| DR: | Well, only a few days to go to the new Millenium, and everything
is going to plan.
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| TO: | Plan, Minister?
|
| DR: | Yes the Getting Things Back Under Control plan. It was part of
our election mandate remember?
|
| TO: | The GST you mean?
|
| DR: | No, the censorship mandate.
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| TO: | Censorship? Was that in the platform?
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| DR: | Well we didn't call it that, you idiot. We said we'd clean up
the video industry remember?
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| TO: | I didn't think that got any attention in the campaign.
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| DR: | It's of no consequence how much attention it got. It was in the
policy so we've got the mandate.
|
| CW: | I'm not so sure. We put that in to get the Catholic and fundies'
votes, but we didn't actually intend to go through with it. Besides, we
didn't cost it out.
|
| DR: | There's no cost, only benefits. More souls saved for eternal
life. And of course, the mandate extends to all other media - television,
films, Internet, magazines, datacasting, digital TV.
|
| CW: | That's stretching our mandate a bit far don't you think?
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| DR: | Politics is about justifying the unjustifiable, Carol. We need
to get shame and guilt back into peoples lives. If we don't establish
community attitudes, who will?
|
| CW: | How much support is there for all this Dick?
|
| DR: | Well I got 87 letters demanding that we do something about porn
on the Net.
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| CW: | How many of those were from Brian?
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| DR: | Sixty-nine. But he represents 32,000 voters remember.
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| CW: | Jeez, you based that whole sorry mess on 18 letters?
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| DR: | Listen, 60 letters were enough for me to crack down on sex on
television, so 18 should be plenty for the Internet. There's significant
community concern out there Carol, and we as the nation's leaders have a
responsibility to do what's best for people's salvation.
|
| CW: | Salvation? We're not preachers for godsake.
|
| DR: | If they want Christmas and Easter holidays they'll just have to
put up with the rest of the package. You didn't benefit from a Christian
education did you Carol?
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| CW: | No, thank god.
|
| DR: | Well I did, and if I think the human body is shameful the rest of
the country does too. This is a Christian country after all. We have to
protect women, and the Internet is very demeaning to women if the stories I
read in the paper are anything to go by. Surely you don't disagree with that?
|
| CW: | Hell, the churches are demeaning to women. I don't see you
trying to ban them.
|
| DR: | The churches are exempt from most discrimination laws, so that's
irrelevant. Besides, we're not banning anything, we're just filtering.
|
| CW: | You're shutting down websites too I heard, but I really want to
find out about this filtering. The PM asked me to get some answers, since
I'm supposed to be in charge of censorship. Are they mandatory?
|
| DR: | They're mandatory to have, but voluntary to use. That's right
isn't it Terence?
|
| TO: | Yes Minister. The ISPs have to "provide" them to users, for a
fee presumably, but the users can decide whether they want to use them or not.
|
| CW: | Jeez, why did we need this stupid law to do that?
|
| TO: | The law gives us enormous powers if things don't work out. And
if we didn't have the law, we'd be lucky if 1% used filters, they have
such a lousy reputation. But now we can even make the filters mandatory
if we want.
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| CW: | You can?
|
| TO: | Sure. If they go for server-based, we can easily stick a filter
in the path. It will be slow, but we've made bandwidth so expensive that
they've got used to waiting anyway. If they choose a client-based
filter, we've cooked up a plan with Puppy to control things.
|
| CW: | How does it work?
|
| TO: | Well it really only applies to new users, the ones that we've
scared shitless about getting on the Net up till now. The existing users
are a lost cause. Mostly computer geeks, and they hate censorship. But
for new users the ISP gives them a starter CD and it could automatically
install the filter.
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| CW: | Won't they object?
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| TO: | They don't need to know it's there. If they click on a site
that's blocked, the thing will just sit there pretending to be fetching the
page. If they complain to the ISP they'll just get the usual excuse that
the Net is like that sometimes.
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| CW: | Cunning Dick, very cunning.
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| DR: | I think so. After all, on the Internet no one knows you're a fox.
|