PETER MEREL will take his place in a march on the NSW Parliament next Monday to protest the State Government's moves to censor the Internet. Here, he explains his reasons:
The telescreen received and trans-mitted simultaneously. . . there was no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment . . . you had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.
THAT'S George Orwell's 1984.
It's also Jeff Shaw's 1996. He is the NSW Attorney-General.
Browsing the Internet site of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I came across the infamous Jake Baker story.
This is a rape, mutilation and murder fantasy-what they call a snuff story- which Baker posted to the Net while he attended the University of Michigan.
The story was traced to him because he used the name of one of his classmates in the story.
This resulted in his expulsion from university. Various United States agencies also tried to prosecute him, although he was never convicted.
I won't include a URL here - Baker's story is not one I'd like to promote.
In fact, it nauseated me. I couldn't read much of it at all.
That someone could actually derive pleasure from writing such a story disgusts me.
Yet here I am defending monsters like this-slavers, rapists, terrorists and paedophiles-promoting their rights of expression and communication and anonymity and so forth.
So why do I stand up for them? How can any moral person stand up for them?
I stand up for them because, in every country where speech is not free, in "interrogation rooms" all around the world, the tortures about which Baker fantasises are actually inflicted on innocents by "public servants" and "law-enforcers".
But Sydney isn't Beijing, and surely we are not in danger of totalitarianism in NSW?
Until last month, I would have agreed that we were not.
But now the Premier, Mr Carr, and Mr Shaw are drafting legislation to apply limitations on all speech transmitted through the Internet in NSW.
As there is no longer any real difference between the Internet and the phone system, this will come to mean all speech transmitted over a NSW phone line.
Simply using the Internet to send your spouse a love letter earns yot six months in jail and a big fine under the new NSW legislation.
Readers of Orwell will recall expressions of love were the ultimate crime in 1984 and for anyone who has read it, Shaw's press release describing the legislation will be familiar: "These offences will catch any person who introduces offensive material to the system-both users and service providers .. material covered will include material unsuitable for minors under 15."
If this legislation is enacted, then personal privacy and corporate security will become illegal in NSW, except for actual face-to-face meetings.
Any communication over the public telecommunications system will be subject to routine tapping, filtering and suppression.
Internet service providers (ISPs) will be coerced into the role of informers, and any ISP that does not cooperate will face $25,000 fines and jail sentences.
Are Mr Carr and Mr Shaw really interested in drastic curbs on civil liberties?
In fact, I believe they're not.
I believe they're reasonable men, trying to deal with what they perceive as real concerns.
No, their problem is simple ignorance of the technology that provides the Internet in NSW and of the nature of the communications that run through the Internet worldwide.
This ignorance has led them to propose measures which, if enacted, would not only be repressive, but totally ineffective against the paedophiles and pornographers who use the Internet.
There are five basic misunderstandings underlying the NSW legislation.
Furphy l: The Internet is a broadcast medium, like a kind of worldwide TV. Therefore it should be subject to censorship, just as TV is.
In fact, the Internet is a conversational medium, a sort of world-wide pub. Like people in a pub, every member of the Net audience is also a content provider, so any form of censorship must limit what every person can say to anyone else-the very definition of repression.
Furphy 2: Internet service providers are publishers. Therefore they can regulate the contents of the material they distribute.
The reality is that publishers rigidly control the information they distribute and do not publish material unless they control the copyright.
None of this is true for ISPs.
ISPs turn a profit not on content, but on throughput, information flows through an ISP: from their users, to their users.
If plumbers were accountable for the sewage their clients poured through their plumbing, they would all be driven out, as ISPs are like plumbers, rather than publishers, the NSW legislation will drive them out, too.
Furphy 3. The Internet is full of pornography.
In fact, pornography on the Internet is just a tiny fraction of what happens there-it's like the number of sex shops in NSW as opposed to all the other shops.
If you look up "sex shops" in the on-line YeHow Pages, you'll find a few. But if you don't go inside them, you wiH never see any pornography at all - just as with real-life sex-shops.
Saying the Internet is full of pornography is a nonsense on the same scale as saying NSW is nothing but an X-rated cinema.
Furphy 4: There's no existing way to protect children on line.
Keeping kids away from Sydney's King's Cross is the job of parents, not of governments.
The Government can't watch our kids for us.
No-one can keep them away from Kings Cross but their parents.
Even parents would not do this by blockading every road that eventually leads to Kings Cross-that would block every road in the State.
Parents do it by close care, advice, love and supervision.
It's just the same on the Net.
Voluntary rating technologies such as PICS and filter programs such as Net Nanny and Surf-Watch give us the ability to monitor and control our kids without need for NSW's repressive proposed legislation.
Furphy 5: Censoring the Internet is just responsible government.
What's the big deal with the Internet? If the Net is just people talking to one another, why crack down on it?
If we discuss sex, drugs or anything else on line, is that worse than what we talk about down at the pub?
In fact, it's just the same thing.
People are just the same on line as they are off line.
If the Government doesn't have any business monitoring our conversations in the pub, then neither should it have any business eavesdropping on our transactions on the Net.
What can we do about it?
By the time the next election rolls around, it will be too late.
The law will be entrenched and Mr Carr and Mr Shaw will be trumpeting their "triumph" over the Internet.
One positive step is for Internet users to make themselves visible - to get the attention of the broadcast media.