Internet Censorship: coming soon to a country near you!
The Australian federal government is pushing ahead with a plan to introduce mandatory internet filtering to all Australian homes, schools, and public computers. The details are not yet clear, but an ALP article says that the initial Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) trial covered not just illegal, but also "inappropriate" content. The stated reason for this filtering would be to make the Internet "safer, particularly for children".
I wrote about some of the problems with similar schemes set up in other liberal democratic states in a recent paper, but for a quick summary of the issues you can visit Electronic Frontiers Australia's No Clean Feed page. EFA notes that in all likelihood, the list of blocked sites will remain a secret, all homes will have their Internet filtered (whether or not they have children), and the basis for adding and having sites removed from the blacklist will be unclear.
These schemes are highly problematic. As well as technical issues with implementing such schemes, the blocking of "inappropriate" content may include sites that many Australians should legitimately be able to access. In March 2006, the Danish filter was found to be blocking a legal sex site, while The Pirate Bay has been temporarily or permanently blocked in Sweden, Denmark, and other countries. In the UK, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has proposed extending the child pornography filters to cover 'extremist' websites. A recent EFA article also discusses more worrisome developments, including "the existence of a second, secret black list, that would apply even to
homes that managed to opt out of the child-safe filtering scheme."
Those of you who are researchers should be particularly concerned about these proposals. The more our access to information is limited, the less effective we are. When the government attempts to establish themselves as arbiters of what can and can't be said, and read, we (and the population as a whole) become limited. I am not trying to argue that this is the slippery slope that leads to 1984, but it is a concerning and unnecessary scheme that we should be paying attention to.
The No Clean Feeds site recommends that you take action by contacting Senator Conroy (the Communications Minister) or your ISP, signing a petition, or raising awareness of the scheme. Think about how often you use the Internet, and what it means to your research and your life.