Australian Internet Censorship

I seriously just got a chill apon reading this. It can't be true... Not in Australia, a progressive/westernized country. It's not China after all...



And that would mean so many of our cool EC Aussies would be gone. :tears:

 

Yeah its true, it has been in the news for awhile now. it will block a lot of things that do not need to be blocked at all, stupid right wing conservative "save the children" bullshit.

but hopefully it wont ever be put it place because it will lead to other things that are even worse than this. Although if it does go ahead and Aussies want to get on to EC a simple proxy should do the trick.

 

Still, not everyone knows how to use proxies. Information should not be censored, especially support websites!

 

I firmly believe that all censorship is useless, especially blanket censorship like this. If you don't want your kids finding certain websites online, talk to them. It's really not that difficult.

Australia really is just too uptight about censorship. The situation there with video games is bad enough--I hope they're not going to try and censor the internet now, too. Which, I might add, is simply too large to be done properly.

 

It is like book burning... it is pointless.

oh... your burning harry potter cause it teaches kids to raise the devil from the pits of hell and have sex with him? well, do you really think burning the book is going to have effect mr. pastor? you have to buy the book to burn it, so arent you just putting more money into jk rowling's pocket?

censorship doesnt work. staying on the book theme, when people tried to censor books, the first thing you notice is the book sales start to skyrocket. Tell people they cant read a book, or visit a website, and alot of people will rush out to do just that.

Make a thing taboo, and people will run out to see for themselves why.

 

They tried to do the same here in Germany, but failed miserably. They got a HUGE backlash from people. Initially it was very difficult for us netcitizens to work against it, because mass-media was all like "if you oppose this law you are pro-childporn", and the politicians where touting the same crap. But eventually a movement arose, and we argued everywhere possible that this law does NOT prevent childporn it only makes people even more blind for it. You cannot solve the "homeless problem" by just placing a "blocked" sign in front of every single one of them. The people actively looking for disgusting material like that will always find their ways, and those are the first who will know how to use a proxy. While at the same time the state has established a working infrastructure for censorship that the average citizen cannot circumvent. To make things worse .. here it was planned that the list of blocked website of course had to be secret as well .. which in the end would mean: the state can block/censor content from the web and you are not even allowed to know WHAT he is censoring. So basically he can censor anything without you knowing .. to make things worse - the law was formulated equally "soft" as the Australian law, so that it would be easy to justify to block other content.

Another argument was that they cannot remove child pornography since it is hosted in "rogue" countries that don't have laws against it. Again netcitizens had to disprove this country by country .. a very nice example was india where a high-ranking german politician said that they for example don't have laws against child-pornography so in germany you can't do anything against people watching it in india. The thing is just .. in India pornography as a whole is illegal :roll: it just went so far that the indian embassador officially had to protest against that statement. Meanwhile a new study surfaced that 99% of the pornographic material featuring minors is hosted in the US and western europe - countries which DO have very strict laws against it.

It took us a long time but meanwhile all major parties suddenly are against the law, and of course nobody ever supported it to begin with :roll: at least they are now trying to find more effective ways to get the material OFF the net and don't just pretend that it doesn't exist by blocking it instead of doing something against it.

 

another perfect example would be when the Us made alchohol illegal, more people went out to drink just cause they couldnt

 

The list of blocked sites is on wikileaks.. at least the March 09 draft of it is.. I don't recall seeing EC on it, but that said, it is 9 months out of date.

edit: just checked it, EC is not on the March 09 blacklist draft. I would link it, but it has links to all manner of shady/pornographic sites so it's probably against the rule.s

 

like a lot of other people said I'm just astonished that this kind of censorship is happening in Australia!! what is wrong with our countries these days I wouldn't be surprised if someone tried to introduce this in the USA.

 

I am confident that neo con's in america have tried to do this.

 

They seem to try to influence everything don't they?

:bang:

 

I am trying to remeber what internet related legislations people have tried to pass. Iam ore like 75% confident somethinglike this was attempted, but dont hold me to the othe 25%

 

As far as I know nothing like this was tried in america - yet. The riaa and mpaa are probably already lobbying for it.

 

Awwww I like the Aussies:tears:

 

Believe it. This is what you get when you have a leftist government, such as ours.

And the worse thing is, the Australian public still loves the government. Mainly because they don't interfere, by and large... and that's because they've done nothing in two years...

... yeah, I don't like the Labour Party.

 

i don't think this has anything at all to do with leftist policy. in the political spectrum, this would seem to lie more in the north/south (libertarianism / fascism) axis.

 

Seriously if Abbott and the Liberals vote against this I would actually vote Liberal (If I was old enough).

Abbott might be a homophobe but if he tells the liberals to vote against this then I don't really care because he is standing up for our democratic principles.

 

I would never vote Labor...

This just further proves that they're incompetent fools.

 

The Government is trying to gain support for it by saying it is intended to block child porn when really that is only a small part of what it is intended for. It is not there simply to block illegal sites but will be there to block sites the government sees as unsuitable whether it be legal or not.