There is plenty of protest on the web about US congress plans to censor the internet (they aren’t the only control freaks who want to do this of course - the Australian government has been every bit as bad on this issue, as have many others, from China to Iran). The Daily Reckoning has but one example of the torrent of complaint about this (pardon the pun) - Blackout Wednesday: The Time Has Come.

The blackout is a choice, and a brilliant one, made by founder Jimmy Wales in consultation with the whole Wikipedia community. It is a protest, a statement, a symbolic warning to the world of what can happen if governments attack the free flow of information.

The online protest is directed, in particular, against two bills roiling around Congress right now, called SOPA in the House and PIPA in the Senate. Early versions have been tabled. The Obama administration has said that it opposes the current versions, but the opposition was weak and suspiciously nuanced.

People who are digitally aware and politically savvy know that this is only round one. The attempt by governments to block information flows on the Web will continue in new and different bills and regulations. No new laws are even necessary; government possesses the power now to crush the information age on a bureaucratic whim.

In fact, this goes on every day. That's because governments everywhere, in all times and places, want to control information and will use all their power to do it. It is also because the legal framework that rules how information is produced and distributed is fundamentally corrupted by the fraudulent notion of "intellectual property," which, if consistently enforced, would put an end to the Internet as we know it...

- Just this past week, a judge ruled that a 23-year-old British college student can be extradited to the US for a 10-year prison sentence, all for linking to other servers that illicitly host copyrighted content;

- Late last year, US officials shut down 150 domains without hearings or trials on grounds that they were suspected of selling goods that violate trademark law. It was done on "Cyber Monday" for a reason: It was an announcement to the digital world that government is in charge;

- In the spring of last year, the FBI arbitrarily shut down every online poker domain they could find and seized the bank accounts of some of the largest and smartest people who play online poker - and all of this happened before the recent announcement that online poker is being re-legalised;

- Earlier in the year, the Department of Homeland Security seized 84,000 domains and put up an announcement that each was trafficking in child porn. Problem: It was all a mistake. Not one was actually guilty. To date, there has been no explanation of how this could have happened

- In 2010, the feds seized some 73,000 domains for the crime of linking to content that was said to be distributed illegally in violation of copyright.

Already, the damage of this sort of thing is enormous. Ten years ago, the Internet represented liberation, a new frontier of innovation, commerce, opinion sharing and spontaneous organising. Today, more and more people are consumed by fear. Bloggers are unclear about what existing law does or does not allow. No one knows for sure how to define "fair use." The deepest pockets are winning case after case. Faced with this uncertainty, many are choosing less over more content - which is exactly what the government and private monopolists want.

The Wikipedia protest is a way of saying: If this kind of thing continues and ends up institutionalised in new legislation, there will be no more Wikipedia, which is the No. 1 content-rich site on the Web and the main way people learn today (how far we've come from the debunking that was common only five years ago).

And this is just one example. Individual blogs would only contain government-approved content. Search engines would only produce only government-approved sites. Digital entrepreneurship would be suffocated by fears of threats, confiscations and jails. It is hard to see how even Facebook and Twitter could survive.

It is just marvellous that Wikipedia has taken this bold direction, and it is only possible because of the unique nature of the media in question. Many large businesses during the 1930s tried their best to protest New Deal price controls. But they could hardly shut down their giant stores. The revenue loss would have been devastating, and the victims would have been the employees. So in the end, the private sector was forced to submit to the controls. It was the same in the 1970s with wage and price controls. How could the merchants resist?

But digital enterprises are in a different position entirely. They can vanish with a few clicks, giving the world a conjectural look at what happens when the state attacks the lifeblood of innovation and progress. Small changes in the law can have a gigantic effect. Just as one click can shut down this site, one law can do the same.

It is not only Wikipedia. Others are doing the same. WordPress, the open-source platform that powers nearly a quarter of new websites and has the most-popular content management system on the Web, has also stepped out in front with a call for action: "Normally, we stay away from... politics here at the official WordPress project...Today, I'm breaking our no-politics rule...How would you feel if the Web stopped being so free and independent? I'm concerned - freaked right the heck out about the bills that threaten to do this, and as a participant in one of the biggest changes in modern history, you should be, too."

There are many such examples. And even if successful, it is not enough. With or without SOPA, digital freedom is under attack. For example, ICANN, the gateway for all domain registration, is now requiring a verified official identity, supplied by government, for domain ownership. This change sets the stage for continuing shutdowns and strangulation.

The struggle is intensifying, and the sides are very clear: It is the government and old-line media companies that depend on the state's laws versus everyone else. Everyone else consists of the independently active, privately owned global society that lives and thrives in the digital age. The astonishing innovations of this age have taught an entire generation about the miraculous power of information generation and delivery, about the capabilities embedded in the spontaneous actions of individuals, about the capacity of people around the world to generate order and progress through cooperation and exchange.

The SMH reports that the Australian government is deferring internet censorship legislation to after the election - Conroy backs down on net filters. Remember to vote against Conroy in the upcoming election.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has capitulated to widespread concerns over his internet censorship policy and delayed any mandatory filters until at least next year.

Academics, ISP experts, political opponents, the US government and a broad cross-section of community groups have long argued that the plan to block a secret blacklist of "refused classification" web pages for all Australians was fraught with issues, for example, that blocked RC content could include innocuous material.

Having consistently ignored these concerns, Senator Conroy today announced that implementation of his policy would be delayed until a review of RC classification guidelines could be conducted by state and territory censorship ministers.

Glenn Greenwald has a post on reports that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has had his Australian passport confiscated - WikiLeaks founder has his passport confiscated.

This is a reminder that one can't run around exposing the secrets of the most powerful governments, militaries and corporations in the world without consequences (h/t):

The Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks had his passport confiscated by police when he arrived in Melbourne last week.

Julian Assange, who does not have an official home base and travels every six weeks, told the Australian current affairs program Dateline that immigration officials had said his passport was going to be cancelled because it was looking worn.

However he then received a letter from the Australian Communication Minister Steven Conroy’s office stating that the recent disclosure on Wikileaks of a blacklist of websites the Australian government is preparing to ban had been referred to the Australian Federal Police (AFP).

Last year Wikileaks published a confidential list of websites that the Australian government is preparing to ban under a proposed internet filter -- which in turn caused the whistleblower site to be placed on that list.

The Australian document was so damaging because the Australian government claimed that the to-be-banned websites were all associated with child pornography, but the list of the targeted sites including many which had nothing to do with pornography. That WikiLeaks was then added to the list underscores the intended abuse.

Forcing Assange to remain in Australia would likely be crippling to WikiLeaks. One of the ways which WikiLeaks protects the confidentiality of its leakers and evades detection is by having Assange constantly move around, managing WikiLeaks from his laptop, backpack, and numerous countries around the world. Preventing him from leaving Australia would ensure that authorities around the world know where he is and would impede his ability to maintain the secrecy on which WikiLeaks relies.

Secrecy is the crux of institutional power -- the principal weapon for maintaining it -- and there are very few entities left which can truly threaten that secrecy. As the worldwide controversy over the Iraqi Apache helicopter attack compellingly demonstrated, WikiLeaks is one of the very few entitles capable of doing so and fearlessly devoted to that mission. It's hardly surprising that those responsible would be harassed and intimidated by governmental agencies -- it'd be far more surprising if they weren't -- but it's a testament to how truly threatening they perceive outlets like WikiLeaks to be.

Glenn Greenwald has a post on the war against transparency, with Wikileaks being a prominent recent example - The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters.

