censorship

In Australia, the Rudd government and Stephen Conroy in particular continue to push toward the implementation of their plan to censor the Internet for anyone in the country.

The plan is supposedly to stop the propagation of illegal information on the Internet. Things like child pornography. While child porn is a terrible thing, there are several major downsides to the government’s plan. First, it won’t do anything to stop illegal activity. What it will do, like DRM, is cause problems for the average, law-abiding citizen who is trapped inside this censored version of the Internet only because they haven’t tried to get out of it. This is the advice the government has received from countless experts and continues to ignore. Second, it will cost a massive amount of taxpayer money to implement. Third, it neatly puts in place a system that will allow the government to extend the filter’s mandate and use it to determine what information we consume regardless of legality.

From the very beginning, this project will see controversial movies and sites about taboo subjects such as euthanasia banned. Games that are intended for consumption by people over 16 years of age will be censored. With such an ambitiously Orwellian start, it’s not long before the only content you can access online is pro-government propaganda.

The public has seen the filter list. It was meant to be a secret, but even before the program’s implementation the government has failed to keep it. The list contains many perfectly legal sites–some included by mistake (a problem itself), some included because the government doesn’t like them. Stopping child porn seems to be the last thing on the government’s mind.

Given that the technology is ineffective, it seems to me that the only possible logical reason the government would ever be willing to spend so much of our money on this is to give them a platform for controlling what the average Australian, who doesn’t look at child porn and doesn’t know how to circumvent the technology, consumes and doesn’t consume, hence giving them the power to determine what issues are up for public discussion and, after some reasonable extrapolation, who wins elections.

What does this mean for web publishing?

It means a lot for web publishing.

It means the government has the ability to shut down your business and livelihood, without blinking, without consultation with anyone representing the public or your business, without giving you any real recourse (the censorship list is “secret”, remember)–at least any accountable and transparent recourse. It means that if you work in web publishing, you and your family could be lining up at the soup shelter in the very near future based on some government propagandist’s whim.

When the censorship list and the process by which sites are selected for censorship are a secret, you simply cannot know if nor when the government could find something it doesn’t like about your site and simply blacklist it. The government has proven (through its inability to maintain the confidentiality of the proposed filter list) that it has no intention of only filtering illegal content, and your publications could be next.

Despite the yelling and cat-fighting during Parliament Question Time, this government is really just continuing the legacy of the previous one. The sedition laws introduced in the Howard era made it clear that the freedom of speech countries such as the US enjoy aren’t high on the priority list here (though, over in the US, you can speak freely on the phone all you want as long as you’re okay with the FBI listening in). At the time these laws had the journalism world worried (though the typically apathetic Australian public didn’t seem to care or even really talk about it), but fortunately a few years later someone decided to get rid of them. We’re still waiting. If you make fun of the Prime Minister in 2010 there’s still a legal chance that you could be arrested, without being told why you’re being arrested, and held in a cell without charge nor the right to contact your family and let them know where you are.

My point being that once these things become law, it’s an awfully tricky and long-winded process to get them out of the law. Your web publishing business gets blacklisted? You’ll probably be there for a while–even if the next administration comes along and decides that censorship was a bad idea in a modern democratic society after all.

The permanent closure of your business and your income if you make fun of Mr. Rudd is what the “clean feed” means for web publishing.

What can you do?

For the Australian citizens reading this, the truth is that there are very few things that you can do to actually stop anything the government dreams up from being implemented.

I hate to deface your idealistic hopes and dreams for democracy, but usually if it’s going to be a bad thing, there are enough idiots with legislative power to make it a reality.

If we can delude ourselves briefly into thinking that there is some sort of democracy involved in the implementation of policies that will pervasively effect all Australians, then you can write Letters to the Editor and squawk about it on Twitter, but I think Josh Mehlman said it best:

Filter opponents appear to believe Twitter, online petitions, protests and letter-writing campaigns will be enough.

However, 10,000 people blacking out their avatars, retweeting blog posts and furiously agreeing with each other on Twitter merely adds to the cacophony of the echo chamber; it has no effect in the real world.

If you are truly interested in getting this ridiculous pet project of Senator Conroy canned before it is introduced, then you need to get off your computer and away from Twitter, and convince your fellow citizens in your electorate that this feed is a bad idea and one that’s worth changing their vote for in the next election.

And then you need to get them to do the same with their friends. Because the only way that we can have any tangible effect on whether the government goes ahead with this plan is to achieve a local critical mass against the policy in each electorate, and scare your local elected officials with the loss of their “elected” status.

If being a persuasive nuisance at dinner parties is all you can do with the resources you have, that’s the best you can do. If you are a member of a more privileged class, and you happen to enjoy your information in uncensored form, then maybe it’s worth thinking about investing the resources to run public protests and rallies and information campaigns. Because the more average Australians who know why the Clean Feed is worth fighting off, and are vocal about it, the better our chances are.

I have to wonder–will you be able to read this a year from now, or will I be blacklisted for criticizing the blacklist?