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.

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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The last couple of weeks have been pretty hectic thanks largely to Senator Conroy’s announcement that it’s full steam ahead with Internet censorship. At EFA we’ve been flat out keeping up with media requests and corralling the outflow of support into a coherent campaign. We’re working with volunteers, other organisations, and internally to make sure January will see some exciting announcements and interesting campaigns.

Below is a Youtube of my appearance on the 7pm project. I hear it may have at least helped touch a nerve with the Minister himself. My small piece a few days later in Crikey reporting on the appeal by Reporters Without Borders to the Prime Minister to abandon the plan also seems to have gotten through, as it was one of the pieces singled-out for a bollocking by Conroy himself in a letter to Crikey. (See the previous blog post for my response.)

Thanks to everyone who has said nice things about the work I and the rest of EFA are doing – it means a lot to know people are listening and on our side!

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/