A newly leaked CIA report prepared earlier this month (.pdf) analyzes how the U.S. Government can best manipulate public opinion in Germany and France -- in order to ensure that those countries continue to fight in Afghanistan. The Report celebrates the fact that the governments of those two nations continue to fight the war in defiance of overwhelming public opinion which opposes it -- so much for all the recent veneration of "consent of the governed" -- and it notes that this is possible due to lack of interest among their citizenry: "Public Apathy Enables Leaders to Ignore Voters," proclaims the title of one section.

But the Report also cites the "fall of the Dutch Government over its troop commitment to Afghanistan" and worries that -- particularly if the "bloody summer in Afghanistan" that many predict takes place -- what happened to the Dutch will spread as a result of the "fragility of European support" for the war. As the truly creepy Report title puts it, the CIA's concern is: "Why Counting on Apathy May Not Be Enough":

The Report seeks to provide a back-up plan for "counting on apathy," and provides ways that the U.S. Government can manipulate public opinion in these foreign countries. It explains that French sympathy for Afghan refugees means that exploiting Afghan women as pro-war messengers would be effective, while Germans would be more vulnerable to a fear-mongering campaign (failure in Afghanistan means the Terrorists will get you). The Report highlights the unique ability of Barack Obama to sell war to European populations.

It's both interesting and revealing that the CIA sees Obama as a valuable asset in putting a pretty face on our wars in the eyes of foreign populations. It is odious -- though, of course, completely unsurprising -- that the CIA plots ways to manipulate public opinion in foreign countries in order to sustain support for our wars. Now that this is a Democratic administration doing this and a Democratic war at issue, I doubt many people will object to any of this. But what is worth noting is how and why this classified Report was made publicly available: because it was leaked to and then posted by WikiLeaks.org, the site run by the non-profit group Sunshine Press, that is devoted to exposing suppressed government and corporate corruption by publicizing many of their most closely guarded secrets.

I spoke this morning at length with Julian Assange, the Australian citizen who is WikiLeaks' Editor, regarding the increasingly aggressive war being waged against WikiLeaks by numerous government agencies, including the Pentagon. Over the past several years, WikiLeaks -- which aptly calls itself "the intelligence agency of the people" -- has obtained and then published a wide array of secret, incriminating documents (similar to this CIA Report) that expose the activities of numerous governments and corporations. Among many others, they posted the Standard Operating Manual for Guantanamo, documents showing how corrupt offshore loans precipitated the economic collapse in Iceland, the notorious emails between climate scientists, documents showing toxic dumping off the coast of Africa, and many others. They have recently come into possession of classified videos relating to civilian causalities under the command of Gen. David Petraeus, as well as documentation relating to civilian-slaughtering airstrikes in Afghanistan which the U.S. military had agreed to release, only to change their mind.

All of this has made WikiLeaks an increasingly hated target of numerous government and economic elites around the world, including the U.S. Government. As The New York Times put it last week: "To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret." In 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center prepared a secret report -- obtained and posted by WikiLeaks -- devoted to this website and detailing, in a section entitled "Is it Free Speech or Illegal Speech?", ways it would seek to destroy the organization. It discusses the possibility that, for some governments, not merely contributing to WikiLeaks, but "even accessing the website itself is a crime," and outlines its proposal for WikiLeaks' destruction as follows ...

The Pentagon report also claims that WikiLeaks has disclosed documents that could expose U.S. military plans in Afghanistan and Iraq and endanger the military mission, though its discussion is purely hypothetical and no specifics are provided. Instead, the bulk of the Pentagon report focuses on documents which embarrass the U.S. Government: information which, as they put it, "could be manipulated to provide biased news reports or be used for conducting propaganda, disinformation, misinformation, perception management, or influence operations against the U.S. Army by a variety of domestic and foreign actors." In other words, the Pentagon is furious that this exposing of its secrets might enable others to engage in exactly the type of "perception management" which the aforementioned CIA Report proposes the U.S. do with regard to the citizenry of our allied countries.

All of this is based in the same rationale invoked by President Obama and the Democratic Congress when they re-wrote the Freedom of Information Act last year in order to suppress America's torture photos. It's the same rationale used by all governments to conceal evidence of their wrongdoing: we need to suppress our activities for your own good. WikiLeaks is devoted to subverting that mentality and, relatively speaking, has been quite successful in doing so.

The Age has a report on the Australian government's outrageous plans to introduce mandatory internet censoring, led by conrol freak communications minister Stephen Conroy - Government goes to war with Google over net censorship

The government intends to introduce legislation within weeks forcing all ISPs to block a blacklist of "refused classification" websites for all Australians ... a large and growing group of academics, technology companies and lobby groups say the scope of the filters is too broad and will not make a meaningful impact on internet safety for children. ..

Google, which has recently been involved in a censorship spat with China, has been one of the filtering policy's harshest critics. It has identified a range of politically sensitive and innocuous material, such as sexual health discussions and discussions on euthanasia, which could be blocked by the filters.

Last week, it said it had held discussions with users and parents around Australia and "the strong view from parents was that the government's proposal goes too far and would take away their freedom of choice around what information they and their children can access".

Google also said implementing mandatory filtering across Australia's millions of internet users could "negatively impact user access speeds", while filtering material from high-volume sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter "appears not to be technologically possible as it would have such a serious impact on internet access".

"We have a number of other concerns, including that filtering may give a false sense of security to parents, it could damage Australia's international reputation and it can be easily circumvented," Google wrote.

On ABC Radio last night, the majority of callers were opposed to the filters and right before the end of the segment, Senator Conroy attacked Google over its privacy credentials. ...

Senator Conroy also said he was not aware of the US State Department contacting his office or that of the Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith, over the internet filters. This contradicts a statement made by a US State Department spokesman yesterday.

"Our main message of course is that we remain committed to advancing the free flow of information which we view as vital to economic prosperity and preserving open societies globally," a U.S. State Department spokesman Michael Tran told The Associated Press. ...

Senator Conroy argues the he is only attempting to apply the same restrictions placed on the distribution of books, magazines, DVDs and other content to the internet.

But critics say this approach fails to consider that the internet is a vastly different, dynamic medium. They say Senator Conroy's proposal is a heavy-handed measure that is easily bypassed by criminals and could restrict access to legal information.

Senator Conroy has conceded that greater transparency is needed in terms of how content ends up on the blacklist, but last night he again refused to make the blacklist itself public, saying it would provide people instant access to the banned material.

The SMH has a report on a protest against internet censorship by the Australian government - Websites fade to black in censorship protest.

Hundreds of websites joined an Australia Day "internet blackout" today to protest against the Government's web censorship agenda, but even the internet industry body believes it will do little to lessen the Government's resolve.

The Greens, Democrats and ISP iiNet are among the organisations that pledged to fade their websites to black today and provide visitors with information about the Government's censorship plans. The blackout is expected to last until Friday.

The Government is determined to implement mandatory internet filtering of a secret blacklist of sites the Government's censors have determined are "refused classification" (RC).

Critics say RC is too broad and that providing the Government with a new censorship power is unnecessary, given that the filters could only ever cover a tiny fraction of the nasty websites on the internet. Child welfare groups have said it might give parents a false sense of security.

There are also fears over the lack of transparency in administering the blacklist and that the scope of what is blocked could drastically increase over time.

"My main problem with the filter proposal is that it won't work and that it sets up a really dangerous mechanism to centralise censorship of the net by the Australian Government," Greens communications spokesman Scott Ludlam said.

Topic du jour is the Australian government's sneaky pre-Christmas release of their plans to censor the internet, after some mock-trials "proving" the filter will be effective and won't have any adverse side effect - Crikey leads off with - Conroy’s internet filter: so what?.

