Beijing Olympics: Rudd damns the Chinese for internet censorship.

Fiji: Rudd calls Fiji ‘military dictatorship’ after Fijian constitution abrogated, press censored and journalists expelled.

And all the while, Rudd continues to press on with mandatory internet censorship here in Australia.

I guess censorship is only bad if someone else is doing it.

-weez

In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ’s New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush’s

Commentary by Tim Jones

April 7th, 2009

We had hoped this would go differently.

Friday evening, in a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping of countless Americans, the Obama Administration’s made two deeply troubling arguments.

First, they argued, exactly as the Bush Administration did on countless occasions, that the state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue out of hand. They argue that simply allowing the case to continue “would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security.” As in the past, this is a blatant ploy to dismiss the litigation without allowing the courts to consider the evidence.

It’s an especially disappointing argument to hear from the Obama Administration. As a candidate, Senator Obama lamented that the Bush Administration “invoked a legal tool known as the ‘state secrets’ privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court.” He was right then, and we’re dismayed that he and his team seem to have forgotten.

Sad as that is, it’s the Department Of Justice’s second argument that is the most pernicious. The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying – that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes.

This is a radical assertion that is utterly unprecedented. No one – not the White House, not the Justice Department, not any member of Congress, and not the Bush Administration – has ever interpreted the law this way.

“We had hoped this would go differently” is the biggest understatement made in the US since 1776. This move by Obama fully undermines just about every argument made when he was a candidate. If I had any clue that Obama would have done anything like this, I would not have bothered voting at all.

-weez

While you gotta hand it to the guy for being able to bullshit on the fly, it was heaps better when Senator Conjob was hiding under a rock, refusing to answer any questions at all about the proposed mandatory filtering scam.

Conjob appeared on Triple J’s Hack program on Tuesday, 7 April- and was summarily O’Tooled (MP3 audio, 450kb).

Stephen Conroy: We said that if the trial shows that this cannot be done then we won’t do it.

Kate O’Toole: And what is the definition of ‘cannot be done’? What would be the acceptable amount to slow the internet down?

SC: Now you’re asking me to pre-empt the outcome of the trial.

KO: No, no, no, I’m not, you’ve gotta have a… before you start the trial, you’ve got to have an understanding of what is… what’s a pass and a fail, like you’ve got to be able to measure, you can’t sort of wait until the trial finishes and then look back and decide how you’re going to measure the outcome.

SC: Well actually, actually, that’s how you conduct a trial. You wait to see what the results is and then you make a decision based on the results. If the trial shows that it cannot be done without slowing the internet down, then we will not do it.

And there you have it- Conjob will define ‘success’ after the results of the filtering trial are in- moreover, the trial won’t be held under anything resembling real-world conditions. Customers on filtering trial ISPs like Optus will be able to opt-out.

However, in the same breath, Conjob committed himself to an impossible goal- filtering without any speed degradation whatsoever. Simple as this, when a computer halts an access to a website while the URL is compared to a banlist, there will be an inherent delay while that task is performed.

You would have to have mountains of sympathy for Conjob’s primary school teachers. He’d be the only kid who could have homework eaten by the family dog twenty times yet turn it into a scholastic achievement every single time.

-weez

Child pornography is Labor’s WMD.  It’s nothing but an excuse that few will disagree with to implement mandatory censorship, with the premeditated intent to use the filter for a much broader range of material, inclusive of political speech and peer-to-peer filesharing. Once the filter is in place, it will be expanded. The Australian Christian Lobby will see to that. ACL’s Jim Wallace has said in no uncertain terms that he wants all ordinary porn blocked, as well as numerous other subjects on his list of pet hatreds.

Frankly, the primary goal of the filter is blocking political speech critical of the government’s positions. The ACL and some of the less savvy child protection advocates are merely useful idiots to the ALP in driving the anti-porn furphy. These groups have access to a rather small but vocal base. Their sympathetic audiences are susceptible to emotive arguments, inclusive of conspiracy theories, instead of fact. They are likely to be distrustful of educated and intellectual arguments against filtering from well qualified people.

Clearly, despite Senator Conjob’s and the ACL’s protestations that ‘no one should be able to opt in to child pornography,’ no reasonable Australian supports free access to child pornography. However, there’s numerous reasons not to use internet filtering to address the problem, perhaps the most significant being that it’s like drawing the drapes because someone’s being murdered in your front yard. However, it’s really worse than that. In this metaphorical example, given how trivial it is to circumvent ISP level filtering, it’s like drawing transparent or even imaginary drapes. Plain old police work must be used to catch child pornographers, specifically and critically, those exploiting children to produce the material, to seize their files and shut down distribution.

If ordinary adult pornography is going to be handed up as a reason for the filter, that’s an argument that simply won’t win in Australia. Most of you will know from personal experience that Aussies don’t mind a bit of porn. However, there’s precious little proper research into Australians’ relationship with porn.

Thanks to Associate Professor Alan McKee, Dr. Kath Albury and Professor Catharine Lumby, there’s now a bit more in the body of evidence that not only do we like a bit of porn, it’s demonstrably harmless. (more…)

Fibre to the home has been on every internet user’s wishlist for years, certainly on mine… but will Rudd bundle internet censorship with it? Let’s hope he’s not laboring under the impression that it’s any harder to circumvent filtering with fibre than with any other transport means. Pardon my suspicion, but with the level of uninformed crap coming out of Conjob’s mouth, anything from government seems possible.

-weez

Cheers to Mike Knapp for showing just how easy it is to beat the Conjob filter.

-weez