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Politicians struggling to cope with that interwebby thing

Colin Jacobs

by Colin Jacobs

23 Dec 05:55am

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Filed under: Broadband, Censorship, Internet, Media, Wikileaks

41 comments

Besides liking to get their picture in the newspaper, the politicians of the world have something in common: They are struggling with the internet.

Illustration: HAJO.

Not just how to set up wireless on their laptops, or how to clear incriminating sites from their browser histories, but how to regulate information itself.

In almost every country on earth, the free access to the world’s data is causing embarrassment, consternation and even panic. And the lawmakers are reacting.

In the US, the Department of Homeland Security recently seized control of 80 internet domains for alleged piracy.

In Britain, we heard yesterday of a conservative MP who wants an “opt-in” internet to stop children seeing porn. In France, a new government-controlled blacklist is being introduced to block child pornography, terrorism and hate speech.

In China, new regulations are coming to effectively forbid anonymous internet use. And in North Korea, they still don’t have internet at all - just an officially sanitised intranet for the nation.

In each case, lawmakers bow to pressure to clamp down on undesirable speech. But their tools for doing so are limited.

Fish swim, birds fly and politicians pass laws. But it is all too seldom that a national law, even when well-intentioned, is considered or practical enough to have the desired outcome.

In Australia, our lawmakers are no different.

The debate over mandatory internet censorship here has raged for three years, and the government has refused to give an inch of ground. No matter that there is unanimous agreement amongst experts that the filter will be useless and unworkable.

One way or another, they intend to impose their blacklist on us if they can. But should we care? If the blacklist is imperfect and only going after the nastiest web sites, why make a fuss?

Because protecting an open internet is more crucial than ever before. The internet’s capacity for ensuring transparency in governance is unmatched, and its power is sorely needed.

In the modern era, governments and corporations are increasingly secretive, though adept at spin and media manipulation. Traditional journalism has often been unable to keep up.

But the internet makes it that much harder to keep a secret from the public. Whether it is a leaked government report, an exposé of corruption, or a campaign against a corporation that is poisoning the air, the public interest is served by a platform that is open and cannot be censored on a whim.

Internet freedom brings other tangible benefits as well. The advantages of instant and unfettered global communication are known to everybody; today it’s difficult to recall the experience of sending air mail, painstakingly written in tiny letters on translucent blue paper.

Every year we reap the rewards of increased productivity, flourishing online commerce, and continued innovation.

Now, imagine if the internet was replaced with a collection of a hundred national networks, each operating on a different set of rules and regulations, each controlled by a different technology selected by the local government to allow the requisite level of control. The pace of progress would be a tiny fraction of what we take for granted today.

But could anyone argue that that this online dystopia is not what would eventuate if the internet was designed, today, by our political leaders?

Wikileaks has given us a pointed lesson in the benefits and perils of internet freedom. As revelations and embarrassments mount, politicians are in damage-control mode.

Their earlier rhetoric about the benefits to democracy of free speech and communications has been put to the test, and a great deal of hypocrisy has been exposed. The same sort of people who in Iran were “citizen journalists” are now suddenly “info-terrorists”.

The next time the government proposes to censor the internet, will we again accept their justification? Or will we remember the lessons of Wikileaks and respond with skepticism?

If free speech requires that violence can be searched out online, that racists can gather and share poisonous ideas, that defamation can occur in perfect anonymity - would we pay that price?

The fact is that an open internet levels the playing field. Gone are the days when the power to mobilise was the exclusive domain of governments or large organisations. Thanks to the internet, any of us can publish a manifesto, issue a call to arms, and organise a protest movement that did not exist yesterday. It’s no wonder the world’s powerbrokers are nervous.

And that’s just how we want them to be.

Most commented

431Australia, you have nothing to fear but fear itself
390There's no one Thomson won't burn to save his skin
336Animal experiments won't cure me from cancer
313Thomson didn't answer the question everyone is asking
266Who murdered the Arts degree?
246A big day for Thomson, who thus far is guilty of nothing...
231Craig Thomson speaks. Meanwhile, in Australia...
231South Australia. It's the middle bottom bit.

41 comments

Show oldest | newest first

    • Eric says:

      05:03am | 23/12/10

      Information is power. Governments want the right to have complete information on all their citizens - the ability to spy on our phone conversations, emails, bank accounts, medical records, and so on. But they also want to deny us the ability to know anything about them, except what they choose to reveal.

      The battle for transparency and freedom of speech is probably the most significant political struggle of the coming decade. The outcome will make a big difference to our rights and freedoms. The push for censorship is a push for control over the people.

      It is we, the people, who should control the government, not the other way around.