“Our pilot, and the experience of ISPs in many Western democracies, shows that ISP-level filtering of a defined list of URLs can be delivered with 100% accuracy,” Senator Stephen Conroy said yesterday when announcing that mandatory internet censorship — sorry, “filtering” — is going ahead.

“It also demonstrated that it can be done with negligible impact on internet speed.”

Conroy is right on both counts, as it happens — provided you gloss over that reference to “many” unnamed democracies. I wouldn’t call a dozen countries with ISP-level filtering “many”, and in some of them filtering isn’t mandatory. And provided you restrict your aims precisely to those carefully worded factoids cherry-picked from Enex TestLab’s trial report.

And provided you never make a mistake.

Blocking a defined list of URLs [specific web addresses] such as the ACMA blacklist of Refused Classification material, even 100% of it, falls far short of “protecting” children from “inappropriate” material, to use the wording of Labor’s original cyber-safety policy.

Google’s index passed a trillion web pages a year and a half ago. ACMA’s manually compiled blacklist of a thousand-odd URLs reported by concerned citizens is a token drop in that ocean, a mere 0.0000001%.

ACMA told Senate Estimates that of the 1175 URLs on their blacklist on September 30, 54% were Refused Classification material, and only 33% of those related to child sexual abuse. The rest of the blacklist? 41% was X18+ material, and 5% was R18+ material without a “restricted access system” to prevent access by minors.

The same key problems with a filter-based approach, which Crikey has reported many times before, are confirmed by the Enex report.

If you go beyond the pre-defined ACMA blacklist to catch a wider range of content, the false positive rate — material blocked when it shouldn’t be — is still up to 3.4%. Enex’s examples include the incorrect blocking of “sperm whales” and “robin red breast”. In the industry, this is known as the Scunthorpe Problem.

Australia’s biggest telco, Telstra, wasn’t part of the official trial, but it conducted its own tests and discussed the results with Enex.

“Telstra found its filtering solution was not effective in the case of non-web based protocols such as instant messaging, peer-to-peer [file sharing like BitTorrent] or chat rooms. Enex confirms that this is also the case for all filters presented in the pilot.”

For all filters.

Telstra also reported that its filtering system could be overloaded if pages on heavy traffic sites like YouTube ended up on the blacklist. Every request for anything on YouTube would have to be routed to the secret filter box to see whether it was listed.

“This is also the case for all filters presented in the pilot,” reports Enex.

For all filters.

In any event, as the Enex report reminds us, “A technically competent user could, if they wished, circumvent the filtering technology.” In its own tests, Telstra didn’t even bother testing circumvention because they take it as given.

Bernard Keane thinks its just another bizarre example of Labor's urge to play wedge politics instead of governing responsibly - Net filtering won’t work, so what is Conroy up to? (I think he's underestimating their control freak impulses personally but he may have a point).

It’s been quite some time since I’ve seen as breathtakingly mendacious a policy announcement as yesterday’s declaration by Stephen Conroy that the government would introduce internet censorship.

It’s one thing to hold off on an announcement (which Conroy admitted he’d been sitting on since October) until the week before Christmas, when half the serious journalists in the country are on the other side of the world. That had its reward, with minimal, and decidedly thin, coverage of the announcement in the mainstream media today.

It’s quite another, even in these days of spin and media management, for a government minister to stand up and blatantly declare that black is white, and the government will be proceeding on the basis of that fact.

The internet “filtering” trial — perhaps we should drop the “filter” term, and call it what it is, censorship — was carefully structured by the government so that the filtering technology tested would meet low benchmarks and limited performance requirements. But it looks an awful lot like one of the reasons the government sat on the trial outcome for so long was because most of the trial results failed to meet even the minimal hurdles set up by the government.

On the basis of the trial report, even advocates of censorship could not support what Conroy has proposed, on the basis that it just doesn’t work.

That’s why Conroy, in charging ahead yesterday, had to tell a series of patent untruths. That filtering could be done with “100% accuracy”, when the trial saw up to 3.4% of web content (which means tens of million of web pages worldwide) wrongly blocked.

That the “wild claims” that censorship affects internet speed have been “put to bed” when the trial, despite trying to define the problem away by declaring “negligible” effect on usage speed as less than 10%, saw speed reductions of 30-40%.

Or the big lie, that filtering works, when several filters were bypassed more often than not (in one case, more than 90%), and the only filter that defeated nearly all efforts to circumvent it was the one with the 40%+ performance degradation. ...

The government’s real objective here is to shore up its family-friendly credentials. While the technologically literate may laugh at the trial outcome, and free speech advocates rail at censorship, Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy know they’re a tiny minority of voters. This is all about giving ill-informed and often lazy parents, most of whom think that you can “stumble upon” p-rnography on the internet, the illusion that their children are safe, even as their kids circumvent the mechanism and go looking for s-xual material, which is what kids have always done. That parents should be active monitors of what their kids consume in the media is apparently old-fashioned thinking.

It isn’t about changing votes, so much as solidifying the government’s branding in the minds of mainstream voters as morally middle-of-the-road and supportive of families.

The other target is the coalition. Hitherto, particularly under Nick Minchin, the coalition has been hostile to the filtering scheme. But in the end, the coalition — which in the face of Green opposition will be necessary for Conroy’s Bill to pass the Senate — may struggle to oppose it. Blocking the Bill will enable the government to portray the coalition as out-of-touch with families and “mainstream values”. The value of censorship as a wedge far exceeds any losses that will accrue from a few IT nerds.

And if the technically competent, as the report says, can bypass these filters easily, what’s the issue? Geeks can have an uncensored internet, while your average suburban mum and dad are happy their kids won’t be clicking onto child abuse while doing their homework.

This is where this political stunt has serious consequences, and where the issue stops being about the ineffectiveness of filtering technology and about freedom of speech. Conroy insists that the censorship will only be about RC-material. “So for people wanting to campaign on the basis that we’re going to maybe slip political content in — we will never support that. And if someone proposes that I will be on the floor of Parliament arguing against it.”

Good to hear, minister, and I actually believe you. But you’re in effect asking us to trust not just you but every politician in the future. We’ve all seen the confected moral panics that the tabloid media, and politicians, are happy to use. Maybe it’s an unsavoury incident on a reality TV show. Maybe it’s a particularly foul-mouthed chef. The results are the same — the demand for politicians to censor, to block, to ban and restrict.

And that’s before we get to the moralisers and the demonisers. Maybe it’s euthanasia, accepted and legal in other countries but banned from discussion in Australia. Maybe it’s junk-food advertising, or alcohol advertising, another alleged source of vexation to parents.

The government’s censorship proposal locks in a universal mechanism that can be extended at will by politicians. Those who want to circumvent it will be able to, yes, but the bulk of the population will be subject to it, barely aware that it’s there — like they are barely aware that politicians have already banned the online expression of certain ideas such as euthanasia.

Do you trust politicians with such a mechanism?

GetUP has a campaign going against the "great firewall" - Tear down the great firewall.

Senator Conroy thinks he can sneak his plan to censor the internet in as Australia settles in for Christmas. As he considers the future of the scheme he needs to know that we'll be watching every step of the way.

At this crucial moment send Senator Conroy a quick message to let him know what you think of his plans to censor Australia's internet.

Crikey's Bernard Keane has an interesting essay on how to avoid getting a form letter response to your complaints to the government - and how to make them aware of the impact of clogged bandwidth - Bernard Keane’s guide to writing to Ministers.

