Austrialia censors 90% of web censorship plan to avoid "unnecessary debate"

Stephen Conroy seems to repeatedly fail at understanding the basic concepts involved in information security and the Internet. A recent quote from him at the launch of the "Cyber Security Awareness" week [1]:

  "There’s a staggering number of Australians being in 
  having their computers infected at the moment, up to 
  20,000, uh, can regularly be getting infected by these 
  spams, or scams, that come through, the portal"

Watching the video on the Gizmodo site is like watching a slow motion car crash.

Another car crash video is of Senator Conroy trying to explain how the "Russian mob ... hacked" a dentist's website [2] as an explanation for it ending up on the leaked "Internet Blacklist" from the filtering trial [3].

I don't underestimate the complexity of concepts in the information technology space, especially for those outside the industry. And I particularly don't envy the people whose job it is to explain to the general public the issues and come out with (and sell) realistic public policies.

However, you'd hope the man who has ultimate responsibility for these policies would have a basic grasp and be able to communicate it more effectively. More importantly he sorely needs advisers that both understand the issues and are able to properly brief him.

[1] http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2010/06/theres-a-staggering-number...

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwoKjDRaKHM

[3] I won't link to the leaked black list directly but you can find it by searching for australian government ACMA blacklist site:wikileaks.org in Google.

It's a tough question. But in my mind it is more related to the Australian political culture than it appears. And I note a lot of parallels between the formation of modern states and the advent of internet legislation. I'll try to explain my view - sorry if it is an essay :P.

Essentially, the nature of a modern state is the governing body has monopoly of force over a geographical area. By extension, this allows certain advantages, namely extraction (which from a one dimensional or conventional perspective can be viewed as taxation or army conscription) or coercion which again, from a one dimensional perspective means the ability to force a society to act in a certain way. For instance, one could view the inquisition to be coercing (by means of force) the population to a particular religious doctrine. Or from a modern perspective

Now, the space of the internet in it's current form can be interpreted as anarchic - a power vacuum of sorts. The nature of a politician is to expand into all power vacuums in a given area - it's what they do. The vehicle is legislation. As the internet grows and becomes more a part of our society than ever, the need to control this vacuum is more important than ever. China has been especially proactive in this regard, but more states are following suit (consider the US is also looking into a RealID programs).

But the thing that is so bad for us Australians is that our political culture is very ambitious. For decades our society has been screaming out to appear as a major player on the world stage. The politicians, understandably are more fundamental on this issue - as all people in a position of power will be.

This has changed our political policy to a form of 'any means necessary' legislative agenda to modernise and to expand Australia's power and thus influence AND importantly to appear to the world as an example of modern proactive state making. This is paramount - our leaders perception of ourselves on a world stage. They crave world recognition.

A more obvious example will be the former prime minister Kevin Rudd's ambition to increase Australia's population to 60 million - an almost threefold increase on a land whose space and water is already on the brink. A detriment to society is ignored in favor of this increase in power.

The current internet legislation is essentially a conglomeration of these factors. And due to a series of conservative rule (and by extension the right-leaning attitude of the two popular governing parties), this new approach to modern state making has often come in the form of very conservative legislation.

Again, I am sorry for this essay. However, I prefer to view this problem from a structural standpoint, instead of any ideological agenda. Though I think this still may be a factor, IMO the system is more to blame.

VPN? That's still easy in my book. Probably easier than setting up Tor. When I Was in Shanghai in May, Tor still worked.

the ALP.

the real question is who has their ear, for internet censorship i would say it's the christian lobby, for this logging crap would say both state and commonwealth law enforcement agencies (chiefly AFP???).

the latter certainly have form (e.g. http://www.theage.com.au/national/investigations/private-spi...)

We get to vote for either dictator 1, dictator 2 or dictator 3. There are no democratic flavors left.