Tag Archive for 'politics & govt'

The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship

Published
by
Idiot/Savant
1 year ago
in Authoritarianism, Law, Politics and The Web
. 85 Comments

WikiLeaks is a public-interest website which makes leaked material freely available on the internet. In the past it has revealed information on psychological torture at Guantanamo Bay, a Pentagon analysis showing it is losing the war in Afghanistan, and insider trading at J P Morgan. At the moment its hosting leaked memos from Barclays Bank detailing the extent of their tax evasion – memos which have been suppressed by the UK High Court (ah, the joy of a free market in legal jurisdiction). In short, it does good work, exposing corruption and malfeasance in both the public and private sector and allowing those responsible to be held to account.

You may be wondering why I’m not linking to any of that material. The reason is that WikiLeaks is now on Australia’s internet blacklist. Last year they posted a copy of Denmark’s blacklist, revealing some unusual censorship choices (one of the blocked sites was a Dutch transport company), and this apparently meets the ACMA’s definition of prohibited online content. Australian websites linking to it could be fined $11,000 a day. The last thing censors can tolerate, it seems, is free and open discussion about censorship.

The Australian government is planning to turn its blacklist into a mandatory internet filter, similar to those used in such great democracies as Burma, Iran, and of course China. This provides an excellent reason why Australians should not let that happen.

Abolishing sedition

Published
by
Idiot/Savant
1 year, 2 months ago
in Authoritarianism, Howardia, Law, Nationalism, Politics, Security and Terrorism
. 67 Comments

Cross-posted from No Right Turn

Three years ago, the Australian government passed draconian sedition laws as part its knee-jerk response to the “war on terror”. Now, Kevin Rudd is planning to repeal them:

The Howard government’s controversial ban on sedition will be scrapped and replaced with legislation that bolsters the protection of free speech under a series of changes to the nation’s terrorism laws.Yesterday the Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, flagged plans to increase oversight of the national security apparatus and promised to accept the bulk of the recommendations from the Clarke inquiry, a 2006 Australian Law Reform Commission report on sedition and a parliamentary committee report on intelligence and security.

(The ALRC review recommended replacing the law with a narrower one bearing more resemblance to criminal incitement, with stronger protections for academic, artistic, scientific, political or journalistic speech to make it clear that merely criticising the government, or reporting or studying such criticism, was not in and of itself seditious or treasonous. They also recommended removing the ludicrous claim of universal jurisdiction which allowed people who had never set foot in Australia, let alone bore it any allegiance, to be prosecuted for “disloyalty” against it).

But its not all good news. There’s this bit:

The new counter-terrorism laws – to be drafted in the first half of next year – will cover attacks that cause psychological as well as physical harm…

This current internationally accepted definition of terrorism (as seen in e.g. New Zealand’s Terrorism Suppression Act) includes acts which are carried out for the purpose of “induc[ing] terror in a civilian population” – but it still requires that they cause death, injury, or serious destruction. So, in order to be “terrorism”, it has to involve killing people or blowing stuff up. Allowing psychological as well as physical harm runs the risk of substantially lowering that threshold, allowing the misclassification of other offences as “terrorism”, with all that that entails. Given that anti-terror laws are already overused, that would be a Very Bad Thing.