If your first instinct upon hearing about the Rudd-Conroy plan to censor the internet is to email Stephen Conroy, your local member and Labor senators from your state to protest, wait up.

Or, in fact, do it anyway, then read this.

Let me explain some facts about writing to ministers, drawn from my sordid, blood-soaked and adventure-filled time as a public servant.

For a start, understand that few ministers if any read their correspondence. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s that it’s not humanly possible to read even a fraction of the amount of emails, faxes and letters they get. So the chances of you directly influencing a Minister with your particularly brilliant insight into the issue are zip. Deal with it. Things don’t work like that.

Their staff will read correspondence, but only when considering a reply prepared by their Department.

And that is only a small proportion of the actual volume of correspondence received. Some is answered directly by bureaucrats. But much of it is simply binned. Don’t waste your time sending off a letter pre-prepared by some enthusiastic online advocacy group, where you sign at the bottom, endorsing the nicely-phrased sentiments at the top. They’re called “campaign” ministerials and are binned without being read or replied to (but please don’t tell the Friends of the ABC, who rely heavily on that technique, and haven’t had a letter to Canberra read for two decades).

Most non-campaign letters and emails - some departments still won’t reply to emails but demand your snail mail address, perhaps out of residual loyalty to Australia Post - are answered using what’s called “standard words” - a reply that ostensibly covers the issue raised but which normally says as little as possible. They say as little as possible because the mindset of bureaucrats and ministerial advisers is to keep as many options open as possible, except when there is a particular message that the Government wants to hammer.

Standard words are worked up by bureaucrats and edited and signed off by the Minister’s staff when they’re happy the words are risk-free or convey the desired message. In most departments, they are then loaded into electronic ministerial correspondence systems. This means a bureaucrat doesn’t even need to cut-and-paste into a Word document, merely tell the system to use a particular set of standard words under the name, address, salutation and opening paragraph, which have all been electronically entered already.

So if you send off an angry email or letter about net filtering, all you’ll likely get is an automatically-generated reply giving you the standard words on the issue. There’ll be minimal human involvement in the writing of it until it is stuffed into an envelope and dispatched.

You may not think it’s very democratic or consultative, but it’s a damn sight more efficient than processing correspondence by hand.

But if you can’t have any impact on policy, you can have an impact on the level of resources used to answer your letter. And that resource is the time of bureaucrats - the same bureaucrats who advise Conroy on policy, and implement his decisions. In most Departments, ministerial replies have to be approved by SES Band 1 officers before being sent to the Minister’s office, which means many replies consume the precious time both of senior bureaucrats and ministerial advisers. Many Departments also have formal agreements with Ministers that a certain proportion of correspondence will be answered within a certain period of time. If they’re not, more people have to be put into answering correspondence.

So if you want to consume as much of the Department of Broadband’s time as possible, here’s what to do. There’s not much you can do to avoid receiving a standard reply. But you don’t have to confine your missive to net filtering. Throw in some other topics. That means someone will have to put together a reply using standard words from different areas, which is a lot more complicated and can’t be done automatically. Ask about the rollout of the National Broadband Network (NBN). That means someone in the NBN area has to provide some words. Ask about Telstra. That’s another area entirely that has to provide input. If there’s three or four topics in your letter, bureaucrats will start arguing to avoid having to be responsible for it. The NBN area will tell the net filtering area it’s their responsibility to collate the response. The net filtering area will try to off-load it to the Telstra area. A Band 1 in one area will make changes and the whole lot will have to be re-approved by a Band 1 in another area.

Throw in something on Australia Post. Ask about something obscure. They may not have standard words at all and someone will have to actually prepare a proper reply.

You see, once your letter stops being a standard rant about filtering and requires actual work, the amount of time taken to prepare a response can snowball dramatically.

You can also use the Government’s system for allocating correspondence. As a start, always write to your MP first, even if it’s a Coalition MP. They will send the letter to Conroy and ask for a response to provide to you. MPs - even Opposition MPs - must get a response no matter what, as part of the civilities of politics, and it normally has to come from the Minister himself. But write to other Ministers as well. Ask Kim Carr what the impact of filtering will be on Australia’s IT industry. Ask Jenny Macklin what impact she thinks it will have on families. Ask Robert McClelland what the penalties will be for breaches of the mandatory filtering requirements. And ask Kevin Rudd how a Government that understands the need to bring Australia’s online infrastructure into the 21st century wants to drag it back to the 19th when it comes to content regulation.

All of those letters will have to go from the recipient’s department to Conroy’s Department for a response, then back to the originating Department, where they might add some additional material of their own. If you come up with a particularly complicated issue, the bureaucrats might start disagreeing with each other. Innovation bureaucrats might think Broadband’s net filter standard words doesn’t quite answer your question and want something else.

And don’t ask the same questions in different letters, otherwise they’ll bin them and tell you they understand you’ve separately written to your MP/another Minister/Kevin Rudd and here’s your job lot reply. Ask different questions and raise different issues.

And be pleasant. Apart from anything else, if there’s too much abuse in a letter, it gets thrown out (quite rightly). But these are decent, hard-working bureaucrats and regardless of what you think of Stephen Conroy, they deserve civility and respect.

Most of all, get your friends, acquaintances, family members, work colleagues, passing strangers, all writing. The bureaucratic capacity to handle ministerial correspondence is a lot like the net filters trialled earlier this year. At low levels of traffic they work OK, but once the traffic picks up, things start to choke up. That’s when Stephen Conroy and his office might start to notice that things are slowing down.

Following Jay Rockefeller's bizarre recent proclamation that the internet is the number one threat to the US homeland, Fast Company reports that Congress wants a way of completely shutting it down if necessary - Congress Seeks "Kill Switch" For Internet.

Congress is considering legislation that could give the President power to shut down large swaths of domestic Internet traffic, should he perceive a threat to national security.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 would give the government increased oversight in areas of "critical" Web infrastructure like banking, energy and telecommunications. The latter industry encompasses most private Internet service providers, meaning that officials could use the legislation as a kill switch over privately-owned networks. The bill is being introduced concomitantly with a second bill that would create a cabinet-level cybersecurity post in the White House.

Ironically, the nation's increasing need for cyber-vigilance is partially a result of new plans to make other infrastructures more advanced. Digital health records, smart electric grids and smarter traffic-management systems will all pose new security threats once brought online.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published an editorial condemning the legislation, saying that the biggest weaknesses in government cyber-security--lack of encryption, poor network management, and insufficient auditing--are far too "mundane" to warrant legislation of such wide scope.

Phrase of the week comes from Buffalo Geek - The Sphere of Deviance (via Cryptogon).

The row that developed around the Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer tête-à-tête was sadly misguided. Mainly pushed by media outlets who don’t understand the whole point of The Daily Show and the subversive reality of the show’s irony. The Daily Show succeeds because it is the only show on which views from outside the sphere of legitimate debate can be aired and find an audience. It’s comedic basis disarms the critics.

The people who regularly watch The Daily Show treat it as an end of the day metafilter for the news coverage they just consumed. Whether the views aired on The Daily Show are about shoddy financial reporting, corporate media complicity in governmental shenanigans or lazy journalism; the show serves as a cultural touchstone for people who know the whole media spectacle is a sham. Stewart has the only show on which there is even a mild analysis of those who deign to keep the “news” centrally controlled. The fact that he does it in an entertaining manner and that it airs after repeats of Crank Yankers are beside the point.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I refer to the “sphere of legitimate debate”, I point you to Daniel C. Hallin’s book ‘The Uncensored War’, in which he defined the range and biases of journalism in the American media establishment. This is a topic that is central to several intelligent criticisms of the media establishment, most recently put forward by Jay Rosen of NYU’s Pressthink.org.

