Saying This While I Still Can

I've long been in favour of Australia adopting the American Bill of Rights unaltered.*

How long I will be permitted to state these views publicly is now in question, following this bit of complete insanity from South Australia:

South Australia has become one of the few states in the world to censor the internet.

The new law, which came into force on January 6, requires anyone making an online comment about next month's state election to publish their real name and postcode.

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

The law ... 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.

This little abomination of human rights is the work of South Australia Attorney General, Michael Atkinson, whose worst crime against humanity prior to this was his single handed prevention of an adult classification for computer and video games in Australia.

No computer games can be sold in Australia unless they are classified by the censors - the Office of Film and Literature Classification - and since there is no adult category, that means that no games can be sold unless they fit into the MA15+ category - i.e. suitable for 15-year-olds.  Any change to this legislation has to be approved by all the state Attorneys General, and Mr Atkinson is the sole holdout.

The reason he gives for this range from the inane to the dishonest, but so do the OFLC's reasons for blocking games.  Fallout 3, for example, was banned in Australia because it includes the use of morphine as a painkiller.**

Read that again.  No need to bang your head against your desk; I'll do that for you.

That's hardly the worst or most recent offense of the OFLC, either.  Just recently, they decided to criminalise the depiction of adult women with insufficiently large breasts.***  In their defense:

We're all taking this too far, says Australian censorship blog Somebody Think of the Children. While it's true that the law does ban women who "look younger" than 18 from appearing in adult publications and films, images of small breasts alone are not "automatically" considered "illegal." For instance, "it’s highly unlikely that a naked photograph of a 30-, 40- or 50-year-old woman with small breasts" would ever be banned.

Images of small breasts alone are not automatically considered illegal.  Australian censorship blog Somebody Think of the Children, you should not automatically be considered insane and committed to an asylum.

And all this is on top of Senator Conroy, the worst Minister for Communications in Australia's history - and given some of the prior incumbents, that's saying something - and his ongoing crusade to destroy the Internet in order to save it.  Australia already has a secret blacklist of web sites that are illegal to visit; dissemination of the list or linking to those web sites is also illegal and subject to a fine of $11,000 per day (and per Senator Conroy, possible criminal charges).

Currently, this secret censorship has no teeth other than the stifling of discussion, though, because there is no actual filter on Australia's internet connections.  The sites are banned, but you can only be fined after the fact.

What Senator Conroy is planning, in the name of protecting the children, of course - he has a regular habit of acccusing his detractors of being in favour of child pornography - is installing mandatory filtering at all of Australia's internet providers that block all requests to the banned list of sites, and extending the list to cover thousands more.  And introducing a second, even more extensive filter with an opt-out clause, which filter, under recent controlled trials with a list of 10,000 banned sites, had a false-positive rate of just 3%.****

This filter works on HTTP requests on port 80.

So it does nothing to control the spread of Senator Conroy's chosen enemy via other channels, does nothing to check encrypted connections of any sort, and imposes a secret regime of censorship on the entire country. 

It can, as it is currently planned, be trivially bypassed via any encrypted proxy or VPN; we can safely assume that those will be next on Senator Conroy's little list.

We need to get rid of the whole present totalitarian mentality at the next election.  No Australian should even think of voting for any candidate supporting such attacks on fundamental human rights.  And then we need to adopt the Bill of Rights for our own.

Update:

Attorney-General Michael Atkinson has made a "humiliating" backdown and announced he will retrospectively repeal his law censoring internet comment on the state election.

After a furious reaction on AdelaideNow to The Advertiser's exclusive report on the new laws, Mr Atkinson at 10pm released this statement: "From the feedback we've received through AdelaideNow, the blogging generation believes that the law supported by all MPs and all political parties is unduly restrictive. I have listened.

"I will immediately after the election move to repeal the law retrospectively."

You will move to repeal the law after the election?  You assume too much, Mr Atkinson.

* Many people here look askance at the Second Amendment, I see no reason we shouldn't adopt it along with the others.

** Fallout 3 was eventually released here; I understand they changed
the name of the drug.

*** You may bang your head against your desk now.

**** If you haven't studied enough statistics to grasp the significance of this, let me explain.  Assume there are ten million web sites in the world (there are far more than that).  Assume 10,000 of those are blocked intentionally.  With that rate of false positives, 300,000 sites will be blocked unintentionally, that is, there will be 30 times as many errors as there are correct answers.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:16 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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