Recently the trends in Internet freedom have been all bad. China’s censorship regime escalated dramatically over the last 12 months, with a more aggressive Golden Shield, tumultuous events in Iran and of course Australia’s own filtering plan. It is therefore extremely heartening to see the tough new stand on Internet freedom taken by the USA.

The new approach was outlined last week in a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who declared the free access to information online as critical a human right as the freedom of assembly or the right to publish. Although barely mentioning China in her speech, Clinton was clearly setting the stage for a showdown with Beijing, declaring that “countries or individuals that engage in cyber attacks should face consequences.” The Chinese government responded angrily, declaring the Chinese internet “open”, demanding the U.S. “respect the facts” and calling the speech”information imperialism” in an official newspaper.

This is a pretty bad look for the Rudd government. It is my belief that they thought the filtering plan would be relatively uncontroversial, would wedge the opposition, and would allow them to check a few boxes to do with election promises and helping kids. Suddenly, they find themselves swimming against a rapidly accelerating tide.

Senator Conroy, I believe, hates it when Australia is compared to China in these sorts of debates. Conroy has no plan to censor political speech in Australia (I certainly believe this), so he sees any comparison to China or Iran as a cheap shot, dishonest and unfair. I think it simply doesn’t occur to him that the system itself is a danger. If you created a secret police force with the express purpose of weeding out terrorists amongst the population, would that be of concern if that was the extent of their mission? Of course it would. People are people, and regularly exceed their mission or their authority. (It’s happened before here – google “special branch” and “cold war”.)

To borrow a phrase from Bruce Schneier, it’s bad civic hygiene to allow our rights to be eroded without an excellent reason. In a free democracy the default position should always be to preserve openness and transparency. The government needs to make a watertight case if they want to take new powers onto themselves.

That case can’t be made for Internet filtering, and the Government knows it. This explains the amusingly defensive tone of Friday’s media release. It’s pure, panicked spin.

I made similar comments to the ABC on Friday. My full take on the subject can be found over at EFA here, or in today’s Crikey here.

In a debate as nuanced as the one against filtering, it can be hard to penetrate the sound bites about kids and get some focus on the real policy underneath. With the filtering moving from policy to law, though, we can hope that scrutiny will increase. Here are my suggestions (over at EFA) for some urgent questions that need answering.

There’s a piece by me today over on New Matilda on the Google/China fight. It’s nice to write about someone else’s filtering problems for once.

Have a read here.

Note: Colin lived in China in 2009 and as EFA’s internet censorship spokesman has previously commented on China’s Internet Censorship regime.

The Communications Minister Stephen Conroy was published in today’s Crikey, firing back at several pieces run over the last week about his government’s mandatory ISP filtering scheme, including one of my own. I’m very happy to see the minister respond personally and at length; over the last year we have been starved of information on the plan, and the debate, such as it was, has often been in the form of quick sound bites. Discussing the real facts for a change is a welcome development. (Plus, it’s nice to know that a slightly miffed Commonwealth Minister is amongst my readership.)

The fact is that this is a complex policy and there are a fair few misunderstandings out there on both sides of the issue. If I were minister, factual inaccuracies and exaggerations would annoy me, too. Sometimes in dealing with the media it’s hard to get a nuanced point across and things get inadvertently misrepresented. Personally, and as a representative of EFA, I sincerely regret any inaccuracies, and even the “cheap shots.” But it’s no point raising a fuss about them, then making your own. Sure, I slip up from time to time, but to suggest I am “blurring the lines, burying the facts and wilfully misleading the Australian public” seems the sort of exaggeration Senator Conroy is himself complaining about. So let’s see how many mea culpas I owe.

Senator Conroy implies that perhaps the reason Australia’s image is suffering is due to my own rabble-rousing. I wish this were the case, but the Minister has to share some of the blame. It’s an inescapable fact that this filter is censorship, and that such censorship in a free country like Australia is unsettling to observers overseas. The Minister, of course, sees the policy as benign; that’s fair enough from his point of view, but that doesn’t change how the rest of the world sees it. Yes, “Iran of the South Pacific” is an obvious exaggeration – but the filter is tarnishing our reputation.

