Australia is "debating" changes to the law that will force ISPs and telecommunication companies to keep data on their users. I put "debating" in quotes, because the government is forcing the bills through without any sort of meaningful public input.

The bills are a disgrace. As one commentator (see link below) says, we don't accept that the government can open our letters and read them, so why should email or text messages be any different? We also haven't been told whether a history of our day-to-day browsing the Web will be kept, or for how long, or who would have access to that information.

The trouble with broad-reaching legislation is that, despite reassuring comments at first, the legislation inevitably gets used in the widest possible way, much beyond what the original intent was. For this reason alone, we should be concerned about it.

In the interests of fairness, I link to The Age's opinion piece by Robert McLelland, the Federal Attorney-General, who is replying to a previous critical piece. Make sure you read the comments to McLelland for several very good reasons why the legislation should be rejected.

At long last, after years of obtuse, head-in-the-sand prevaricating, Australia is to get an R+ (i.e. restricted to adults) rating for games.

The issue has been that censorship is ostensibly a matter for the States and needs a joint approach across all of them so that the Commonwealth could enact legislation. Up to recently, when he retired, the South Australian Attorney-General would not agree to an R+ rating.

This meant that there were only classifications ratings below the R+, which caused some adult titles to be refused classification.

The S.A. Attorney-General did not seek re-election late last year, much to everyone's relief. However, in the latest meeting to sort this out, to gamers' surprise, the NSW Attorney-General abstained from voting. NSW had just had a general election, there was a new government in power, and the Attorney-General wanted the new Cabinet to consider the issue first.

That has now happened and NSW has agreed to the proposal. The collective Attorneys-General have agreed to implement an R+ classification, which should be done by the end of this year.

This is a good thing. It means that some games that have "slipped" through on an M+ rating will get the R+ that they should have had in the first place.

In fantastic news, The Australian reports today that the Liberal Party will not support the Government's proposed internet censorship.

This is great news for two reasons. Since we have a Federal election in two weeks, we don't know who will be in power. However, either way, the filter won't proceed. If the Libs win, they won't implement it; if Labor is re-elected, the Libs will block the legislation in the Senate.

I'm too cynical to be cheering just yet, after all we have seen too many twists and turns and back-tracking on this. But, it does seem as though the issue is done and dusted.

I've written on this previously. Search for "censorship" or click on the "censorship" category.

The Age reports that Communications Minister Conroy has backed down on the proposal to introduce mandatory web filtering in Australia.

I wrote about this previously (search the blog for "censorship"). Although The Age is reporting it as a back down, in fact the proposal is still going ahead. The difference this time is that there will be an independent arbiter in the event that someone disputes their website being blocked and, perhaps most importantly, users will know that a URL is blocked because a notice will appear instead of the blocked website.

The latter point means that at least people will be aware of censorship, which will make it harder for subsequent governments to get away with widening the censorship rules. It is still not ideal.

Conroy's backdown on some of the key elements of his original proposals (read The Age's article for the full details) is interesting given his previous absolute refusals to compromise. I can only surmise that we are indeed going to have an early election and     [continued...]

In the first sign of a crack in the wall, the Federal Government has backed off [The Australian article] its plan to censor Australians' access to the internet.

It's mildly good news. Good because it is the first sign of hesitation in a government and minister that, up until now, have stared unblinkingly at their critics; mildly because it still intends to proceed with its plans after the next election at the end of this year.

So we are saved for a little while. It's still very much a concern, though. This Labor government is almost certain to get re-elected and it will no doubt then claim that it has a mandate to proceed with the filtering.

As an aside, politicians who claim they have a mandate give me the rabid annoyances. Unless there was one single issue that dominated an election, voters vote on the cumulated knowledge of all the issues. There is no way a party can claim they have a mandate on every single issue they canvassed, but, of course, they do.     [continued...]

This week is National Blackout Week. It's to draw attention to Australia's great shame, our forthcoming internet censorship laws.

I previously wrote on Australia's forthcoming internet censorship.

Now, AFP reports that the White House backs "the right to a free internet."

Some salient quotes:

• Obama is a "strong supporter of open Internet use" and
• a "big supporter of non-censorship."
• Spokesman Gibbs affirms "our concern is with actions that threaten the universal rights of a free Internet..."

These quotes are in the context of Google's revelations that China has been attacking it and several other major US corporations, as I mentioned previously. However, the context is irrelevant for these quotes, which are     [continued...]

Australia has announced that it will proceed with mandatory censoring of the internet. The process will involve a secret blacklist of websites that will be blocked at the ISP level. The blacklist will be maintained by the Australian Communications and Media Authority ACMA in a hidden process. The list will remain secret.

Although government spin has pushed it as an anti-child pornograpy move, in reality it is plain old censorship. The blacklist will contain sites that have been refused classification (the RC category) by ACMA. Refused classification includes things like euthanasia, abortion, spanking, fetishism, contentious political movements like the Tamil Tigers, computer games, and so on. In other words, an extraordinarily wide net.

An indication of the mindset behind the RC category is that Australia is the only first-world country not to have an R-18 category for games. Any game that is R-18 in other countries cannot be sold in Australia and is Refused Classification.

The surprising thing about this is that almost everybody assumed that it would not proceed. Nobody seriously believed it could happen in a     [continued...]