Internet filter danger

REMEMBER the images of German soldiers marching through the Arc de Triomphe after conquering Paris during World War II?

Or those grainy black-and-white photographs from May 1933 when the Nazis embarked on their campaign of burning all books considered to be subversive?

Do you recall the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1984? Perhaps the burning books in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451?

Welcome to Australia in the 21st century, where totalitarian history meets science-fiction and dark political satire.

Welcome to the Rudd Government's internet filter.

Like most authoritarian pogroms, the internet filter is being sold as a measure to protect the greater communal well-being.

A quick recap: Australia's "Minister for Truth", Stephen Conroy, has claimed the filter will help stamp out child pornography, protecting the young and vulnerable from accessing inappropriate online material.

This will result in the internet being filtered at two levels. Firstly, all internet service providers will be required to block sites deemed unsuitable for children (hopefully this includes reruns of The Simpsons but that's a column for another day).

Anyway, we can opt out of this kiddie filter if we contact our ISP. What we can't opt out of, however, is the second-level filter that blocks all sites deemed illegal or unsuitable for adults to view.

This was sold as an attempt to free Australia from the scourges of child pornography, terrorism and so forth.

The great logical fallacy of that argument is that those who trade in child porn or bombmaking recipes don't do so in the public domain but swap their information on obscure message boards or by way of peer-to-peer file-sharing sites.

And what is terrorism? Is it a bunch of activists organising a demonstration against an OECD meeting, for example?

None of this can be blocked without effectively shutting down the entire internet to all but the likes of the ABC Kids webpage or official government websites.

So what will be caught?

Given that the Government has taken a leaf out of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbel's book and decreed the list of blocked sites will remain secret, we only have a broad indication of what we are to be protected from. Initially, it was to be material that would be refused classification by Australian censors: largely banned films and imagery of an explicit sexual and/or violent nature.

It also is likely to include a lot of milder X-rated material: what we married and consenting adults do in the privacy of our own homes, or in fact what various state governments sanction and tax through the licensing of legal brothels.

There are brothels in Brisbane, for example, that legally offer fairly mild dungeon and dominatrix fantasies that, if filmed, would be banned from ever being released on disk, even under our existing X-category. Go figure.

Sex aside, though, the nanny net also will include computer games.

Australia bans the sale of all computer games that attract anything higher than an MA 15+ rating.

Any game that might attract an R rating is banned from sale or must be heavily censored.

But computer gamers don't just buy a disc to slip into their PlayStation. They often participate in multi-player online games such as World of Warcraft.

These aren't rated and may well fall foul if there is a complaint of our new net nanny regime. If in doubt, ban it. Where will it end?

As internet freedom advocacy group Electronic Frontiers Australia spokesman Colin Jacobs was recently reported as saying: "This is confirmation that the scope of the mandatory censorship scheme will keep on creeping.

"Far from being the ultimate weapon against child abuse, it now will officially censor content deemed too controversial for a 15-year-old."

The office of Stephen Conroy also confirmed that online retail sites, which offer games refused classification in Australia because they fall into the restricted category, also could be blocked.

Hello? Is there anybody out there?

Wouldn't that include the likes of Amazon and eBay?

Right now, I could log on to Amazon and order copies of banned computer games such as Fallout 3 or Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, which was banned because it allegedly promoted graffiti art.

And what of banned or unclassified films?

Lets go to Amazon again and see if we can buy the likes of Pasolini's (banned) classic tale of fascism and mass human debasement Salo, the banned uncut version of Caligula, or perhaps even more confronting material such as Jorg Buttgereit's Nekromantik or Fred Vogel's August Underground.

Check, check, check and check again. Better block Amazon and every other online retailer on the planet that sells game and film titles refused classification.

Oh, and also block the likes of YouTube, which carries clips from these banned films and games.

And don't forget to block access to the thousands of movie and gaming forums that also discuss, and host sequences of, films and games that are forbidden here.

It's idiocy. Offer, and that means offer not impose, filtering for children's net use by all means but let adults decide for themselves what they want to watch, play and talk about, or buy online.

If this draconian madness of the internet filter comes to pass, I promise to publish whatever I can when it comes to ways of circumventing it.

And if that is deemed illegal, then just email me and we'll conduct the resistance by other means.