Conroy attacks BitTorrent: Ruins Australia online

@Simon: Thanks for that history, and for reminding us that the rules for censorship online and in interactive media were made arbitrarily by politicians in response to a moral panic. We saw a similar example in the Bill Henson case where the words “naked” and “child” has Certain People frothing at the mouth — when the Australian Censorship Classification Board rated the imagery PG.

Finding a way to mobilise the punters will be difficult here. The debate has already been framed as a “filter” creating a “clean” feed, which automatically makes any opponents of the idea “dirty”. I’ve tried to promote “Conroy’s Rabbit-Proof Firewall”, using ridicule rather than a direct attack, but I’m not sure it’ll be that effective.

@Alastair: Correct, Conroy’s single sentence is ambiguous. However given Mark Newton‘s solid argument — thank you, Sir! — I’m guessing someone answered the question “Can you deal with P2P?” with a “Yes” without working through the subtleties.

For those of us who’ve been part of (or at least witness to) the continuous arms race between the Good Guys and Bad Guys on the Internet these past couple of decades, it does get frustrating to see expertise ignored in favour of sales hype from the snake-oil brigade.

@Frank Filippone: Exactly. And as someone else pointed out, when we all move to IPv6 with every packet encrypted, everything becomes difficult to “filter”. It’s like trying to stop influenza by going after each virus particle individually with a fly-swat.

@Mark Newton: It’d be interesting to know who in the Minister’s office actually has technical knowledge of how the Internet works. It all sounds like they’re being briefed by vendors — because vendors have the money to employ professional marketers and write well-rehearsed pitches, and can write off external viewpoints as uninformed critics and underlings.

@Phillip Molly Malone: The human right I’m talking about is freedom of speech, which during World War II was adopted by the Allies as one of the Four Freedoms which differentiated them from the oppressive regimes they were fighting, and which later became part of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Senator Conroy, Bernadette McMenamin and censorship-fan Clive Hamilton try to tag anyone introducing freedom of speech into this discussion as a promoter of child abuse, each for various reasons — and I can see a whole essay in that alone. “We must protect the children” is a great piece of camouflage. But there is a risk.

Here’s why…

When we make laws and build bureaucracies and systems, we do so not just for whatever the government says publicly it’s going to use them for now, but also for whatever any conceivable future government might want to use them for in the future. Time and time again, governments have demonstrated that they’re willing, even keen to encourage this sort of scope creep. Once the technology and staff are in place, it’s easy to add related tasks.

A system to monitor phone calls might be introduced to stop “the terrorists”, but once it’s in place its use can be extended to less and less important crimes — to the point where in the UK now local governments can order a phone tap on someone suspected of illegally dumping rubbish. A crime, yes, but hardly mass murder.

Conroy’s “plan”, at least what’s been spelt out, has all the key elements of a centralised speech-suppression system precisely like China has deployed.

• Technology will centrally block certain material.
• The technology is being tested for its ability to block all sorts of material, not just the ACMA blacklist.
• The list of what’s blocked is ill-defined and can be added to at the government’s whim. Conroy has repeatedly said it’s “only” about the ACMA blacklist. But he’s also spoken about potential extensions to that list, used undefined terms like “harmful” and “inappropriate” to describe that extra material, and continuously avoided saying precisely what the intention is. Also, he has misrepresented the ACMA blacklist by saying it’s “mainly” child abuse and other illegal material, but analysis has shown that legal material can and does end up on the list.
• The list of what’s blocked is secret. There’s even specific Freedom of Information legislation to preserve its secrecy!
• Items may be added to the blacklist because they “potentially” break the rules, not because they’ve been proven to break the rules.
• There is no right of appeal and no process for dealing with material which is incorrectly blocked.

A dangerous machine is being built. Senator Conroy assures us it’s about protecting the children. But there are no safeguards that the machine won’t be used for something else — indeed by its very nature it could easily be used for something else and the government could just deny it.

It’s also easy to demonstrate that “protecting the children” is more effectively done by funding education and policing, and by helping parents make their own decisions, not by this sort of dangerous machine.

Conroy seems to be saying, “Well, let’s just start building is, testing it, and see how we go.” And of course, should it be built, the world won’t end immediately, critics like me will be ridiculed as scaremongers and it’ll all be forgotten when the next football star gets caught with a prostitute. But the machine will still be there, ready to be used.

I say we don’t let them start building it at all.

@Phillip Molly Malone: You say:

Do you see that your using the Howard/Bush terrorism is bad argument against the Filter?

Nope, you’ve lost me there. Care to spell out the steps in more detail?

As for trusting the government, as I say, it’s also about trusting all potential future governments. Things can change rapidly in only a decade or two. Mentioning German, Italy and Japan in this context is a cliché, but nevertheless true. Maybe those with better History than me could suggest less-obvious examples.

I’m starting to think the Dunning-Kruger Effect is in full force. A corollary is that you have to know enough about a subject to even suspect you might be being fed bullshit.