Yesterday I read about the case of Dr Aafia Siddiqui, who was found guilty of the attempted murder of her American interrogators in a New York court.
Reading that article, it seemed fairly obvious that the case didn’t stack up. In 2003, Aafia Siddiqui went missing, with no (public) record of her whereabouts for the next five years. The next the public record knows of her, she was arrested by Americans in Afghanistan in 2008.
US military personnel argues that they were interrogating her in Afghanistan when she picked up an unattended gun, and started shooting at them. She didn’t manage to hit a single soldier, but they sure got her, and then they hauled her back to the US to try her for attempted murder.
Forensic evidence suggests that the gun she ostensibly fired was never fired by her, nor even fired at all. Furthermore, common sense suggests that US soldiers wouldn’t have left loaded guns lying around unattended where their prisoner would be able to reach them.
Aafia Siddiqui also says that during her five years of imprisonment, she was held in a secret US prison in Afghanistan. This is denied by both the US and the Pakistani authorities, but it is not exactly hard to believe. Read More »
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
On the radio yesterday, apparently (I wasn’t concentrating on it), the presenter was trying to market some event the radio station was organising, so he said, “So, come along, any lady who might be looking for a husband — or guys too, for that matter!”
Anyway, the way he said it implied that guys might also be searching for a husband, and my grandmother became indignant (which is how I know anything was said at all). “Do you know any guys looking to acquire a husband?”
“Not in Australia, anyway,” I said, because not one state in the whole of Australia has legalised gay marriage.
“Exactly! And the way they said it made it sound like guys could marry each other!”
“Well, you never know… the law could change.”
Then she became sullen. “The big problem with that issue is that people insist on using the same terms we use for normal marriage. If they gave up on that unreasonable demand, there’s a good chance that they would get what they want.”
So, I wasn’t going to say anything to her because it is always utterly pointless to argue with her. That said, “they could get what they want if only they gave up on one of the things they want” doesn’t make a lot of sense. They’re not getting what they want then, are they?
I think the real problem is that there are two conceptions of what “marriage” means, and people keep trying to conflate them. The first is the idea of marriage as a religious institution, between one man and one woman, like my grandmother holds. And that’s fine. The other idea is the secular view of marriage as a legal institution, in which individuals agree to be loyal to and assist one another and receive a whole host of benefits in return.
Australia is a secular country. It’s not a theocracy, and nor is there even a state religion. Consequently, I feel religion should play no role in determining our laws. This secular kind of marriage, the one with all the rights and legal privileges attached, should be open to everyone who wants one.
And if the majority of the population feels that “marriage” is an inappropriate word for this kind of union, and must be reserved for religious marriages between one man and one woman… all right. But then let’s make it such that marriages carry no legal status. We could retrospectively declare all married couples to be joined in a union as well, but from the day the law came into effect, newlyweds would be required to obtain a legal union separately from their marriage.
I think this is an issue about legal rights. Either marriages are secular, in which case there is no reason for gay couples to be forbidden to have them, or else they are religious, in which case they deserve no legal weight. Admittedly, my attitude is likely a bit extremist… I can’t think of many people who’d argue that marriages don’t deserve legal status at all. However, I did steal the idea from someone, and I think it makes a lot of sense. If marriage is such a religious thing that it can’t be extended to gay couples, what right has it to carry legal status in a secular society?