Only yesterday I wrote about the South Australian government’s plan to limit political free speech and today I get to write about how they’re giving up on it. If only the federal government would be this efficient!
In all probability, the South Australian government’s turnaround is due to the fact that there’s an election there next month, and they don’t want to completely destroy their supporter base when there’s so little time to go. The federal government can trust people to forget about internet filtering by the end of the year — and indeed, it seems vocal objections have died down — but the South Australian one didn’t have that much time.
Of course, a success is a success, and SA’s attorney-general announcing he’ll retrospectively repeal the law is probably a success (unless he changes his mind after the election and doesn’t repeal it after all).
Something particularly amusing to come out of this is the attorney-general’s insistence that a man named Aaron Fornarino doesn’t exist, and is merely a sock puppet internet account of the Liberal Party. Sock puppets like him are exactly why South Australian Labor felt this law was so necessary — the Liberals were disseminating propaganda whilst posing as ordinary citizens, oh noes!!
Except that Aaron Fornarino does exist… and lives in the attorney-general’s electorate… 500m from his office.
When asked how he could be so sure Fornarino didn’t exist, the attorney-general’s response was, hilariously, “Because I’ve been the member for the area for 20 years, I’ve lived here for longer. I have the up-to-date electoral roll and I just know West Croydon people very well.”
Yeah… evidently.
At any rate, it’s good to finally have an example of a government caving in to public pressure instead of devoting huge amounts of energy to resisting it. It’d be good if the Rudd and Brumby Governments would take note.
Wed, 03.02.2010, 1pm • 0 Comments • Tags: news, politics, Australia, rights, Internet, censorship
I found out about this issue today through this entry on mgk. The South Australian government has decided that all political commentary during an election campaign must be accompanied with the writer’s real name and postcode. This legislation appears particularly aimed at banning “anonymous” commentary on the Internet, and was passed with the full support of the Opposition. Their spokeswoman did admit it’d be too hard to enforce if they tried to identify political Twitterers and Facebookers, but apparently that was their only concern.
The legislation is absurd. As both weez and the Opposition spokeswoman point out, it is unenforceable. The South Australian government cannot possibly monitor all bloggers in South Australia to confirm that every time they write something about the election campaign, they’ve attached their full name and post code. That’s assuming they give up on Twitter and Facebook, because seriously, they’re dreaming if they think it’s possible to monitor Twitter and Facebook.
So then it would seem the intended purpose is simply to punish people who piss them off. Having a really broad law and enforcing it selectively seems to be one of governments’ favourite tactics, since it means they can get pretty much anyone who annoys them somehow. You know, like how they got Al Capone for tax evasion. Governments want to be able to do that.
There’s no reason why political commentary must be accompanied by the full name and post code of the commentator. This seems obvious. How on earth can a point be invalidated by the identity of the one who made it? If a point is good, it’s good regardless of who made it, and regardless of whether you know who made it. Wanting to “protect” people from “anonymous” political analysis is not a motivation — there is no need to protect people from that.
The true reason for this legislation must be to inconvenience people who want to influence the political landscape of South Australia in the lead-up to the election. Either they might be inconvenienced by having to release this information in the first place, or else they might be inconvenienced by how this information will be used — to take revenge on them somehow for saying mean things, presumably. And of course, no one will be prosecuted for supporting any mainstream party — Labor, the Nationals, the Liberals, and maybe even the Greens are going to have their supporters protected. To do anything else would be to alienate voters.
So what is this — is it that in South Australia, politics is now to be considered the dominion of a select few who rattle off the correct ideas? That everyone else should live in fear? I mean why else would the South Australian government care who says what? I think the fact that the Opposition is totally behind this measure is also insightful — it shows that the Opposition considers itself so identical to the government that it can also benefit from legislation like this.
Media like newspapers and TV can already be controlled through the steep cost of entry — only the wealthiest businesspeople can promote their opinions through those. But since the Internet is truly democratic — a realm where everyone’s opinions can be heard — it seems that fearful governments want it stifled. If they weren’t afraid, why would they bother?
This article brings up a lot of stuff that I think is fundamentally wrong with the copyright system as it is.
Most crucial among these is that governments are negotiating in secret to intensify copyright laws and punishments. They are doing this without any mandate from their citizens, without any regard for the wishes or interests of their citizens.
For Australia, the grossly excessive nature of these negotiations won’t have much effect on our laws… because we already implemented a ton of the worse measures when Howard was so desperate to include a free-trade agreement with the US. But there is one measure that hasn’t yet been implemented here, but which could be, and that is worrying.
Without being a legal expert, I’ll say my understanding of the nature of suing is that someone has to have actually harmed you before you can sue for damages. So you know, if you haven’t lost any money through someone else’s actions, you’re not allowed to demand that they pay you tons of money. You would have no reason to demand lots of money, that that would basically be stealing. However. Among the secret provisions of this treaty, that could all change.
