[ProgSoc] Censorship Forum: UNSW, this Thursday.

John Elliot jj5 at jj5.net
Mon Nov 24 13:57:56 EST 2008


Robert Howard wrote:
> Anyone interested?

Yes. Good timing. I was just sitting here working myself into a state 
about this. I'm fucking furious. In my view if the state condones 
deployment of this level of surveillance and censorship capacity it 
violates its social contract and loses its legitimate monopoly on 
violence. There is no amount of doublethink that allows for the 
interpretation their plan as anything other than fascist. It's the 
responsibility of the state to protect *against* this type of outcome. 
That it's happening in our country is appalling.

Corporations went way too far already (transparent proxies, email bugs, 
and more recently social modelling), and now the state wants in 
(although it doesn't have the technological capacity without leaning on 
the private sector). The technical capacity gave rise to the 
possibility, and the (international) private sector has been quietly 
creating precedent to the point now that they feel a level of 
entitlement. The "free market" has been utterly flaccid in throwing up 
combatant solutions to protect the privacy of the individual and their 
communications.

One thing that I'd dearly like to understand about these new censorship 
technologies is what exactly is happening from a technical perspective. 
Just how broken are they planning to make the internets? All the 
arguments that I've seen against the policy to date have been grounded 
in costs and technicalities. While that's interesting, it's a complete 
red-herring, and people shouldn't get trapped into a debate framed this 
way. The argument shouldn't be "gee, government mediation of 
individual's communications might slow down the network and not really 
work anyway, because the technology 'isn't quite ready yet'." The 
argument should be "that's a fucking disgrace, how dare you even 
consider it, get out of here you haven't got a leg to stand on."

*Contemporaneously*, I read this [1] in the paper this morning. Damn 
straight there'd better be a "rethink".

On a related note, I had the misfortune of suffering through this [2] 
recently. Australian "think tanks" and policy makers are a fucking 
embarrassment. Stupid pompous parochial hicks digging themselves into 
ditches they don't understand. How far out of touch with contemporary 
reality could they be? Light-weight bureaucrats with a misplaced 
self-assurance in their old tricks and antiquated ideas, pulling levers 
on a system they don't understand, and being properly outclassed. 
They're pretty fucking far away from the "philosopher kings" they'd like 
to regard themselves.

[1] 
<http://blogs.smh.com.au/business/lindsaytanner/2008/11/24/internetdrives.html>

[2] <http://www.themonthly.com.au/tm/node/1166>











More information about the Progsoc mailing list