts of the Government's policy. For example, where he points out that his policy includes "$49 million for an additional 91 Australian Federal Police officers for the Child Protection Unit," some of us have made hay about how that's actually a budget cut, given that the previous Government committed nearly $3 million more for staff that'd have started work an entire year earlier. Rudd's razor-gang cut it back and delayed it, yet now Conroy portrays the reductions as some kind of triumph.

Oh well. If he wants to draw attention to it that's his loss.

The other thing the Minister has defended in this article is the use of the Refused Classification category for a mechanism to ban content for adults.

Despite his contentions in this article, the Minister knows that RC content has never been illegal.

Read the rest in Crikey comments

Censoring the Internet - an Adelaide LOL

 

If someone's on the Internet reading and commenting, what on earth makes Atkinson think that bloggers living in other states and publishing from international platforms are going to obey his attempts to gag debate.

He needs to detach himself from Conroy's teat!

SOUTH Australia has become one of the few states in the world to censor the internet under laws created by Attorney-General Michael Atkinson.

The new law, which came into force on January 6, requires internet bloggers, and anyone making a comment on next month's state election, to publish their real name and postcode when commenting on the poll.

The law will affect anyone posting a comment on an election story on The Advertiser's AdelaideNow website, as well as other news sites such as The Punch, the ABC's The Drum and Fairfax newspapers' National Times site.

It also appears to apply to election comment made on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The law, which was pushed through last year as part of a raft of amendments to the Electoral Act and supported by the Liberal Party, also requires media organisations to keep a person's real name and full address on file for six months, and they face fines of $5000 if they do not hand over this information to the Electoral Commissioner.

The Right to Know Coalition, made up of Australia's major media outlets including News Limited, publisher of The Advertiser , has called the new laws "draconian".

"This is one of the most troubling erosions of the right to free speech in Australia for many years," Right to Know spokeswoman Creina Chapman said.

BEAT THE CENSOR: Have your say now. Normal moderation rules apply - until the writs for the March 20 election are issued.

 

NZ Internet peak body shows the good sense which Rudd & Conroy lack

InternetNZ rejects centrally operated filtering for New Zealand

InternetNZ has today released a position paper that responds to the development by the Department of Internal Affairs of the “Digital Child Exploitation Filtering System”.
The position paper rejects centralised filtering as an acceptable approach for New Zealand to take. It sets out the basis for this position, and calls on the Department to conduct a thorough study of the extent of access of child abuse material on the Internet and the best ways of addressing it.
“InternetNZ supports a safe environment for people online, and absolutely deplores the availability and use of child abuse material,” says InternetNZ Policy Director Jordan Carter.
“However, a government filtering system, centrally operated, is not the answer. It risks leaving parents feeling that the Government is providing a safe environment, but it cannot deliver on that promise. The filter would only help at the margin, and child abuse material would still be available on the Internet.
“The filter would disrupt the end-to-end connectivity that has made the Internet the useful tool it is today. It creates some confidentiality concerns, and is not subject to all the usual lawful checks and balances that apply to all other parts of New Zealand’s censorship regime.”Besides studying the scale of the problem, the preferred approach New Zealand needs to take is a proactive one. People need to understand the risks of such material, and they need to be made aware of things that they can do to avoid it.
“Filtering solutions chosen by individuals and applied to their computers is a good option. A centralised, government scheme is not,” concludes Carter.
InternetNZ January 28, 2010

Have you noticed how often Stephen Conroy mentions bestiality?

 

Almost every time the Australian Communications Minister opens his mouth on censoring the Internet he mentions bestiality. It's almost an obsession with him. He's also widened his plea to not just thinking of the children but protecting adults from Teh Evilz. Is Stephen Conroy really concerned about what we might (ahem) 'accidentally' see on the world wide web or is he reflecting his own fears and dark desires.

Furry friends against Internet filtering

I found a blogging moggy over at North Coast Voices who objects to the Labor Government's Internet censorship plan.

"A Grrr at Kevin Rudd musing: Even Toovey the Wonder-Dog blacked out his website on 26 January 2010 in protest at Rudd's plan to censor the Internet in Australia. Next furry friend to see this man should give him a sharp nip on the ankle (I'm looking your way Jasper & Abby)."

Now that's a seriously political feline. ;-D

This is Toovey the protesting mutt ->

Get your censorship question for Kevin Rudd into ABC TV Q&A now!

Kevin Rudd special

Q&A returns in 2010 at the top of the week – 9.30 every Monday night. To celebrate we'll kick into 2010 with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd joining Tony Jones and 200 young Australians for a live broadcast from Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House. That's Monday 8 February at 9.30pm on ABC1. Don't miss it!

Register to be part of the Q&A audience in 2010. You can also ask the PM a written or video question, or send us a video mashup.

Jacobs cuts through Conroy's dishonest spin on Internet censorship

Colin Jacobs of Electronic Frontiers Australia writing in today's Crikey dismantles the hypocrisy of the Australian Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy:

The debate over internet censorship has well and truly moved to the global centre stage, with the US last week drawing a line in the sand and declaring itself the champion of open access. Coming in the wake of Chinese cyber attacks against Google and dozens of other US companies, the new approach was outlined last week in a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who declared the free access to information online as critical a human right as the freedom of assembly or the right to publish.

Although barely mentioning China, the speech has roused considerable ire in Beijing. It's not just China that is experimenting with internet censorship, however. This speech couldn't have come at a worse time for the Rudd government, with its mandatory filtering policy set to come before Parliament early this year. Any government would want to be seen on the side of freedom and democracy, but elevating uncensored internet access to a fundamental right is clearly problematic in the present circumstances.

It was therefore not surprising to see that the government has endorsed the Clinton doctrine, but it has done so in such an ironic and equivocal way as to elicit a wince or two when reading it.

In a media release titled "Rudd Government welcomes Secretary Clinton's comments on the internet", Senator Stephen Conroy spent the first half on the non-sequitur of the National Broadband Network, and the second half justifying their mandatory filtering policy. Beginning with "The Rudd government also agrees with Secretary Clinton's observation that 'all societies recognise that freedom of expression has its limits'," Conroy predictably goes on to again raise the alarm about nasty content such as bestiality.

This is a cynical misrepresentation of Clinton's words. To use a speech that includes the lines "governments should not prevent people from connecting to the internet, to websites, or to each other" and "censorship should not be in any way accepted by any company from anywhere" to justify a censorship policy is nothing if not brazen. Clinton herself goes on to say that "these challenges must not become an excuse for governments to systematically violate the rights and privacy of those who use the internet for peaceful political purposes". In other words, there are challenges, but the benefits of an open internet are too great to risk with government censorship.

For the sake of fulfilling an election promise, the government is now arguably on the wrong side of history. The department's spin doctors have their work cut out for them.