Thread: Australians - Protest against a Mandatory ISP Level Internet Filter

Australia, welcome to the club. Your government is responding to criticisms of inaction in the recent AFACT v iiNet suit. They were made to look impotent and foolish. Governments in western Europe and the US are being effectively lobbied by big business to log, filter, and throttle media traffic. Media companies are attempting to regain the ability to monetize assets. Trunk providers seek to delay infrastructure investment by filtering bandwidth. Uncle Joe just announced an exploratory $30 million for a group to help Media and punish fileshares - the O administration / socialism in action. Your download didn't just slow down - your ISP is working for the government - and those sounds? that's the cable guy climbing the pole with wire cutters and your personal freedom circling the bowl.

Google anything like,"My download slowed WAY DOWN." Thousands of posts from people too oblivious to realize they're being surveyed, logged, and throttled. If you rent or daddy pays your bills, who cares. If you own and have assets, it's considerably more serious.

Fileshares in the open are a big Ooops. Post on any type of forum about the ability of ISP's to sniff PPTP or L2TP VPN traffic, and 99.99% of the folks don't have a clue. They stare at their shoes. How much faith do you have in anyone to protect your identity when you pay them $12.95 a month and the attorney suing them makes $500 an hour?

I owe a big thanks to T-I for reasons not readily apparent.

I so agree. This is the most shocking and shittiest policy to emerge in years. It is even more reactionary than any measure designed under the Howard government and that is truly telling about how controlling our political environment overall is becoming in Australia. There is much at stake here: if Labor introduces this, it's almost certain that the mandatory filter (nice name for a censorship ban) will not be removed in even the remotely forseeable future. Who would lead such a progressive move when the so-called 'progressives' are themselves the advocates for the ban? At stake here is not only proper or improper uses of the internet but the social reality of the country.

Furthermore, it infuriates me how the innately emotionally explosive issue of pedophilia is manipulated to promote the ban. For starters, child porn is already subject to the strictest mechanisms of scrutiny and police prosecution in this nation. There are the irregular but routine news stories about busts of so-called pedophile rings. But notice that there has been no news story of any record that reports the production of child pornography in this country. Even if it were true that an internet ban would prevent image sharing between domestic pedophiles (and it's doubtful, due to private file share, like torrenting; current policing methods already mean child porn collectors have to be technically savvy), the ban would only then stop some pedophiles from looking at images of naked kid sex acts but would do absolutely nothing to stop the creation of those images in the first place. To argue that this is a blow against pedophilia is just outright mystification as it makes no difference to the exploited and it creates a situation, moreover, as coldflame writes above, where we force pedophiles further underground and, as usual, do nothing to try and figure out a more sophisticated and democratic policy that would treat pedophilia as an affliction as much as a crime. In saying that it should be thought also as an affliction, I don't mean to pardon it at all, nor naively justify it away as an illness that only needs to be cured, but rather to remind us that even the most unapologetic, predatorial pedophile is subject to a desire that doesnt just offend and scare society but actually ruins lives, their own included. The ban is a way of yet again avoiding the hard work of developing a plan which would aim at interfering with pedophilia activity primarily at the sites where real violence occurs, such as the international effort to close down the child slave trade and the formation of designated domestic groups for distribution of pedophilic material, collective nodes of spread, rather than the unethical but isolated individual viewing of it. It also once again neglects the fact that most sexual abuse of children continues to take place nowhere near a computer but in the very home that is supposed to be a buffer against such depravities.

Beyond all that, what I truly loathe is the way this pedophilia hysteria is used to smuggle through the lesser known implications of the legislation, such as the ban on "politically or legally objective subjects", a disgracefully indefinite categorization in a society that relies on tradition and so does not legislate any explicit protection of its right to access information. As coldflame points out, this puts in place a regime aimed at denying information rights to people (such as information on drug abuse, but, more than that, communities of discussion between drug users who also transmit information about safer usage to one another as well as information on procurement). It essentially tries to discipline Australian citizens for using the net in a way that demonstrates they are not pleased with current Australian law. Rather than realizing for instance that kids especially seek R18+ games online because they are mature enough to handle them, we have this cynical effort to turn them into poor vulnerables manipulated by a vast and never specified group of corrupters and abusers. Perhaps the problem is with the censorship laws, not the search to negate them. Also, although coldflame notes that the anonymous proxies will provide a way around the filter, there remains the issue of those people - an ever-growing number what with the irreversible computerisation of society - that actually do not know enough to negate the filter that way. This is a kind of tax against the computer unsavvy and, by implication, a kind of class-based penalty, against the lesser educated and skilled.

Finally, this system will announce Australia as the very first Western democracy to introduce a mandatory censorship regime. One thing we can be sure of: while this will not "turn" us into an authoritarian system on the model of China, censorship regimes are only prone to the expansion of their perimeters, not the contraction of them. The very fact we are facing this ban now is already because of the growth of a culture of censorship and moral panic in Australia where everything deemed unsavory by our moral mainstream must immediately be subject to legislative measures that eradicate it. The idea of valuing the freedom of illicit activities as being a practice that teaches us how to go against the law sometimes, as and when we feel we need to, is being quite steadily junked. More and more, this 'economization' of the messiness of democracy is prized as the only way to protect democracy, when it is aimed only at false security, moral prudery and draconian protection of a regime of exorbitant property rights. The fact is, in a democracy, there should be real unofficial leeway for law-abiding citizens to 'act up', to live lives that teach them to be able to sometimes leave the law and thus, to realize the law needs to be made less legalistic, more ethical.

Bullshit arguments about profit loss from illegal downloading are means of denying a truly anti-capitalist culture where the mix of people both buying and ripping media ensures a culture that overrides economic impediments to the spread of information. The argument about the rights of the artists (which is always an argument for the rights of a particular monopolizing ownership class) are based on the most specious arguments about harm: for instance, by what statistical methods do media companies know how much they would have made in a year if not for downloading? Even if they had a way of knowing how many copies of every release with their imprint were downloaded in a year, and they don't, this assumes all those people would have had 'no choice' but to buy those products otherwise. Not true. What downloading opens most often is the chance to consume something which I would otherwise not have spent the limited resources I have to buy. The profit loss argument is nothing but a projection - not a proven fact - based on a small test sample that their own research divisions inflate drastically to create the impression of a fatal hemorrhage, even as consumer growth proceeds apace each year. For all of these reasons, what the censorship filter marks is a very disquieting move toward an anti-democratic market society, even after we just witnessed in 2008 and 2009 the pernicious effects of such a social organization. Such a society has no need to do away with democracy entirely; just prune it a little so it can't do any damage. One can only hope that we'll be able to stop this erosion of the social in our system before we have no more choices left but the system itself.