Internet Censorship is 21st century book burning.

Internet Censoship is the 21st century equivalent of book burning. You cannot be inspired or educated by a book that you'll never read, and you will never read that book if it is destroyed. In 1933 the German Nazi Party began it's campaign of burning books that didn't correspond with Nazi ideology. Censorship has always been a favorite tool of authoritarians because it limits peoples access to information and silences dissent within the population.

However the existence of the Internet has now made book burning largely redundant because books no longer need to be printed and shipped to those who will read them. Now ideas can be posted online where they are accessible anywhere in the world. I do not need to print pages of this site and send them off in the hope that someone might read them, instead I can post things here on my own corner of the web and anyone with an internet connection can access them. The internet provides a sort of immunity to book burning because not only can ideas be easily accessed without the need to ship a tangible item but they can also be electronically copied an infinite amount of times. Even destroying the server that hosts a particular website cannot guarantee that the ideas have not been copied and made available elsewhere.

But governments do not give in very easily. While there may not be many books left to burn there are still ideas that may need to be silenced. So authoritarian governments of the 21st century have come up with the idea of Internet Censorship. It may be impossible to burn the pages of a website but if the government can prevent people from accessing that website then the end result is the same as burning a book. People cannot be inspired or educated by an idea that they never read. Dissent can be silenced without the need to destroy all copies of the original.

Here in Australia the Gillard Government has plans to introduce legislation that will require all Internet Service Providers to block access to content that is "Refused Classification" that is any content that the Australian Government has deemed undesirable for public consumption. In 2009 Wikileaks released to Australian Governments blacklist of website that it wants banned for all Australians.

University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt said the leaked list "constitutes a condensed encyclopedia of depravity and potentially very dangerous material".

He said the leaked list would become "the concerned parent's worst nightmare" as curious children would inevitably seek it out.

But about half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist. -Sydney Morning Herald

It seems like nobody in Australia is safe from the Gillard Governments censorship regime. Many of us already know better than to run our website off servers located within Australia, but this regime of censorship is aimed at everyone. It doesn't matter if your content is 100% legal the Australian Government may still silence you at their own discretion. Some people who find themselves on the government blacklist already reside within Australia. So I think it's fair to ask; Why are they not arrested if the content of their website is so bad? The answer is of course that many of the websites that our government wishes to censor are not actually illegal. If the blacklisted content was illegal they would at least arrest the people who own it and live in Australia.

Internet Censorship is the 21st century version of Book Burning. Essentially a Book Burning 2.0 and it must be stopped at any and all opportunities. The internet gave us the freedom to share and discuss ideas without boundaries and those in power seek to reinstate those boundaries and limitations on behalf of vested interests. Silencing Dissent is the dream of every authority but it must not be allowed to happen here in our western democracy.

United States policy is at odds with Australian politics.

The United States government is funding the development of systems that will allow citizen in foreign countries to evade government internet censorship. However meanwhile in Australia the government is moving ahead with it's draconian plan to censor the countries internet service. So we are left in an interesting situation where our own government is gearing up for a massive assault on our human rights while an allied nation is seeking to develop tools to mitigate such an attack.

THE US Government is reportedly financing the development of "shadow" internet systems to enable dissidents abroad to get around government censors.

Financed with a $US2 million ($1.9 million) State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communications over a wide area with a link to the global internet. -News.com.au

So how will this work with the proposed internet censorship here in Australia. Will we be able to import this technology from the US to help Australian citizens evade the governments censorship?

You would think that with all that's been going on in the middle east recently, that our government would be taking a pro-democracy and pro-freedom of speech stance. Unfortunately it is not and senator Conroy remains as committed to the filter as ever. How can our government persist with it's ideology of censorship and control while one of its closest allies (at least in the public spotlight) is developing tools to thwart such control.

The United States stance against internet censorship is incompatible with Senator Conroys desire for control. Is it wishful thinking for me to hope that the United States will take an agressive stance against this policy?

Anonymous Script Kiddies are not defending the internet.

If you're following the WikiLeaks debacle you have no doubt heard of the group being called "Anonymous" although they are more of a phenomenon than an actual group or organisation. Anonymous have been launching Distributed Denial of Service Attacks against Mastercard, PayPal. Dubbed "Operation Payback" this loosely connected band of idiots are attempting to bring down websites and services that have refused to do business with WikiLeaks under the misguided view that they are standing up for Freedom of Speech and 'Defending the Internet'.

However nothing could be further from the truth because Anonymous have even attempted to bring down Amazon for refusing to host WikiLeaks. Of course with Amazon being one of the largest service providers in the world Anonymous failed miserably, although they still attempted to bring down a service that hosts tens of thousands of servers. Such an attack on so many innocent people is not standing up for Freedom of Speech. Knocking someone's service provider offline has the same effect as adding them to a government censorship filter; they are silenced.

