Internet Censorship: The Camel’s Nose?
The Camel’s Nose argument (aka the slippery slope) where “if the camel once gets his nose in the tent, his body will soon follow,” isn’t always a logical fallacy: if one can propose a statistical or explicit causal means for A to lead to B.
According to Asher Moses of The Age; “Industry sources said Senator Fielding’s sentiments validated ISPs’ concerns that the categories of blocked content could be broadened significantly at the whim of the Government, which is under pressure to appease vocal minorities.“. Said sentiments being that Senator Fielding wants additional, legally available websites added to the list of blocked sites (x-rated pornography and in the case of Nick Xenophon, online gambling.)
(Hat tip to Scott for the link.)
The proposal for Internet filtration entails a two tiered system. The first tier filters out “illegal” material, which Australians can’t opt out of. The second tier filters out “objectionable” material, such as boobies and so forth that may give your kiddies the wrong idea – the second tier can be opted out of.
The thing is, is that Fielding wants pornography added to the list of blocked sites on the first tier. Why? Well, supposedly to protect the children, but again, there is a supreme lack of attention to materials that could really mess with your kids head – the Bud Dwyer suicide is my usual example (there is a link to un-censored footage on the Wikipedia page, but I suggest that you don’t watch it.)
Why the rather out-of-whack emphasis? Because this is not about protecting the children, it is about a senator with the balance of power, using that power to try to stop adults from seeing things that he doesn’t want them to see. You don’t have to be Steve Fielding to do it though – prior to 1999, Brian Harradine had the same niche, with very similar goals.
The first tier of Internet filtering is a boon to anyone who wants to stop you thinking and watching what they don’t want you to, particularly to senators with the balance of power.
It’s not just the Harradines and the Fieldings you have to watch out for. What if we had an uber-right wing senator with the balance of power, who on the grounds of us keeping safe, wanted blocked, green sites deemed too radical or too-close-to-be-safe to the Bill Ayers of yesteryear? Righties, would you like to see the day when the first tier of Internet filtering becomes a bargaining chip for a far-left senator that wants “hate sites” added to the blocked list?
This Internet filtration proposal gives such well-placed senators, now and in the future, the ability to arbitrarily stop people from seeing what-ever they don’t want people to see on the Internet. Fielding at least has demonstrated that he has the inclination.
This proposed filtration scheme is the camel’s nose. Don’t let it in.
~ Bruce
P.S. Oh and Nick Xenophon, welcome to the bottom end of my ballot. You’ll be a lot further down my preferences next time around (and I do vote below the line) – the senate is supposed to be a house of review not a political auction house, and Australia a liberal democracy.
You hit it on the nose my friend. I can live without the x rated porn ( I can legally buy it in the NT
). The MSM has been painfully slow on the uptake on this one. Thankfully the greens have some balls to take conroy to task.
Any pretence of the KRudd government getting on with policy rather than playing at demagoguery has been unquestionably blown out of the water by this single effort of Conroy’s and the failure of the rest of the caucus to bring him to a rational stance.
I too think it’s the thin end of the wedge. Today, the Government will ban illegal content; tomorrow, objectionable content; and after that, inconvenient content.
We won’t know what this content that is banned is, only what category it has been deemed to fall into.
The stupid thing is, it cannot work for its ostensibly intended purpose.
Internet content is merely a encoded bitstreams which are then processed into human-readable media, and there is no technology which can examine an arbitrary bitstream and determine its content.
At a simple level, the file “Resume.doc” in someone’s drive may actually be a renamed JPEG file containing banned content. At a deeper level, the file “MonaLisa.jpg” might actually be that of Leonardo’s painting, yet have an embedded steganographically-encoded banned image.
This is leaving aside more complicated schemes, such as partial distributed content (itself encoded) over many sources that is assembled at the local workstation.
In short, groups of people who wish to acquire or share content deemed illegal can (and no doubt) will do so at a level that this proposal cannot defeat.
That is, the bad guys will carry on, and the rest of us will suffer higher costs, slower throughput, and erosion of our freedoms. Sigh.
Finally, if the Government is serious about “protecting the children” through ISP filtering, then an opt-in system will achieve that for parents who believe their children are best protected by having censored access to the internet.
I suspect most parents delude themselves as to the innocence of their children; I well recall that in my Catholic primary school (early 1970’s) we children swore like troopers and had access to illicit materials. Children today are not likely to be more naive than we were…
Grr. Sorry for the rant, but this proposal does exercise my indignation.