In my piece I was reporting on the letter from Reporters Without Borders, and their Secretary-General used words I wouldn’t myself (the reference to aborigines is confusing to me, too). However, the anorexia, abortion and marijuana sale examples could all fall under the categories mentioned by the Minister in his very next paragraph (crime, self-harm, drug use). Surely it is a legitimate concern to speculate about what’s at the margins of the RC system? It’s neither interesting nor helpful to confine our attentions to the “worst of the worst”, the unavailability of which is uncontroversial.

This is also a little strange:

Jacobs argues that the government’s policy will “block access to inappropriate websites”, the same language he criticised the government for using months ago as being unclear.

Am I being criticised for using vague language to describe the scheme, even though the words are his own, and I’m expressing concern about their very vagueness?

Most galling is the Minister’s outrage at my statement that in the past he has implied filter opponents are “all card-carrying members of the Child Pornorgaphy Apologists League”. Of course, that’s not a direct quote – hence my use of the word “implies” – so I can’t produce such a quote. But how about this?

If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree.[1]

Doesn’t that imply that filter opponents are advocates of more liberal child porn laws (they aren’t). Or in answer to a question in the Senate as to whether the filter will be opt-out, the Minister replied:

I trust you are not suggesting that people should have access to child pornography. [2]

Senator Ludlam, the questioner, was indeed not suggesting that. So why smugly bring it up? The debate has never been about the legal status of child pornography, and to pretend that it is is, as I wrote, a distraction that simultaneously smears the filter’s opponents. Those are two examples I remember and I know offended many. If you can remind me of any further examples, I’ll chronicle them here.

The Minister’s kind query about my whereabouts for the last nine years seems pretty irrelevant to substance of my argument. As it happens, I was in the USA, and I did not join the EFA board until 2007. Nevertheless, EFA was certainly a vocal opponent of the 1999 amendments to the Broadcasting Services Act that gave us the equally useless system we have today, including the infamous ACMA blacklist.

The fact is, the reason there is so much confusion about this policy is that while it has changed markedly over time, the government have tried to maintain that it was always as it is; and the vagueness of the original, pre-election policy document is used to help prop up this illusion, rather than acknowledging it and providing a more detailed document for the community to dissect.

The minister concludes with the following rhetorical question:

Let me repeat the government has been clear that mandatory filtering will only apply to RC-rated content. This content is not available in newsagencies, on library shelves, at the cinema or on DVD and you certainly can’t watch it on TV. Why shouldn’t Australian ISPs be required to block access to such content?

Because it’s pointless, it’s expensive, it’s done in secret, and there are no guarantees the scope will not increase under this or a future government. And these are exactly the points I am trying to make in the public debate. If this is misleading, then it’s up to you, Minister, to demonstrate why that is so.

[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/12/31/2129471.htm

[2] http://www.somebodythinkofthechildren.com/greens-senator-quizzes-conroy-on-filtering/

The pressure is still on Conroy over his plan to censor Australia’s Internet. The public and the opposition are still calling for the plan to be abandoned and the Government to come clean. My own contribution, which takes a Western theme today, is an op-ed in the Australian. Despite all the noise, though, I think Conroy will use the test results to announce that filtering is feasible and going ahead. We’ll see in the coming weeks and months.

Read my piece here.

My (problably entirely mild and benign) interaction with a cyber-stalker (Hi, Q, if you’re reading) has served as a reminder to be careful of a subject I often am asked to speak about for EFA: online privacy. Occasionally, when Facebook or Myspace change their terms of service, there is a flap in the media about the privacy implications, but in general anecdotal and research data indicates that people don’t think too carefully about the sort of information they put online. People are also not aware of the sorts of information that may litter the web already, or that they may be giving away completely invisibly.