1.) The sphere of legitimate debate is the one journalists recognize as real, normal, everyday terrain. They think of their work as taking place almost exclusively within this space. (It doesn’t, but they think so.) Hallin: “This is the region of electoral contests and legislative debates, of issues recognized as such by the major established actors of the American political process.”

Here the two-party system reigns, and the news agenda is what the people in power are likely to have on their agenda. Perhaps the purest expression of this sphere is Washington Week on PBS, where journalists discuss what the two-party system defines as “the issues.” Objectivity and balance are “the supreme journalistic virtues” for the panelists on Washington Week because when there is legitimate debate it’s hard to know where the truth lies. There are risks in saying that truth lies with one faction in the debate, as against another— even when it does. He said, she said journalism is like the bad seed of this sphere, but also a logical outcome of it.

3.) In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible. The press “plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda” the deviant view, says Hallin. It “marks out and defends the limits of acceptable political conduct.”

Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel” (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate.

The Sphere of Legitimate Debate is where reporters like John King, David Gregory, and Carl Cameron operate. They have also allowed entrance to new media reporters who serve as court jesters like Ana Marie Cox.

The Sphere of Deviance is where Amy Goodman of Democracy Now operates. Jay Rosen, Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald discuss why an Amy Goodman and those like her are not taken seriously.

In the sphere of deviance, we also find news subjects…people like Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, Ralph Nader and others who challenge the lockstep concepts of our society and politics. Think about the scorn that was heaped upon Peter Schiff when he tried to tamp down the irrational exuberance of financial analysts on CNBC and Fox News panel shows. He was treated as a member of the Sphere of Deviance. Schiff and others are made into wingnuts, jokes, zealots and are considered to be unserious. Including their views on a regular basis as part of a serious discussion and not as strawmen would not be convenient to the narrative and construct of American media. ...

The Stewart/Cramer discussion, as ancillary as it might seem to the greater crisis, was one of the first mainstream cracks in that veneer of always having the media define the boundaries of the argument.

Blogs and new media have been eating away at that veneer for quite some time and that’s why newspapers are suffering. Their inability to recognize the critical flaw in their coverage when the people are starting to demand more. Sure, they are having trouble with costs, scale and declining revenue, but the problem with their content precedes all of those things.

The Age reports that Australia's best ISP, iinet, is refusing to participate in the government's internet censorship trials any further (originally they agreed to participate purely to prove it wouldn't work), citing corporate social responsibility - iiNet pulls out of net censorship trials.

Australia's third largest internet provider, iiNet, has withdrawn from the Government's internet censorship trials, saying it could not "reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility".

The move comes after the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks last week published a leaked copy of the secret Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) blacklist of prohibited websites, which forms the backbone of the Government's censorship policy.

Far from containing just "illegal material" such as child pornography, the list of prohibited websites includes a wealth of legal material such as regular gay and straight porn sites, YouTube links, online poker sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites and even the sites of a Queensland dentist, a school canteen consultancy and an animal carer.

The Government's mandatory internet censorship plan, which is already being trialled by a number of small ISPs, will block sites contained on the ACMA blacklist for all Australians.

"We are not able to reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility, our customer service objectives and our public position on censorship," iiNet managing director Michael Malone said.

"It became increasingly clear that the trial was not simply about restricting child pornography or other such illegal material, but a much wider range of issues including what the Government simply describes as 'unwanted material' without an explanation of what that includes." ...

Senator Conroy and ACMA initially tried to discredit Wikileaks by saying the leaked blacklist was about double the size of ACMA's list. However, they admitted that both lists shared "some common URLs".

Wikileaks said the disparity was due to the fact that the leaked list was from August last year and contained a number of older URLs that had since been removed by ACMA.

It quickly followed up by leaking a second version of the blacklist, dated March 18 this year, that is approximately the same size as the ACMA list and contains many of the same seemingly innocuous websites. The renegade site also published instructions on how people can verify that the leaked list is legitimate.

The list was obtained by Wikileaks from internet filtering software that parents can opt to install on their computers. ACMA provides its list of prohibited sites to these software developers for inclusion in their products.

Wikileaks was offline over the weekend and continues to be inaccessible, with a message on the site saying that it is "currently overloaded by readers". It plans to deploy additional resources to resolve the issue and is calling for people to help out with donations.

Last week's leak of the ACMA blacklist reignited concerns that the internet filtering proposal could have unintended consequences for innocent businesses.

The ABC reports that the Australian Minister For Censorship, Stephen Conroy, says that the Wikileaks list of web sites the government wants to ban is inaccurate - but any Australian who helped publish it is at risk of prosecution - Leaked blacklist irresponsible, inaccurate: Conroy. Go figure how that works - you can be prosecuted for leaking a fake list of banned web sites - is this guy an Orwell fan with a twisted sense of humour ?????

Broadband and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says a list claiming to be the communication regulator's blacklist for a proposed internet filtering system is not the real blacklist. He has condemned Wikileaks, the website that published the list, as "grossly irresponsible".

This morning Wikileaks published what it says is the Australian Communication and Media Authority's (ACMA) blacklist of banned websites that is being used in trials of a proposed mandatory internet filtering system. ...

"The leak and publication of prohibited URLs is grossly irresponsible. It undermines efforts to improve cyber-safety and create a safe online environment for children," Senator Conroy said. ... "I am aware of reports that a list of URLs has been placed on a website. This is not the ACMA blacklist." ...

"There are some common URLs to those on the ACMA blacklist. However, ACMA advises that there are URLs on the published list that have never been the subject of a complaint or ACMA investigation, and have never been included on the ACMA blacklist," he said. "ACMA is investigating this matter and is considering a range of possible actions it may take including referral to the Australian Federal Police. Any Australian involved in making this content publicly available would be at serious risk of criminal prosecution."

Crikey's Guy Rundle has a column on internet censorship / net filtering and says it is the most important issue in Australian politics today, recommending the left and the libertarians co-operate for a change to defeat it - Rundle: there is no bigger issue than net censorship.

With the news that communications watchdog ACMA has put some pages of Wikileaks on its list of banned links -- and threatened linkers with five-figure daily fines -- the fight against the compulsory internet filtering enters a new and vital stage.

Wikileaks -- the document repository, no association with Wikipedia -- has published the list of sites banned by the Danish government, and these pages have been put on the blacklist, presumably as part of a worldwide compact, formal or otherwise, between national web censorship authorities.

Of course, the ACMA decision doesn't affect many people at the moment, only sites hosted from Australia. But should mandatory filtering be introduced, the pages would be blocked for everyone. As would the pages telling you which pages had been blocked. And the pages telling you the pages that tell you the ... and so on, a repressive tower.

Such a move should make crystal clear to everyone, what has always been obvious to anyone paying attention -- that Conroy's filter proposal represents the greatest assault on free speech and an open society in the country's history. By its very nature, it is categorical and self-concealing, far beyond the sleazy and capricious "sedition" laws of the Howard government. For the left and the libertarian right it has to be recognised not only as an utter priority, but as the point on which a political realignment occurs.

For the left, this involves reminding oneself of the old rule -- vital right up to the 1970s -- that civil liberties and free speech campaigns have to take priority over any other, because they are the precondition of political activity. In the 1930s, this involved a long campaign against the "vagrancy" laws used by the police to prevent anti-eviction campaigners, among others, speaking at street corners.

