A Joint Select Committee on Cyber-Safety has been set up as of 15th of March 2010. While this is a good thing as far as investigating ways in which Australians might need help or guidance online, those interested in online rights might be concerned that a committee has as much opportunity to confuse myth with reality in terms of online problems, as it does to come up with real world solutions to challenges online.
EFA has received the text of a letter from Liberal Party Senator Sue Boyce to Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith demanding they come clean on the nature of representations made by the U.S. government regarding their internet censorship policy.
Recent revelations that the U.S. Department of State had broached the subject with the Australian government, followed up by a diplomatically-worded but damning statement by U.S. ambassador Jeff Bleich on Q&A last week leave little doubt that Australia is on the U.S.'s watch list. The Obama administration drew a line in the sand in January with Secretary of State's Hillary Clinton's landmark speech on internet freedom. Despite disingenuous attempts to spin it otherwise, Senator Conroy's mandatory censorship scheme clearly crosses that line.
This has not been lost on Senator Boyce. In her letter, she questions Senator Conroy's assertion that the U.S. government merely asked for some background information on the censorship plan. "I am sure that [State Department spokesperson] Mr Clay would have chosen his words carefully and I find it difficult to reconcile a statement that the US Government had 'raised concerns' with Minister Conroy's assertion that the US Government had only asked for background information."
Referring to Ambassador Bleich's comments, Senator Boyce goes on to say,
It is a deplorable situation when Australians have to rely upon the frankness of a foreign diplomat to provide information about bilateral discussions on a very important matter because relevant Australian Ministers either dissemble or just refuse to say anything.
Given the Ambassador's statement that the US Government has been "able to accomplish the goals Australia has described … without having to use internet filters" I would appreciate your advice as to whether the US Government has advised the Australian Government about how that has been managed in the USA, when that advice was provided and to whom.
To those following the debate it will be well known that the mandatory filtering plan has drawn criticism for its technical flaws, confused goals, free-speech risks and ever-shifting details. The fact that it is drawing international opprobrium is not new - for instance, Conroy's receipt of the "Internet Villain of the Year" award - but the remarks by the United States show just how seriously this is being taken.
When Reporters Without Borders named Australia as a country "under surveillance" as an internet enemy earlier in the year, the Minister tried to deflect the blame onto EFA for misleading them. Are we also to blame for misinforming Secretary Clinton, ambassador Bleich, and even President Obama himself? Or could it just be that it's possible to understand Senator Conroy's policy and harbour serious concerns without being sympathetic to child pornography? While we don't expect the Minister to concede this any time soon, the broad array of organisations opposing the filter is making this line of attack increasingly untenable.
In any case, EFA looks forward to hearing the Ministers' response to Senator Boyce's timely questions.
The full text of the letter is available here.
For all his faults, Stalin was a pioneer in the field of image manipulation. Airbrushing liquidated foes from official photographs was the photoshopping of its day. And although Stalin (like modern dicatators) would have loathed the internet for its uncanny ability to let the truth slip out, he would have admired the way information can be changed in realtime and disappear instantly.
Many companies and individuals have been caught out trying to redact embarrassing material, but we can't always be sure when, how and why information is changing. When do personal and corporate interests take over, and when is the law at play? As a champion of an open internet, while at the same time a corporate citizen in hundreds of jurisdictions around the world, Google has a fine line to walk. To many, Google is the internet and they are bombarded with requests to remove unwanted material. They have no choice but to take those that come from governments and the courts very seriously.
Today Google have announced a new initiative to bring some transparency to this process. Google's Government Requests page, announced here, shows breakdowns by country of the number of requests they get to remove information by service. The statistics for Australia for the last 6 months of 2009 are interesting in particular:
155 data requests (requests for private user data for purposes of criminal investigation)
17 removal requests (52.9% of removal requests fully or partially complied with)
Despite the important role they play, Google are a for-profit company and not a government department or some kind of public utility. This can be a cause for concern; when the corporate interest an the public interest conflict, such as in matters of privacy, we can only hope that Google's directors give the latter due consideration. We also have no explicit right to know about the inner workings of Google's information management systems. We are therefore encouraged with Google's latest move which we can only take as a good faith attempt to be a better internet citizen.