The current situation in the US has lead to ordinary American citizens being ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in punishment for illegally downloading music — sometimes amounting to $22,000 per file.
How much is a music track? In Australia, single tracks can be bought through iTunes for $1.69. I’m sure they can be bought elsewhere for less.
Does it harm giant, sprawling corporations for people to not spend LESS THAN TWO DOLLARS on a certain track? Even if an individual downloads a hundred different tracks, what the hell does $170 matter to a corporation worth billions?
Answer: it doesn’t matter. These companies will get on by without your $170 quite nicely, thank you. An individual downloading a track for free is basically equivalent to an individual who has never heard that track in the first place. The notion of “stealing” doesn’t work when individuals are supposedly “stealing” digital files that can be copied and copied and copied again and again. The people who do pay more than compensate for those who don’t.
Since corporations would look ridiculous suing ordinary American people for, say, twenty bucks, lawmakers have decided they’re allowed to sue for THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS instead. I believe that people who “pirate” tracks are not harming corporations, and even if they ARE harming corporations, they are harming corporations to the value of two dollars. Not $22,000. Under no circumstances, ever, should a corporation be allowed to extort $22,000 per song downloaded from individuals who have not even harmed them.
What this demonstrates is that our lawmakers think corporations and lobbyists are more important than people. And why should that be? What a backwards system.
Fri, 29.01.2010, 1am • 1 Comment • Tags: news, politics, rights, Internet, technology, USA, Australia
Mark Newton posted this on Twitter today:
ACMA ref 780248254 concerned this content: [snip]. Can’t host it or a link to it in Australia. Twitter is offshore. #nocleanfeed
To be on the safe side, I won’t link to the content blacklisted. I did, however, link to the Twitter status that linked to it (which I do not believe is illegal).
Because YouTube is an irritating organisation committed to shielding “vulnerable children” from the horrors of political realities, I am actually forbidden to view this video, in a way that probably makes the Australian Government feel very happy inside. However, I can see that the title of this video is Neda Sultan R.I.P - Iran Elections.
Since Australia has not yet implemented its filter, the blacklisting means that people who’ve opted in to the existing filter cannot view it, and it’s illegal to link to or rehost. Essentially, ACMA believes that the fate of Neda Soltan is unacceptable for Australians to view.
In the interests of fairness, Mark Newton was the one who filed the complaint against the video in the first place — the blacklist will be run partially on complaints, so (theoretically) if no other country has blocked certain material and no one’s complained about it, ACMA will not block it.
In practice that can’t reassure us, because anyone can file a complaint. It could be anti-filter campaigners proving a point about how bad this censorship scheme will be, as it is this time… or it could have been an Iranian representative in Australia trying to get this hushed up. Perhaps once the filter’s in place, we’ll see Chinese officials filing lots of complaints about graphic depictions of crackdowns in Tibet, or Xinjiang, or wherever they may occur. Or perhaps Sri Lanka would complain about the footage that exists of Sri Lankan soldiers shooting Tamils. Having set this precedent, how could ACMA not block this stuff?
But none of it should be blocked at all. The whole point of this video’s publication is that everyone knows, and remembers, the capabilities of a totalitarian regime, so our opposition to such regimes is strengthened. Maybe it’s horrifying, but that doesn’t mean the government should be working to conceal it from people. We can’t be sheltered from everything that’s horrifying, particularly when that gives such things the freedom to occur.
This is probably everywhere by now, but regardless, I’ll post it anyway: Google has announced that it will no longer be censoring internet search results in China.
According to Google, the reason for their decision is that a group of hackers within China breached Google’s security in an attempt to access the personal emails of Chinese human rights activists. Furthermore, the emails of human rights activists throughout China, the US and Europe have been accessed thanks to malware installed on their computers, seemingly from much the same source.
Google’s policy was always that it was better to offer a limited (censored) service to Chinese people than no service at all (which would be the case if Google was blocked). I can sympathise with this. But the Chinese regime’s fondness for “cyberwarfare”, using malware and hacking against its political opponents, seems to have caused Google to draw the line. What point is there in cooperating with an oppressive regime that isn’t even cooperating with you?
In Al Jazeera’s article on this subject, they quoted Danny O’Brien, an “internet rights” activist, saying:
“This changes the game because the question won’t be ‘How can we work in China?’ but ‘How can we create services that Chinese people can use, from outside of China?’”
Offering limited services may be better than offering none at all, but better still is offering a full and uncensored service to people (even if they have to jump through a few hoops to get there). If trying to cooperate with the Chinese government is too difficult and unsatisfactory to boot, it’s time to think of a better solution.
I would start with doing everything I could to promote anonymisers and proxies, like Tor and the Usejump browser. Spread them by USB if need be. The Chinese government can refine its Great Firewall all it likes, but it’d have difficulty blocking programs on USBs.
Wed, 13.01.2010, 6pm • 3 Comments • Tags: news, politics, rights, Internet, censorship, China