Through the 1960s it involved a campaign to abolish Australia's shockingly comprehensive book and film censorship laws, kept in place by the "Liberal" party as a sop to the DLP. In the late 60s it included a general strike in Victoria, when tramways union leader Clarrie O'Shea was jailed (and as a result of the strike, released) on archaic anti-combination laws, and the process didn't stop until the full decriminalisation of homos-xuality in the 70s, 80s, and -- ! -- 90s.

Throughout that series of struggles, the ALP was -- more often than not -- on the side of a freer and more open society. It was, in that sense, Australia's liberal party. For everyone up to and including Keating, the modernisation of Australia manifested in making it a fairer, better society was equally expressed in the idea that ideas, debate and media should be as free as possible, and that each was a condition of the other.

Like New Labour in the UK, the ALP has now abandoned that, for a number of reasons. Once it committed itself to neoliberal economics ("social capitalism") Labo(u)r became freaked about the social dissolution and rupture, the desocialisation created by turning the polis into a giant market of winners and losers. The tough answer to this is genuine social democracy, in which people have a social being not entirely defined by whether they're a "winner" or a "loser". The easy answer is to let the market rip, allow it to change the culture, and then seek to control and reshape people's behaviour, selling it to them as "protecting the many against the few".

Politically, this also serves as a way of outflanking the Right on the law and order issue, with a distinctive centre-left twist. The Right can talk about "throwing away the key", "three strikes", etc, sounding increasingly olde-worlde, while Labour can offer filters, ASBOs, CCTVs and so on, portraying themselves as both cutting-edge, high-tech, and hardline. And any objection concerning an open society from within its own ranks can be dealt with by reference back to the way in which "rights stopped Labour achieving real change" -- high courts striking down tax laws etc etc.

The result -- a party committed to a timid shadow of social democracy, waging a foreign imperial war, and trialling a world-standard setting system of secret censorship is obviously a force that is neither progressive, nor politically liberal nor left in any sense of the terms, and which has jumped wholly across to a space on the reactionary right (some might argue it always was, save for the period between the 60s and 90s, but that's a historical discussion).

Thus, the most important act is twofold -- recognising the categorical primary importance of this issue, and the need for total separation from any remnant or sentimental attachment to the ALP regarding it.

In that respect -- and I apologise in advance to anyone who's been campaigning on this issue, irritated at getting lectured from London -- several concrete moves seem crucial:

1. A significant number of left activists have to drop particular campaigns, and commit to full-time focus on an anti-filter campaign.

2. Through that, existing organisations need to be got to the next level of visible full-time campaigning, fundraising etc.

3. The campaign needs to be fought as an internet matter, still less attacked for its technical unworkability, but head-on as an attack on fundamental free speech.

4. The focus has to be not only on defeating the bill by a single Senate vote, high court repudiation of a regulation-only road, but as a comprehensive and mass rejection of it.

5. The various talk about mass public support for it has to be disregarded -- firstly because there's about six different figures floating around, and secondly because that opinion is not static. The campaign has to be addressed to people qua citizens, without any hesitation about whether "anyone cares about free speech" etc.

6. The campaign has to explicitly countenance strategically campaigning against ALP sitting members at the next election, even if a possible result of that was a return of the Coalition (presuming the Coalition maintains a credible opposition to the filter).

7. The activist left, right libertarians and anti-statist conservatives have to actively work together, not merely refrain from criticising each other, as part of a process of realigning Australian politics around different issues -- state vs. citizenship and control vs. liberation, primarily -- other than the secondary (GFC notwithstanding) left-right defining economic question.

I'm not suggesting one big group, with all the headaches that entails -- but I am suggesting that both a peak group which draws in the existing groups and connects them more explicitly to a free speech fight is pretty necessary, as is a more pointedly political action group, wholly focused on damaging the government for as long as it sticks to this idea.

Crucially that involves a moment of recognition from key activists -- no more than a dozen initially, would do it -- that this is an issue which demands they renounce their particular campaigns, and elevate this to a sole priority for a period of time. (For the record, your correspondent is involved in one of the groups feeding into CML, the Convention on Modern Liberty, the peak body formed last month in the UK).

That looks like a big ask, when such campaigns include the environment at a time when it is becoming visible to people that we are energetically undermining the basis of life on earth. But consider what can be banned if sites like Wikileaks are in the sights -- anything with back-of-a-truck commercial-in-confidence material, for example. Without anyone knowing they've been banned. Even the CIA redacts with a black texta, not a zippo. This is of another order entirely.

It is not despite the urgency of other (and contradictory) campaigns, but because of them that such a campaign has an absolute demand on attention -- in the same way as Vietnam, the Franklin Dam, or the Australia Card had at earlier times.

But that will depend not least on whether people on the left have the courage to make a final breach with the residual attachment to the ALP, and whether libertarians, as many have in the US, can overcome their distaste for collective action, especially with the left. That will largely depend on whether leading figures within each group see the situation in the same categorical and singular way as I do.

The SMH has a report on the latest attack on freedom of information in Australia, noting the bureaucrats / Stalinist losers in charge of censoring information now want to impose massive fines on those who publish links to sites on their list of blacklisted internet sites - Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11,000 a day. Hopefully Cryptome has (or soon will) publish the list so the world can have a good laugh at these guys. When the next election comes around remember I'm recommending you vote against the government.

The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks.

Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark's list of banned websites.

The move by the Australian Communications and Media Authority comes after it threatened the host of online broadband discussion forum Whirlpool last week with a $11,000-a-day fine over a link published in its forum to another page blacklisted by ACMA - an anti-abortion website.

ACMA's blacklist does not have a significant impact on web browsing by Australians today but sites contained on it will be blocked for everyone if the Federal Government implements its mandatory internet filtering censorship scheme.

But even without the mandatory censorship scheme, as is evident in the Whirlpool case, ACMA can force sites hosted in Australia to remove "prohibited" pages and even links to prohibited pages.

Online civil liberties campaigners have seized on the move by ACMA as evidence of how casually the regulator adds to its list of blacklisted sites. It also confirmed fears that the scope of the Government's censorship plan could easily be expanded to encompass sites that are not illegal.

"The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship," Wikileaks said on its website in response to the ACMA ban.

The site has also published Thailand's internet censorship list and noted that, in both the Thai and Danish cases, the scope of the blacklist had been rapidly expanded from child porn to other material including political discussions.

Already, a significant portion of the 1370-site Australian blacklist - 506 sites - would be classified R18+ and X18+, which are legal to view but would be blocked for everyone under the proposal. The Government has said it was considering expanding the blacklist to 10,000 sites and beyond.

Electronic Frontiers Australia said the leak of the Danish blacklist and ACMA's subsequent attempts to block people from viewing it showed how easy it would be for ACMA's own blacklist - which is secret - to be leaked onto the web once it is handed to ISPs for filtering.

"We note that, not only do these incidents show that the ACMA censors are more than willing to interpret their broad guidelines to include a discussion forum and document repository, it is demonstrably inevitable that the Government's own list is bound to be exposed itself at some point in the future," EFA said.

"The Government would serve the country well by sparing themselves, and us, this embarrassment."

Last week, Reporters Without Borders, in its regular report on enemies of internet freedom, placed Australia on its "watch list" of countries imposing anti-democratic internet restrictions that could open the way for abuses of power and control of information.

The main issue raised was the Government's proposed internet censorship regime.

"This report demolished the Communications Minister's contention that Australia is just following other comparable democracies," Greens communications spokesman Senator Scott Ludlam said.

