More regarding freedom of intarwubs
Oct. 16th, 2008 07:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentric1. This is the man to complain to if you feel inclined to make a formal complaint. Interestingly, his media releases page includes nothing about the filtering plans. But back here he promised that there would be a way to opt out of the censorship system.
2. I put A more cogent rant up on my blog, in which I make conjecture about the consequences for academia. We have the world's leading expert on Potter fandom working in Australia, people. Wouldn't it be entertaining if she couldn't access her research material?
2. I put A more cogent rant up on my blog, in which I make conjecture about the consequences for academia. We have the world's leading expert on Potter fandom working in Australia, people. Wouldn't it be entertaining if she couldn't access her research material?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2008-10-16 09:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-16 09:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-16 10:22 am (UTC)If they really want to implement this hare-brained scheme, they're going to have to look into developing a pretty intelligent filtering system.
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Date: 2008-10-16 10:24 am (UTC)I'd write to Mr Conroy Knobhead, but I can't think what to say. Dear Mr Knob, I, a writer of Narnian porn, am distressed... yeah, doesn't come off well.
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Date: 2008-10-16 10:40 am (UTC)I was trying to think of a metaphor or a comparison today and all I could come up with was this:
Laws in general aim to catch and punish people who are doing something wrong. They don't attempt to bind the hands of every single person in the population in order to prevent anyone doing wrong. For example, the police catch people who speed, rather than the govt ordering that all cars be limited to a speed not exceeding the speed limit. Philosophically/morally that's important (so as not to become a Nanny State), but also costwise because it's less expensive to catch the people who are actually doing wrong than to try and make it impossible for anyone to do wrong.
Aside from that, legislation such as that being proposed will be like the gun control legislation - of course it will make it hard for anyone to own a gun, and by and large, law abiding citizens won't mind that there are tighter controls on gun ownership. But the people they are hoping to catch, i.e. the people we should be worried about owning guns, will be the people who exert themselves to find ways around the controls or make their activities more covert so that they slip under the radar.
I reckon it's going to be the same with this internet filtering thing. The entire population of Australia will be made miserable with a filtering system that slows down and/or disrupts their access to perfectly legitimate sites in order to prevent them accessing things that most people would never want to look at anyway. The people who want to look at kiddie porn will look at it regardless, because about five minutes after the law is implemented and the filters are hoisted, someone will find a way around the them. It is, IMO, a battle that cannot be won in the way the government is trying to do it. They are far better off working on refining their police operations or whatever to better target and snare the relatively few people who look for illegal stuff on the internet, than punishing the whole country in advance.
Grrrrraaaarrrrghhhhh!!!
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Date: 2008-10-16 10:44 am (UTC)Hmm... well, I'll put writing to Mr Knobhead Senator on my long to-do list. :D
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Date: 2008-10-16 10:55 am (UTC)I was using the gun control thing more to point out that people will find a way to get around the internet filtering thing, rather than for the moral argument of letting people freely wave their own guns around (or not).
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Date: 2008-10-16 10:59 am (UTC)I want it to be different. But I'm not sure that it is, except that gun control doesn't ban everything that MIGHT maybe be a gun, or talks about guns, whereas keyword based filtering WILL do that for illegal online whatevers.
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Date: 2008-10-16 11:24 am (UTC)Unfortunately, you can't really licence internet use or monitor it in the same way as for guns, because then you run into privacy problems.
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Date: 2008-10-17 04:30 am (UTC)This is what the laws are designed to stop:
Kiddie-porn maker: Oh, Henson's allowed to photograph half-nekked kiddies. Therefore, I'm allowed to make explicitly sexualised and abusive kiddie porn.
But here's the situation they might be unwittingly endorsing:
Kiddie-porn maker: what I'm doing isn't wrong, the government are just being tossers like they were to Henson. That was art. Maybe my porn is art too, since the framework that differentiates art and porn has been so obviously ignored by policy-makers.
OK, artistic ontology aside (complicated question), my point is that you end up with an underground of seriously damaging stuff, like kiddy-porn, that has a new way to self-rationalise. The same could happen with illegal stuff on the internet. If LJ were banned, for instance, inciters of racial hatred could easily lump themselves in with less harmful, but apparently "illegal" censored things.
This makes me angry.
Also, I agree that it is action that makes someone a paedophile, not intent. To brand everyone who has a schoolgirl fantasy (or who plays that out with a consenting adult) as a paedophile is similarly to trivialise the problem. I think such fantasies are disturbing, and perhaps something to do with our society. But ultimately they don't hurt anyone unless a kiddy is abused.
When that happens, throw them to the inmates with children.
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Date: 2008-10-17 04:41 am (UTC)Sorry to anyone who was offended by my failing to account for the complicated factors influencing sex offenders - I know they're people too. It's just a particularly difficult issue to try and be humane and understanding about.
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Date: 2008-10-16 11:57 am (UTC)You're not gonna get any disagreement from me. I think it's unbelievably high-handed, arrogant and paternalistic, on top of the point that I just do not trust that this will be used only for the reasons they're talking about.
And the worst part of all this is that the other lot would be even worse, so we have no-one to do anything. I hope the Greens or someone will at least put up token resistance...
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Date: 2008-10-16 12:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-16 12:54 pm (UTC)