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.

When I was a naive undergraduate, I laboured under a severe misapprehension. I thought that people believed things because they had heard the evidence and believed those things to be true. If somebody believed something that was (in my opinion) wrong, it must have been because they had bad information or had heard a mistaken argument. Therefore, all I had to do was simply furnish them with better information and a logical argument and we’d agree on the facts.

Needless to say, I had a lot of long and pointless conversations back then.
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2005’s Freakonomics was one of the most refreshing reads in a long time. It had a theme that I always enjoy, of taking a fresh, evidence-based look at everyday phenomena and challenging the conventional wisdom. Of course, most everybody likes this and Freakonomics was a huge hit. Its examination of how incentives affect behaviour was truly fascinating, for instance that imposing a fine on parents for being late to collect their children from daycare lead to more late parents, as the fine legitimised the overtime asked of the carers. The finances of a major urban crack-dealing operation were also really fascinating.

Journalist Stephen Dubner has again teamed up with economist Steven Levitt and their new book, Superfreakonomics (released in October), has proved more controversial than the original. Unfortunately, the controversy is less to do with the amazing insights they have revealed, but more to do with their sloppy handling of some important topics. Foremost among these was climate change.

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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?

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.

I have a piece in New Matilda having another go at the Conroy Curtain. The awesome thing about it is the picture.

Read it here.

“Safer Internet Day” has come and gone, and the Government’s trial of mandatory filtering has finally been announced, with six small ISPs participating. The trial, with poor results practically inevitable, will do little to dampen discussion about this policy. The stated rationale for the new filtering regime, to protect children, has ensured the debate remains emotive and controversial.

Many of the filter opponents have focused on the many technical flaws in the plan, or its worrying implications for free speech. This has led to the perception that opponents of the plan put internet freedom or technological costs ahead of the welfare of children, as if opponents are all ideologues and childless nerds. Ill-informed filtering proponents have branded organisations like Electronic Frontiers Australia “extreme cyber-libertarians” and implied they oppose filtering because it seeks to impose a restrictive sexual morality on the country. The real question is not “should we do something about child abuse material” or “is protecting children worth the trouble?” but “will filtering actually protect children?” Since we are, in fact, all on the same side when it comes to protecting kids, let’s examine the proposal from a child-welfare perspective. (more…)

It’s when they stop talking about you, that’s when you’ve got to worry. Or so the old saying goes. Perhaps, then, we at Electronic Frontiers Australia should be gratified that filter-backers such as Clive Hamilton still hold up EFA as the epitome of “extreme cyber-libertarianism”, a gang of internet anarchists who don’t care what happens to children as long as Government keeps its hands off our Internet.

While we do appreciate the mention, as ever, it’s a bit dismaying that such misrepresentations still find their way into print. EFA’s objections to filter are well known; it’s an ill-defined policy mess, it won’t deliver for kids, it won’t aid law-enforcement, it’s overly secretive, and technical problems abound. In fact, just about the only argument we haven’t made is that filtering is a bad idea from a purely libertarian perspective.  (more…)

Here’s my piece on the filtering plan from ABC Online.They also spun it into a news item, which was then picked up and published in Chinese.

Read it here.

One test that the Government’s “clean feed” Internet censorship policy fails comprehensively is as the cyber-safety test. Does this deliver anything for kids? Over at Online Opinion, I argue no.

See the piece here.