Facing Up To The Facts
Let’s all talk about something really uncomfortable — and by that I don’t mean haemorrhoids or religion. I am talking about censorship — in particular, the censorship of the internet kind.
At present, web censorship is quite a topical sore point, with everyone from federal politicians to IT professionals and religious crackpots lining up and putting in their two cent’s worth.
So in view of this salubrious gaggle of quasi-experts trying to hijack the web censorship debate, I figured that a not-yet-jaded- and-still-somewhat-optimistic journalist such as myself would have a few crumbs of useful ideas to add. OK, where to begin? Well, firstly, the idea of a government — any government or overarching authority — telling all and sundry what is allowed to be viewed or downloaded online is an odious one. Moreover, Federal Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy and his bleating about ‘protecting our children’ and then hiding behind the Classification Law and its archaic acts is nothing short of comedy dressed up as farce.
The simple fact of the matter is that Australia’s National Classification Board is not structured to deal with online content — it was set up specially for lm and printed material — lumbering this mid-twentieth century bureaucratic body with the ever-changing face of twenty-first-century communications technology is akin to entering an FJ Holden in the Australian Grand Prix.
As a number of IT experts have already shown that internet censorship is unworkable, since it will not affect Peer-to-Peer and other le-sharing technologies, you wonder why anyone would bother even trying to keep this political corpse on life support.
And if the good Senator was so concerned about protecting our children, he would be 90 smart home ideas avhub.com.au more in tune with catching and prosecuting those who use the internet for their disgusting perversions, rather than helping them obtain even more anonymity.
But let’s not point the finger at politicians too much. The fact is that the corporate world is full of censorship — nowhere more evident than in the world of apps. And when it comes to app censorship, the major players such as Apple, Nokia, Microsoft and other hardware makers are all as guilty as sin in this respect. Just try and get an app approved by Apple, for example, if it thinks it is not ‘suitable’ for its customers. Fat chance is probably the most polite way that I can put it.
This, of course, is censorship in its purest form — one that we gladly pay companies like Apple large sums of money for. And yet I wait to hear howls of protest coming from civil libertarians, IT journalists and conspiracy theorists about this egregious assault on our freedom of speech, thought and deed. Though there is one area where we would need some form of at least auditing, and that is in social media. The recent examples of horror concerning Facebook are nothing short of a tragedy — compounded by the realisation that our police and legal systems are woefully ill equipped to deal with online abuse.
This in turn is made worse by the attitude of Facebook towards any legal authority that is non-US. In a recent interview with the national press, Neil Gaughan, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) Assistant Commissioner, stated, “The company has been unwilling to provide police with the intelligence they need for investigations.”
The belligerence of Facebook would be understandable if their position was globally uniform. However, it seems to act one way with US courts and another with those outside the United States. Why? Well because US courts have the laws and the enforcement will
to back themselves up. And the US has also federal corporations statutes which could close Facebook down if it failed to comply with any court subpoenas.
In Australia, we have ASIC, whose idea of punishing companies for corporate wrongdoing usually involves a swift whipping with some wet lettuce leaves, and Senator Stephen Conroy, who thinks draconian North Korean-style laws will solve all of our online legal shortfalls.
Both approaches are wrong. Tough laws both protecting freedom of speech and also the privacy and wellbeing of internet users are what is required. This, of course, does not require the Wisdom of Solomon to achieve — just some political gumption and an understanding of what the online world really is all about.
Branko Miletic, Editor
Smart Home Ideas
Winter 2010
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