Around the world it has often been difficult to get a picture on how prevalent such requests are and the Google information will be examined with some interest. The fact that they have released these statistics voluntarily is a welcome sign and Google should be congratulated for doing so. They have raised the bar for the other companies that play such an important role in managing and safeguarding the information that makes up our digital lives.
Earlier this week, I stepped down as the Chair of EFA, and will shortly be leaving the EFA Board. I'll be moving to the US for the 2010/11 academic year, and will be focusing on my academic work after completing my PhD dissertation.
I step down with some regret; I have very much enjoyed being a part of this important organisation. Over the last few years, I really think we've done some great work here; we're starting to see much wider attention on the Open Internet campaign against mandatory ISP filtering; we've been working hard on computer game classification, on ACTA, and on telecommunications interception, to name but a few topics. I've been very pleased to see EFA's profile continue to increase in the past few years, and honoured to have served with the other members of the Board and all members and other individuals who have pitched in to try to make a positive difference to Australian internet regulation and policy.
The new Chair is Colin Jacobs and the new Vice-Chair is Geordie Guy, both of whom should be very familiar names to those of you follow EFA's activities. I wish the best of luck to them both — and the rest of the Board — in the continued campaign against filtering and all of the other areas within EFA's remit.
-- Nic Suzor
This week, our former website hosts, Sublime IP, are contesting a Final Link Deletion Notice that was issued to them for content on our website in May 2009. (See the story we posted at the time.)
Sublime, with our support, are arguing that (a) the notice should have been issued to EFA, not our hosts; and that (b) the issuing of the notice infringes our constitutionally protected right to free political communication. This is particularly important as, under the legislation, only the person to whom the links removal notice was issued has standing to appeal the decision to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. Dale Clapperton, former chair of EFA, is arguing the matter before the AAT on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.
It is my understanding that the hearing will be open to the public for any members in Sydney who may wish to be present. Details are:
Tuesday and Wednesday this week, 10am start both days
Level 5, 55 Market St, Sydney
We will post any updates here as they become available.
This guest post is written by Mark Bahnisch from Lavartus Prodeo for our series of blog posts on the importance of online civil liberties as part of EFA’s 2010 Fundraising Campaign …
There are a range of good arguments against the Rudd government's internet filter, some emphasised for persuasive or tactical reasons, some reflective of deeply held political and political positions. Among the latter, liberal and libertarian arguments tend to dominate. This is not necessarily to say that those advancing such arguments (which we might usefully summarise under the slogan 'information wants to be free') are liberals or libertarians in a consistently ideological sense, or on the political right. It's more that the deep logic of the internet's history produces an argument in terms of freedom, and that view seems natural to those who are passionate about the online world. In this article, I want to present a somewhat more sociological argument, and one that seeks to build on an alternative (though, in part, complementary) set of assumptions drawn from left and progressive thought and tradition.
In so doing, the target at which I want to aim is not the internet filter itself, or Stephen Conroy himself. To my mind, the personalisation of the debate has not been a helpful aspect of the campaign against the filter proposal. What I think is useful and important to understand is the underlying cause of the government's move, which casts the argument around freedom in something of a different light.
What is at issue here is the desire to govern the private choices of individuals, a desire which has had its apogee in the communitarian aspects of New Labour governance in the United Kingdom. To adapt a judgement made by The Economist, thirteen years of New Labour government has seen the state grow, personal freedom greatly diminish, but the underlying social patterns of inequality little disturbed. The urge to shape and dictate private choices has been growing among Labor governments in Australia, with the long lived Bob Carr style state regimes leading the vanguard. Mark Latham tempered the communitarian rhetoric to a high flame during his leadership, and despite his repudiation by the ALP, the Rudd government has seemingly adopted a similar governing mentality, albeit at more of a simmer.