Amazon has been lined up as the next victim of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack by the group of online vigilantes known as Anonymous, which has already taken down the web sites of MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, as the WikiLeaks controversy continues.

A Twitter update from one of the accounts used by the group, @Op_Payback, read an hour ago: “TARGET: WWW.AMAZON.COM LOCKED ON!!!”. Subsequent updates gave followers instructions on how to turn their computers into part of a mass botnet set to launch the DDoS attack in two hours.

It is unclear whether the attack is in retaliation for the actions of Amazon Web Services last week in booting WikiLeaks off its servers, or due to the appearance on Amazon.com today of the WikiLeaks cables for a £7.37 charge. -V3.co.uk

I decided to briefly point out this hypocrisy in the IRC channel:

If the screencap is hard to see click here.

I had expected to receive at least some half baked ideology in response to justify the DDoS attacks but instead it seems these Script Kiddies are not interested in discussion.

As I type this the IRC has come to life; they are gearing up for another attack. I will be watching this out of interest but I refuse to assist any of these idiots. Because these morons are not defending the internet. Instead they are crippling it and stamping on the Freedom of Speech that they claim to protect. Despite what the media tell you these are not hackers because all these individuals are doing is abusing the core fundamentals of the Internet. Packets of information are routed indiscriminately to their destination so a DDoS attack requires no expertise to carry out. All you need to do is send traffic to a target and the Internet does the rest.

If like me you support WikiLeaks but condemn Operation Payback and the idiots behind it then say something on Twitter, Comment forms or the Anon-ops IRC (But don't expect a warm welcome.)

Wikipedia: What is a Denial of Service Attack?

Anon-Ops IRC: 91.121.92.84 Port: 6667 #OperationPayback

Gillard wants prohibited debate.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard wants to talk about euthanasia, a topic that is banned from discussion under the Australian Government censorship regime.

Julia Gillard has opened the way for a fresh debate on legalising euthanasia after the Greens leader, Bob Brown, nominated it as one of his top priorities.

While three state parliaments wrestle with euthanasia legislation, the Prime Minister and Senator Brown are expected to discuss the Greens' demand for the repeal of legislation preventing territory governments from legalising voluntary euthanasia. -Sydney Morning Herald

Dr Philip Nitschke founder of Exit International has had his book titled The Peaceful Pill Handbook added to the Australian Governments 'secret' blacklist. The book is available online here and because our internet is currently uncensored we can access it. However a quick check of the blacklist shows that the (un-)Australian Government is very much against it's citizens having access to euthanasia material.

Part of the ACMA Blacklist; peacefulpillhandbook.com is highlighted in green.

If you want to check the list yourself you can find it on wikileaks.org. The Sydney Morning Herald article "Web filtering pulls plug on euthanasia debate" also documents the governments anti-discussion stance.

So why does our Prime Minister suddenly want to discuss euthanasia. Certainly this puts her at odds with government policy. Still it's good to see that some progress is being made.

Hopefully this will highlight how incompatible censorship is with a democratic society. Not even the PM will bow to the will of the censors, ironically her own party.

Web filtering pulls plug on euthanasia debate

Australian Labor: stepping back to 1984

I think Labor's proposed National Broadband Network is bullshit. Not because we don’t need faster broadband but because Labor is offering it as bait to try and win back the voters. Having seen how fast Highspeed Broadband in mainland China is I am happy to say ‘no thanks’ to Labor’s National Broadband Network. Because while a faster Internet may seem tempting the idea of being restricted to government approved sites and services via Internet Censorship makes it a pretty raw deal.

Yes, Australia needs faster Internet but I believe there are better ways to achieve it. One of the reasons Conroy wants the ability to censor at the ISP level is because content providers; including Australian Citizens and Businesses often place their websites on United States based servers in order to avoid take down notices from Australian Authorities.

I believe the key to upgrading our infrastructure is to encourage more companies to set-up their data centres over here and the only viable way to do this is to abolish the regime of censorship that our nanny-state of a country has embraced for so long. (We don’t even have R18 for games.) Nobody is going to place servers in Australia if they think there is even the slightest change of being ordered to shut it down. I am not talking about the proposed ISP level censor here but rather the existing censorship that comes from ACMA in the form of take-down notices and $11,000 per day fines. This type of censorship has been around for many years but fortunately the Internet has help liberate the Australian people by giving them a means to speak out. The Internet has given the people a voice and freedom of speech like never before and the Australian Labor party wishes to silence it by implementing mandatory service provider level censorship. This combined with the plan to monitor the Internet usage of all Australian Citizens is destroying our digital economy and moving us towards George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four.

Labor will chase any would be investors away with even more draconian Censorship. In order to move forward we need to become a safe haven for freedom of speech and freedom of information. That combined with our own investments into the infrastructure will provide an incentive for overseas and Australian companies to run servers in Australian data centres which ultimately means they will be investing in Australia’s communication infrastructure and economy.