"We are not. The Government is embarking on a deeply unpopular and troubling experiment to fine-tune its ability to censor the internet. I agree with Reporters Without Borders. If you consider this kind of net censorship in the context of Australia's anti-terror laws, it paints a disturbing picture indeed."

EFA said the Government's "spin is starting to wear thin" and it could no longer be denied that the ACMA blacklist targets a huge range of material that is legal and even uncontroversial.

The SMH reports that independent Senator Nick Xenophon is going to scuttle the government's mandatory internet censorship plan - Web censorship plan heads towards a dead end. Please re-elect him South Australians.

The Government's plan to introduce mandatory internet censorship has effectively been scuttled, following an independent senator's decision to join the Greens and Opposition in blocking any legislation required to get the scheme started.

The Opposition's communications spokesman Nick Minchin has this week obtained independent legal advice saying that if the Government is to pursue a mandatory filtering regime "legislation of some sort will almost certainly be required".

Senator Nick Xenophon previously indicated he may support a filter that blocks online gambling websites but in a phone interview today he withdrew all support, saying "the more evidence that's come out, the more questions there are on this".

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has consistently ignored advice from a host of technical experts saying the filters would slow the internet, block legitimate sites, be easily bypassed and fall short of capturing all of the nasty content available online.

Despite this, he is pushing ahead with trials of the scheme using six ISPs - Primus, Tech 2U, Webshield, OMNIconnect, Netforce and Highway 1.

But even the trials have been heavily discredited, with experts saying the lack of involvement from the three largest ISPs, Telstra, Optus and iiNet, means the trials will not provide much useful data on the effects of internet filtering in the real-world.

Senator Conroy originally pitched the filters as a way to block child porn but - as ISPs, technical experts and many web users feared - the targets have been broadened significantly since then.

ACMA's secret blacklist, which will form the basis of the mandatory censorship regime, contains 1370 sites, only 674 of which relate to depictions of children under 18. A significant portion - 506 sites - would be classified R18+ and X18+, which is legal to view but would be blocked for everyone under the proposal.

This week Senator Conroy said there was "a very strong case for blocking" other legal content that has been "refused classification". According to the classification code, this includes sites depicting drug use, crime, sex, cruelty, violence or "revolting and abhorrent phenomena" that "offend against the standards of morality".

And last month, ACMA added an anti-abortion website to its blacklist because it showed photographs of what appears to be aborted foetuses. The Government has said it was considering expanding the blacklist to 10,000 sites and beyond. ...

The policy has attracted opposition from online consumers, lobby groups, ISPs, network administrators, some children's welfare groups, the Opposition, the Greens, NSW Young Labor and even the conservative Liberal senator Cory Bernardi, who famously tried to censor the chef Gordon Ramsay's swearing on television.

This week, a national telephone poll of 1100 people, conducted by Galaxy and commissioned by online activist group GetUp, found that only 5 per cent of Australians want ISPs to be responsible for protecting children online and only 4 per cent want Government to have this responsibility.

A recent survey by Netspace of 10,000 of the ISP's customers found 61 per cent strongly opposed mandatory internet filtering with only 6.3 per cent strongly agreeing with the policy.

An expert report, handed to the Government last February but kept secret until December after it was uncovered by the Herald, concluded the proposed scheme was fundamentally flawed.

Even Labor has previously opposed ISP-level internet filtering when the Howard Government raised it as a method for protecting kids online.

frogblog has a report on opposition to draconian new copyright laws in New Zealand - Internet blackout gathers steam.

The Creative Freedom Foundation’s internet blackout campaign is gathering steam, and very rightly seeks to pressure Cabinet into killing off the new s92a of the Copyright Act, due to come into force next week.

These are just some of the excellent banners that are going up all over the place in support of the campaign. People are also turning their Facebook, Twitter and other avatars black.

Do you think it is all right for people to be denied their internet access based solely on an accusation, without due process?

Do you think that ISPs and website owners should have to suddenly become experts in copyright law in order to defend their patch or customers from vexatious accusations?

Do you think that such a regulation is even remotely workable, or does it go against everything that this government campaigned on? The Bill was Labour’s baby, but it was supported by national and others and now they are reluctant to acknowledge and correct their mistake.

My favourite summary is by Juha over at geekzone, and it is well covered twice by Kiwiblog as well, who tries to get the Nats off the hook. The Greens and the Maori parties were the only ones to vote against this rubbish in the first place. Public address has a post with the actual section of the Act here. Why not join the fight and join the fun?

Crikey has an update on Australia's farcical plans to filter the internet, noting that Senator Conroy is now trying to frame the widespread opposition to his totalitarian plan the work of "extreme libertarians" - Who supports compulsory Internet filtering, exactly?. What a schmuck - and shame on Clive Hamilton too.

The field trials of the Rudd government's compulsory Internet filters, which were completed just before Christmas... no, they started before Christmas... no, that's not right either... when do they start? Senator Conroy? Anyone? Can't say? Fat kid on the far right? Okay, The Australian says they're "imminent". So another Christmas then.

The Oz "understands" that one cause of delay is that ISPs taking part want more money. My understanding is that their understanding is understandable. Of the $44.2 million for the filter project, $300,000 is for field tests. A mere 0.7% -- under $20,000 per participating ISP -- seems remarkably little for trialling a major cross-organisational IT project -- especially given the need to properly evaluate this controversial technology.

Anyway, while the government's sorting out the trials, let's reflect on where the support comes from.

Senator Conroy tries to portray the filter-fighters as "extreme libertarians". But with GetUp!'s "Save The Net" campaign having already gathered 95,000 signatures and $50,000, it's starting to look pretty mainstream. That, plus a new survey by middle-rank ISP Netspace, starts to paint the supporters of compulsory filtering as the minority.

Netspace isn't taking part in the trials because the Expression of Interest contained "insufficient detail, unrealistic timeframes and unclear funding arrangements".

"We considered these barriers to participating in any meaningful way," said Matthew Phillips, Netspace's Regulatory and Carrier Affairs Manager. "Instead we are contributing... in another way, by engaging our customers to find out what they want and how they feel about the government's ISP filtering policy."

Some 9,700+ responded, roughly 10% of Netspace's customer base plus a few outsiders. The results are clear. When asked "Do you agree with the Federal Government's policy to make ISP level filtering mandatory for all Australians?" 79% either disagreed or strongly disagreed.

Mandatory Internet filtering is presented as core ALP policy. Yet it dates back to 2006, when Kim Beazley was leader. His other policies, like a department of homeland security and a coast guard, are long dead.

But the current push for censorship really started with Clive Hamilton and his 2003 report, co-authored with Michael Flood, Youth and Pornography in Australia: Evidence on the extent of exposure and likely effects. As watchdog group Electronic Frontiers Australia documents, 2003 was when Hamilton was quoted as saying "the information superhighway is principally a conduit for pornography".

The petitions started the following year.

"Since Nov 2004, there have been at least 35 petitions tabled calling for mandatory ISP-level filtering," writes that tireless documenter of censorship, Irene Graham.

"24 of them are a petition form published by the Australian Family Association (which is actually a religious right organization). Those petitions also want ISPs to be subject to 'liability for harm caused to children by inadequate efforts to protect minors from exposure'."

In 2006, Senator Conroy presented the key petition supporting the current policy, with 20,646 signatures, the bulk of which were gathered through churches. The remaining 11 petitions are copies of that, with from 18 to 145 signatures each.

The Christian Right continues to be Conroy's main supporter. Only last weekend the Fairfax news sites carried the Australian Christian Lobby's Jim Wallace's argument for compulsory filtering, which I have deconstructed elsewhere.