The causes of the desire to govern the soul are multiple, though interconnected and interwoven.
It's no coincidence that an increasing drive to interfere with private decisions and choices accompanied the election of the first generation of centre-left governments after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Francis Fukuyama's proclamation of the End of History. The ideological climate where social democrats lost any sense of the capacity to transform, and the desirability of transforming economic and social relations lent itself to a statism without long term purpose, a statism that manifests itself in interventions to transform private lives rather than to transform national and global society. Stripped of the power, and the will, to restructure economic life so as to negate deeply structural inequalities in a globalised world, purpose and the will to do good manifests itself into a micro-level of intervention; what Michel Foucault called 'biopolitics' - a politics of governing the individual body and soul.
Reflected through the prism of the constant campaign, the spectacle of the symbol in politics, and the 24/7 media cycle, 'bite-sized' policies have the capacity to substitute for social change over the long term and to feed the drumbeat of moral panic sounded on a repetitive and moment by moment time scale.
Secondly, in a risk society, individuals are less trusted to make choices for themselves, governed by their desires, their use of private reason, and their consciences. The sub-politics of risk, to invoke the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, concerns itself with the downside of modernity and complexity - the costs of the aggregation of private decisions to public finances and purposes. In areas like health, child development, and many others, the costs of perceived negative choices are transferred to a public purse unable to deal with them, and in a neo-liberal culture, the production of a docile and compliant workforce is key both to the legitimation of governance in a chaotic environment and to the reproduction of late capitalist patterns of work, consumption and distribution.
Thirdly, the micro-government of the individual is a key point of contestation at the site where democratisation and authority clash. An increasing climate of openness from the 1960s onwards, and the democratisation of culture among whose effects is a resistance to assertions of authority, later supplemented by the growth of populisms both right and left combined to render the notion that policy is an effect of expertise shaky. 'Evidence-based policy' is something of a backlash. With politics denuded of big picture ideological conflicts, the void is filled with hordes of experts, who with the best will in the world, think that they know what's good for us. Labor governments, stripped of any real transformational purpose, obsessed with symbolic campaigning and feeding the media beast, and concerned about the governance of risk, seize upon (and cherry pick) crumbs from the table of thinktank, private and public research expertise.
So, then, the internet filter is part of a bigger picture. It's one more item, among the alcopops tax, the national testing regime in schools, and many others, of a form of governmental mentality which seeks to shape, or to dictate, choices to citizens, who are presumed to be unable to discern their own best interests. Evidence, research and policy step in, and electoral advantage is sought through the intertwined machine of political communication and media dissemination.
Yet, there is another left tradition.
That is the tradition embodied in movements for popular education from the 19th century onwards, in the habits of auto-didacticism of early trade unionists and activists, of the respect for reason and informed conscience and judgement imparted to English speaking socialisms and Labourism from the dissent of chapel and the world of workplace dispute and argument. This tradition is one of the cultivation of the capacities of all citizens to apply reason to human affairs, to make conscientiously good decisions in their private lives through collective learning and civic conversation, for opportunity to be opened up rather than to be circumscribed.
This fundamentally progressive attitude and set of dispositions seeks to expand the capabilities of ordinary folk and to enable and facilitate citizens' desires for autonomy, self-government and collective government of communal and state institutions.
It's part of a sweeping movement of democratisation, which popped up in another context at the height of the administered society in the 1950s and 1960s, in a desire for participatory decision-making and for individuals together to question the force of ingrained social norms. It's part of an activist culture manifested in social movements such as feminism and other liberatory and transformational currents. At its heart, it represents a fundamental optimism, a philosophical anthropology foundational to left politics (and to liberalism, too) which holds that humans are thinking beings able to be trusted with choice, and whose choices deserve a basic level of respect.
