Big Brother Down Under?

There’s been a couple of news articles here in Australia which have really caught my attention in the last week or two. Both are quite topical in this age of freedom of speech and the government ’spying’ on and or monitoring our activities as citizens, and to be frank they’ve gotten me a little angry.

Let’s get the first one out of the way.

Last year the Howard government spent some 85 million dollars on providing content filtering software to Australian households in an attempt to protect our children for ‘the evils of the internet’. Now don’t get me wrong I believe that the security of our children should be top priority however I think that the way that the government has previously gone about it was poorly done and to be honest I believe a lot of the responsibility should come back on to the parents and how they’re teaching their children to interact with the world.

Well the Labor Government agrees with my opinion that the Howard government did it incorrectly as well, they’ve since come up with their own ’solution’ which they’ve dubbed ‘Clean Feeds’. Basically these ‘clean feeds’ mean that the content that you are viewing on the internet would have to be approved through a filtering system on your ISP’s servers before it hits your web browser…hrmm tell me I’m wrong here but wont this slow down the already woeful speed of adsl in Australia, not to mention the unfortunate people who live outside of areas that have adsl available to them and are still on dialup?

Another area that will be effected is the freedom of speech and information in Australia. What’s to stop the government from filtering out content such as this that speaks out against such a system, not a lot I’d say. Just like I can add a ‘competitive ad filter’ on my Google Adsense account to stop the display of an advertisement that I dont feel is appropriate for my blogs audience, so could the Labor Government to stop any anti-government movement..Australia or North Korea??

Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy has been quoted as saying;

“Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road,” he said. “If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree.”

In my opinion the Minister is using this child pornography tag as a scare tactic so that it becomes easier for the Labor Government to get this legislation through without losing too much face on the issue of freedom of speech.

Again I’d like to know where are the parents while their children are surfing the internet? Why are you not keeping an eye on what your children are doing? Why are you not educating them on right and wrong? Sure curiosity normally gets the better of kids, and I’ll admit sneaking a mate’s dad’s hustler magazine down to the shack we used to hang out at when we were kids, but if you’ve taught your kids about right and wrong, respecting other people, and have generally taken an interest in their activities then in most circumstances your kids will grow up to become good respectable people.

Back to the ‘clean feeds’ issue. Well it turns out that this ’service’ that will be provided by your local friendly ISP will be an ‘opt out’ service as opposed to an ‘opt in’ service, so what does that actually mean? Everyone who has an account with an Internet Service Provider in Australia, be it Optus, Bigpond, whoever, will be automatically subscribed to this service. If you do not want this filtering on your service you will have to ring your ISP and tell them that you would like the ‘clean feed’ filtering removed from your account and you will have to answer a questionaire, which will no doubt be entered into a database which the government will no doubt have access to…hrmmm sounds sketchy to me?

Techcrunch have their own say on the subject here, and you can read the Labor’s Plan for Cyber-Safety by downloading their pdf here.

There’s also this fantastic ‘propaganda‘ video here on You Tube.