Curiously, Wallace uses exactly the same two examples of over-the-top p-rnography, r-pe and b-stiality, that Hamilton used in his polemic for the ABC News website in November. Who's coordinating whose talking points here?

Crikey reports that the rest of the world continues to mock and criticise the Australian government's big-brotherish plan to filter the internet based on a still vague set of criteria - The world smirks at Conroy's censorship plan.

The rest of the world has been smirking at Stephen Conroy's ill-conceived plan to censor Australia's Internet for a while now, but a new study published by Brooklyn Law School entitled "Filtering in Oz: Australia's Foray Into Internet Censorship" is a serious embarrassment.

This report is important. Not only is it authored by a reputable and neutral foreign observer but it also focuses more on the legitimacy of the scheme than the technical concerns, and it finds some serious problems. Despite the sober language, phrases like "troubling", "worrisome", "politically motivated" and "unaccountable" are common.

Contrary to persistent claims by the Minister, the study finds that Australia "will likely become the first Western democracy to block access to on-line material through legislative mandate."

But is it a legitimate experiment? The study's author applies a process-based methodology to determining censorship’s legitimacy by asking four questions. Is the country open about its censorship plans and the reason behind them? Is it transparent about what is to be restricted? How narrow is the filtering? And finally, are the processes and decision makers behind the scheme accountable? While the Government earns praise for openness (Internet filtering was a central campaign promise), serious issues are highlighted in the other three areas.

Commentators, industry groups like Electronic Frontiers Australia and opposition political parties have consistently called for clarity on both the aims of the censorship scheme and the range of material to be targeted. Yet phrases like "other unwanted material" still represent the best information we have received from the Government. Whether or not this is a deliberate attempt to hobble debate we cannot say, but the situation was not lost on Bambauer:

To date, Australia’s transparency regarding its filtering has been poor. The country has vacillated on what material it will target for blocking. This uncertainty makes it difficult for citizens to assess whether the scope of material blocked is appropriate, and whether the set of targeted sites comports with the underlying rationales for censorship. The Labor government is opaque about the types of sites that will be blocked, how a site will be evaluated for filtering, and how those decisions map to larger social and political goals.

Indeed, in another part of the study the author examines the hypothetical 10,000-site blacklist floated by the Government, and wonders whether this proves they have an idea of the scope or are merely guessing. "The latter seems more likely," he concludes.

This confusion has the net effect of robbing Australians of the ability to make decisions about the merits of the scheme, but also makes it hard to measure the scheme against its stated goal -- protecting children. If the target of the filter is now primarily websites accessed by adults, this suggests that the rationale for Net censorship has changed since the election promises were made. Bambauer agrees. "In short, the Rudd government’s inability, or unwillingness, to elucidate a consistent set of content categories that will be off-limits, either to all Australians or to minors, undermines citizens’ ability to compare concrete plans for filtering to the reasons for implementing it initially." ...

The report is quite comprehensive and the Ministry would be well served to study it. The study does err, perhaps, in the amount of power it ascribes to Senator Steve Fielding of Family First in driving the policy. Nevertheless, it reinforces the position of the many stakeholders in Australia who have opposed the filter, not solely on technical grounds or from some misguided sense of cyber-anarchism, but from solid and fundamental policy/democratic principles. We are not the only ones who question the ability of our Government to anticipate, understand and manage the many complex issues surrounding such a radical internet policy.

In his conclusion, the study's author makes the following observation:

Filtering looks easy and cheap, and calls to block access to material that is almost universally condemned – such as child pornography, extreme violence, or incitements to terrorism – are hard to resist. But this focus confuses means with ends.

It’s hard to disagree. The Government cannot claim a mandate for such a poorly-defined policy. If it is to have any legitimacy, the public and industry must be informed well in advance of the next stages.

I might add that calling "cyber-anarchism" misguided tends to ignore that the internet as it exists today (particularly all forms of online commerce, including internet banking) wouldn't exist if it weren't for the cyber-anarchists.

Crikey reports that the Labor government's attack on the internet in Australia has opened a new front, now looking to include BitTorrent and other P2P networks (though the ISPs are just laughing at them so far, pointing out that this is even less practical than Conroy's original big brother fantasy) - Conroy attacks BitTorrent: Ruins Australia online.

The biggest criticism of the Rudd government's plan to centrally censor the internet -- apart from it being ill-defined, secretive, a potential human rights abuse, a great way to screw up broadband speeds, poorly planned, way behind schedule and tackling the problem of child s-xual abuse in completely the wrong way -- is that it won't work. As Crikey has reported several times before, none of the filters tested in the first half of 2008 could touch peer-to-peer (P2P) networks like BitTorrent, which is where The Bad Stuff lives.

Just before Christmas, Senator Conroy tackled that last bit by declaring in a single sentence on his new blog: "Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial." If so, it's news to the ISPs who signed up. But then they haven't been given official notification yet, and the trials were meant to start before Christmas. Ahem.

BitTorrent is easy to understand, provided you skip the brain-imploding technical details. Instead of everyone downloading the same big media file from a central server, causing congestion, the file is split up into lots of little pieces. As soon as you've download one random piece, your computer becomes a server, swapping the pieces you already have for the missing pieces downloaded by other users -- your peers. Automatically. Eventually everyone gets all of the pieces, with the work shared amongst all the participants.

BitTorrent is incredibly efficient. As we reported in March, Norway's national broadcaster NRK used BitTorrent to distribute a full HD TV program to 80,000 people for just US$350 in bandwidth and storage charges.

Yesterday, Crikey showed NRK project manager Eirik Solheim reports of Conroy's plan. "Wow!" he said. "A minister that is actively working to limit your country's ability to distribute information and compete globally... If he plans to block BitTorrent traffic in general that would be a serious limitation to people's ability to distribute content, creativity, ideas and information."

Sure, P2P has a bad rep. The Bad Guys use it to distribute illegal p-rnography, and ordinary folks use it to bypass the slow, old-fashioned distribution mechanisms of the music, TV and movie industries -- committing copyright naughtiness along the way. But P2P also distributes open source software and other legitimate material.

As Solheim puts it, "Blocking BitTorent because pirates also use it to distribute illegal content would be like blocking all roads because people drive too fast and criminals transfer illegal goods."

Selectively filtering BitTorrent "sounds very difficult", says Solheim. ... Solheim calls BitTorrent "a very robust and effective distribution method, especially good for TV stations with popular content." With Australia's broadband development already well behin

GetUp's campaign against internet filtering in Australia continues to gather steam, with over 75,000 signatures so far.

The Age reports that a child welfare group doesn't think the government's internet filter is a good way of protecting children and that there are much better ways of spending the money - Children's welfare groups slam net filters.

Support for the Government's plan to censor the internet has hit rock bottom, with even some children's welfare groups now saying that that the mandatory filters, aimed squarely at protecting kids, are ineffective and a waste of money.

Live trials of the filters, which will block "illegal" content for all Australian internet users and "inappropriate" adult content on an opt-in basis, are slated to begin by Christmas, despite harsh opposition from the Greens, Opposition, the internet industry, consumers and online rights groups.

Holly Doel-Mackaway, adviser with Save the Children, the largest independent children's rights agency in the world, said educating kids and parents was the way to empower young people to be safe internet users.

She said the filter scheme was "fundamentally flawed" because it failed to tackle the problem at the source and would inadvertently block legitimate resources.

Furthermore there was no evidence to suggest that children were stumbling across child pornography when browsing the web. Doel-Mackaway believes the millions of dollars earmarked to implement the filters would be far better spent on teaching children how to use the internet safely and on law enforcement.