The internet, as I alluded to at the outset, is part of that secular movement towards the democratisation of social relations; and of knowledge. It's precisely because the internet affords so much promise for those who wish to decide their destinies in common, to learn, to form an informed judgement and habit of thought that its freedom from state interference is so important at the level of principle. I'm not so interested in the particulars of the reasons advanced by the Rudd government for this latest instance of the desire to micro-manage individual choices. I'm much more interested in opposing, in principle, anything that partakes in the disrespect for the capacities of individual citizens to decide severally and collectively how best to regulate their own lives. That's a principle, in my view, that from a left and progressive position, is well worth fighting for.
This guest post is written by Stilgherrian for our series of blog posts on the importance of online civil liberties as part of EFA’s 2010 Fundraising Campaign …
“The only difference between a Nation State and a Mafioso protection racket is the letterhead and the rituals -- and the series of concessions, hard-won over eight centuries, that we call ‘civil liberties’.”
That’s how I was going to start this article about the importance of defending our civil liberties online. I was going to write about dusk falling at the end of another busy day, the shopkeeper counting the cash in his till, only to have two thugs turn up to demand their share as “protection money” lest something terrible happen to his business. Or his kneecaps. I was going to compare this to the State demanding its share of the shop’s profits in the form of taxes to pay for the state’s defence, and the shopkeeper’s defence, from unspecified enemies. And the penalties if that money wasn’t paid.
I was going to explain how the State is different from a criminal enterprise because the State has a clearly-defined set of rules, due process, fair trials and – at least in a democracy – that the rules governing all of this have been agreed upon by us citizens, and that we have mechanisms for investigating when things appear to have gone wrong and to seek redress.
And then I watched the video that Wikileaks just posted at www.collateralmurder.com, where it seems that in 2007 some American helicopter crews in Baghdad misidentified a photojournalist as an enemy and killed him and the people who tried to save him.
Now I’m conflicted here.
It’s all too easy for armchair warriors to notice after the fact that it wasn’t an AK-47 slung over Namir Noor-Eldeen’s shoulder, but a camera. Those helicopter crewmen were looking for people with weapons. I’m guessing confirmation bias led them to see something long and black as a weapon – especially when another guy was carrying a tripod.
It’s all too easy for us to sit here in our comfortable homes and offices and complain that these young men shouldn’t have expressed joy at having dealt out death. Yet what’s wrong with someone being pleased with a job well done? After all, we employ these men specifically to deal out death, to do the dirty work that we won’t handle ourselves, so we can luxuriate in petrol that’s ten cents a litre cheaper than it otherwise might have been.
Not that the War in Iraq is about oil.
And yet, when things go wrong, what differentiates a democratic Nation State from a criminal enterprise is our ability to investigate what went wrong and to learn from it. So that’s why when Reuters asked for the footage so they could see for themselves how their people had ended up dead, the US Department of Defense immediately released the footage and… sorry… no? They didn’t?
No they didn’t.
The Pentagon blocked the Freedom of Information request. This footage has only come to light because someone leaked it.
Oh.
Civil liberties, says Wikipedia, are the rights and freedoms that protect us individuals from the state. Civil liberties set limits on government so that its members cannot abuse their power and interfere unduly with the lives of private citizens.
It’s taken, as I say, eight centuries to win these liberties, from the Magna Carta of 1215 to more recent codifications such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the aftermath of WWII. Millions, literally millions of people have died to create and defend these rights.
That’s why it’s simply not good enough for the Rudd government to want to install a secret device in every internet service provider to block our access to … well, it’s a secret. Maybe it’s this ill-defined “Refused Classification” material today, but what might it be tomorrow? Can we really take a government’s word on this? And not just this government’s, but the one after it, and the one after that, and the one after that.
Even if we choose to believe Senator Stephen Conroy’s claim that this is only about protecting us from inadvertent access to child abuse material, once the system is in place, could a government resist the temptation to extend the scope just a little bit? And a little bit more?
Mandatory internet filtering is one piece of a jigsaw puzzle, the full picture of which we do not want.
Organisations like the EFA are needed to look beyond the immediate “protect the children” rhetoric, to look at the implications of what’s being proposed not just for today but for years to come.
