[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>
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