The Open Internet campaign emphasises that Australians want an Open Internet that is free from an impractical and costly policy of Government imposed mandatory Internet filtering.

“This policy has caused considerable anxiety amongst Australian Internet users,” said EFA Vice-Chair Colin Jacobs. “The idea that the Government will be inserting itself in every Internet connection in the country is a tough one to swallow, especially without a workable policy goal behind it.”

“Australians support an Open Internet that empowers individuals to decide what they view online,” said Peter Black, EFA’s campaign manager. “Australians support an Open Internet that trusts parents to monitor what their children view online.”

The campaign is centred around a new website, OpenInternet.com.au, blog, and Facebook fan page, that together will act as campaign hub for all the different individuals and organisations that are that are campaigning against the Government’s mandatory Internet filtering policy.

The policy, which will see all Australian Internet connections subject to a Government-controlled blacklist of banned sites, will apply to all Australian Internet connections within 12 months of the legislation being passed. Although originally touted as a “cyber-safety” policy, the resulting filter will not filter out all material unsuitable for children, instead targeting a select list of “refused classification” material, which would includes content dealing with crime, drugs and certain types of adult material.

Concerns with the list include its broad scope, its secret nature, and the inability of Australian businesses to know if and when they have been placed on the list. “One of our main concerns is how the list might expand in the future,” said Jacobs. “It’s hard to imagine both this government and every government forever, resisting temptation from special interest groups as well as electoral and media pressure.”

The Open Internet campaign marks an escalation of opposition to the plan, which will continue throughout the year. “Our goal is to ensure the Australian public know what they’re in for,” said Black. “It’s important that such a major and expensive policy gets the public scrutiny it deserves. And we believe that Open Internet portrays a positive and understandable message that will resonate with Australians who are yet to form a strong opinion on the Governmentb b-s policy.”

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About EFA:

Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc. (EFA) is a non-profit national organisation representing Internet users concerned with on-line rights and freedoms. EFA was established in 1994, is independent of government and commerce, and is funded by membership subscriptions and donations from individuals and organisations with an altruistic interest in promoting online civil liberties.

Hackers protesting government censorship of the Internet have shut down several Australian government websites in a demonstration against the announcement that filters would be imposed to block access to websites deemed offensive by the authorities.

The campaign was launched by the anti-Scientology group Anonymous in response to plans to implement a mandatory and wide-ranging internet filter modeled on that of the Communist Chinese government.

This is not the first time the group has attacked government websites, having launched a similar stunt last September.

“The main government website, www.australia.gov.au, and parliament’s www.aph.gov.au were both affected along with the sites for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy,” reports AFP.

“No one messes with our access to perfectly legal (or illegal) content for any reason,” said a statement released by the group.

The Australian government attacked the campaign as “not a legitimate form of political statement.”

Despite the Australian government promising that the Internet filter would only be used to block access to child pornography and other illegal websites, the watchdog group Electronic Frontiers Australia warned that the law will also allow the government to block any website it desires under vague definitions.

In March 2009, the Wikileaks website published a leaked secret list of sites slated to be blocked by Australia’s state-sponsored parental filter.

The list revealed that blacklisted sites included “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.”

The filter will even block web-based games deemed unsuitable for anyone over the age of fifteen, according to the Australian government.

Calls to mandate Internet users to obtain licenses, in other words government permission, before they can post to the web have grown in recent weeks, with top Microsoft executive Craig Mundie insisting at the recent Davos Economic Forum that the Internet should be policed.

Within days, Time Magazine enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon to back Mundie’s proposal, as authorities push for a system even more stifling than in Communist China, where only people who have been approved by the authorities would be allowed to express free speech.

ISPs across the world, including in supposed democratic countries like the UK, the US and New Zealand, have periodically blocked access to Alex Jones’ websites without justification and only restored access after a barrage of complaints.

As we have highlighted before, although the merits of hacking as a form of protest can be debated, what seems certain to happen is that governments will launch a false flag cyber attack which will cause a major catastrophe that can then be blamed on the free Internet, acting as a pretext to tighten the screws on plans for centralized regulation and censorship which are already in place.

Source Prison Planet.com – Thursday, February 11, 2010

Google says it will not “voluntarily” comply with the government’s request that it censor YouTube videos in accordance with broad “refused classification” (RC) content rules.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy referred to Google’s censorship on behalf of the Chinese and Thai governments in making his case for the company to impose censorship locally.

Google warns this would lead to the removal of many politically controversial, but harmless, YouTube clips.

University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt, one of Australia’s top communications experts, said that to comply with Conroy’s request Google “would have to install a filter along the lines of what they actually have in China”.

As it prepares to introduce legislation within weeks forcing ISPs to block a blacklist of RC websites, the government says it is in talks with Google over blocking the same type of material from YouTube.

YouTube’s rules already forbid certain videos that would be classified RC, such as sex, violence, bestiality and child pornography. But the RC classification extends further to more controversial content such as information on euthanasia, material about safer drug use and material on how to commit more minor crimes such as painting graffiti.

Google said all of these topics were featured in videos on YouTube and it refused to censor these voluntarily. It said exposing these topics to public debate was vital for democracy.

In an interview with the ABC’s Hungry Beast, which aired last night, Conroy said applying ISP filters to high-traffic sites such as YouTube would slow down the internet, “so we’re currently in discussions with Google about … how we can work this through”.

“What we’re saying is, well in Australia, these are our laws and we’d like you to apply our laws,” Conroy said.

“Google at the moment filters an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Chinese government; they filter an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Thai government.”

Google Australia’s head of policy, Iarla Flynn, said the company had a bias in favour of freedom of expression in everything it did and Conroy’s comparisons between how Australia and China deal with access to information were not “helpful or relevant”.

Google has recently threatened to pull out of China, partly due to continuing requests for it to censor material.

“YouTube has clear policies about what content is not allowed, for example hate speech and pornography, and we enforce these, but we can’t give any assurances that we would voluntarily remove all Refused Classification content from YouTube,” Flynn said.

“The scope of RC is simply too broad and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information. RC includes the grey realms of material instructing in any crime from [painting] graffiti to politically controversial crimes such as euthanasia, and exposing these topics to public debate is vital for democracy.”

Asked for further comment, a Google Australia spokeswoman said that, while the company “won’t comply voluntarily with the broad scope of all RC content”, it would comply with the relevant laws in countries it operates in.

However, if Conroy includes new YouTube regulations in his internet filtering legislation, it is not clear if these would apply to Google since YouTube is hosted overseas.

“They [Google] don’t control the access in Australia – all their equipment that would do this is hosted overseas … and I would find it very hard to believe that the Australian government can in any way force an American company to follow Australian law in America,” Landfeldt said.

“Quite frankly it would really not be workable … every country in the world would come to Google and say this is what you need to do for our country. You would not be able to run the kind of services that Google provides if that would be the case.”

This week the Computer Research and Education Association (CORE) put out a statement on behalf of all Australasian computer science lecturers and professors opposing the government’s internet filtering policy.

They said the filters would only block a fraction of the unwanted material available on the internet, be inapplicable to many of the current methods of online content distribution and create a false sense of security for parents.

CORE said the blacklist could be used by current and future governments to restrict freedom of speech, while those determined to get around the filters and access nasty content could do so with ease.

Source: theage.com.au