I’ve made a conscious decision to be open about what I put on the public Internet, including most of my contact information. I don’t publicise my address, but I know it’s out there to be found – old WHOIS records, the phone book, etc. I’ve been careful on Facebook, keep information within my circle; but still have hundreds of friends, even though I try and limit the circle to people I wouldn’t mind knowing what I’m up to on a given day. (Also people I don’t worry about boring with the minutiae of my life.) I know that through LinkedIn and my company and other bios on the web, my employment history and academic histories could be determined. Through Flickr, my travels around the world and photos of me and my family can be had in abundance. Twitter will give an insight into my thoughts and activities on a variety of subjects, and a diligent investigator could pretty easily determine my political affiliations and religious views without too much work. For a few bucks, all the details about the company of which I am a director can be easily had, online, instantly.

Overall, that’s actually a pretty complete picture of my life that could be built up on a quiet Friday afternoon in the office. It’s probably not enough to become completely obsessed with me, but there’s enough there to give me pause if I know a stranger is compiling it all. For instance, I haven’t completely edited out my ex-girlfriends from all my Flickr photos and potentially old tweets or notes left somewhere. If at various times you’d signed up to dating sites and searched for lonely men using my public information, you probably could have had a dating profile as well – pretty scary, really, given how embarassing those things can be. While my hypothetical persecutor was having a chuckle at that, they could, with Google Street View, be having a look at a photo of my house. (Street View itself has caused many privacy concerns, from drunks to dead people to the entire nation of Japan.)

This is despite the fact that for some years now I have been very conscious of what I let out online. Although I am more active online than most people, think about how much information I might be able to find out about you with your name and email address. Of course, you’ve read and been told many times to be careful with this stuff, and no doubt you are. Consider, for example, that by reading this blog post you have left your IP address in my webserver logs, from which I can probably roughly find out your physical location, perhaps even the name of your employer. Sure, you have nothing to hide now, but what happens when you make an enemy? Even the nicest of us can have psycho ex-partners.

Of course I’m not saying anyone should panic, as I often point out to the media the advantages to our lives of these technologies are still there even if we have new challenges to face on the privacy frontier.  What gives me slight pause is imagining the next generation of politicians now working their way (scheming and stabbing their way) through the ranks. In 10 or 15 years time there won’t be many politicians who haven’t left a racy, rude or ill-thought-out forum post or tweet lying around (not to mention embarassing photos that can be dug up in the Wayback machine), and would we want a leader who didn’t have strong opinions on various topics from time to time in their youth? Former friends will have drunken emails in their archives, Facebook messages will linger. All of these will become fodder for electoral battles, and it’s already happening. Will we get used to this and forgive our politicians for unguarded remarks, or will only the electronically meek inherit the earth?

The Chinese Government’s sudden announcement that all PCs sold in China after July 1st would have to include its “Green Dam Youth Escort” software came as a surprise to many. With the rationale of protecting the impressionable minds of the kiddies – of course – the software would filter all web access in real time, blocking suspect images, blacklisted web pages, and anything with forbidden keywords. The software is frightening in the extreme – it takes all the worst aspects of voluntary home filtering software such as overblocking, underblocking, security flaws and performance degradation, and combines it with the political paranoia of the CCP. The result is government spyware that not only blocks web pages, but actually terminates the processes of running apps into which the user types banned keywords. And that’s version 1.0!

Chinese internet users seem pretty resigned to the Golden Shield, but this might be a step too far. Let’s see what happens. I am not optimistic of a backdown.

I wrote up a summary of the initiate which appeared in Crikey today (shouldn’t be behind the pay wall too long).

On a personal note, I’ve managed to settle down in Shanghai a bit (more here, so updates and media/writing work should be more regular now.

A piece in the SMH today by Asher Moses looking at the upcoming end to the filtering pilot (with a quote by yours truly).

I was a guest blogger on New Matilda’sPollieGraph blog, discussing the revelations by the Minister on SBS’s Insight show.

Read and comment on the post here.