      Reply

    • Bob says:

      07:37am | 23/12/10

      I couldn’t agree more, Eric -  governments the world over seem to have forgotten that they are there to serve the people who put them in power, not the other way around. Unfortunately this view abounds at both State and Federal levels in “The Lucky Country” as well.

    • KH says:

      08:59am | 23/12/10

      Bob - not all governments are in power by the will of their people.  Unless you think the people of North Korea want a hereditary dictatorship, or the people of Burma love their military junta.  There are a lot of places where governments are military dictatorships, religious extremists and the like, and are not going to consider anything as frivlous as what is ‘fair’ or ‘free speech’ as part of their ethos.  Our own government can be seen as an individual amongst a lot of other governments; just like you don’t want every detail of your life to be available for public scrutiny, the government in its community of other governments needs a degree of ‘privacy’ as well, especially when you consider that there are a lot of crackpot governments out there that are seeking the destruction of our kind of democracy.  Doesn’t having no secrets at all make us a little vulnerable?

    • grumpy old man says:

      09:37am | 23/12/10

      the answer is to fight the bureaucracy at every opportunity, and to continually question and challenge their servants…it can even be fun!
      As Eric says, Govts have turned the tables and now believe we work for them, just look at how profligate they are with our money, believing that its ok to throw $millions away for no result.
      They have no rights other than those we give them, no money other than what we earn, and no authority other than that which we cede to them.

    • St. Michael says:

      01:23pm | 23/12/10

      Assuming this is the normal Eric: well, whatever your views on women’s/men’s issues, mate, I agree with you completely on this one.

    • Razor says:

      02:13pm | 23/12/10

      Information isn’t power - Knowledge is power.  Otherwise we’ed be ruled by Librarians.

    • Eric says:

      02:51pm | 23/12/10

      Good point, Razor - but if knowledge was power, we’d be ruled by academics.

      Perhaps wisdom is power. That’s the knowledge of how to use information, and why.

    • Danny B says:

      03:34pm | 23/12/10

      @ Razor

      Isn’t the Internet a means of accessing knowledge?

    • Eric says:

      06:44pm | 23/12/10

      Notwithstanding all of my comments above, I do believe that there is a place for genuine secrets. But, in the case of government, those secrets should be extremely rare and well-justified - such as, for example, the identities of agents or the details of the latest military technologies.

      Most other secrets aren’t really that important, and leaking them won’t do a great deal of harm. Example: Wikileaks. Most of what was revealed didn’t surprise anyone - it just confirmed what we had already guessed.

      The only really bad part was revealing the identities of Afghan civilians who had helped their elected government and Coalition forces against the Taliban. That leak was malicious and unconscionable.

      But as for the rest of them - pretty mild stuff, really. As you would expect, since we are supposed to be the good guys. And so, if anything, the end result of these leaks could well be just confirming that we Westerners aren’t really all that evil after all.

      It’s the tyrants and dictators who really need to fear open information.

    • john says:

      08:04pm | 23/12/10

      Agreed Eric well said, that’s why we need 3 levels of government in Australia and if you count the governor generals that’s a symbolic 4th.
      As the governments grow in size it will give the People of Australia more government to control.
      Perhaps that what Kevin mean’t when he said he wanted a bigger Australia?

    • Reg says:

      12:29am | 24/12/10

      John your wisdom is legion. A BIGGER Australia equates with having intellectually BIGGER people. As the theatrical saying goes, “There are no small parts, there are only small people.” Say what they like about Australia being mostly uninhabitable, so was the US until they changed it and Australia is near the same size. Think big, don’t become like some of the Americans who know nothing outside their street or state.

      The prevention of insider-trading is one of the best reasons for government secrets.

    • Andrew says:

      07:20am | 23/12/10

      Well said Eric. I watch the wikileaks affair with interest (our first ever truly global political scandal!), part of me hopeful for the kind of transparency it inspires, part of me fearful that ultimately wikileaks will drive internet censorship far quicker than any kidiporn or piracy site could.  Hopefully the wild west of the net will remain free for sometime to come, but Orwellian values will win in the end.

      Reply

    • Andrew says:

      07:24am | 23/12/10

      The balance of power is ludicrously in favour of government, and tragically against those who vote them in. A single vote: what a pathetically insignificant measure of influence each of us has. The balance needs to change, greatly. Just watching self-satisfied politicians award themselves another hundred thousand dollars a year, as they so often do, while others are living out of cars or on the streets ought to be enough to show that there is something extremely rotten in the state of Denmark.

      Reply

    • L. says:

      10:28am | 23/12/10

      :Just watching self-satisfied politicians award themselves another hundred thousand dollars a year, as they so often do.”

      When was the last time politicians awarded themselves “another hundred thousand dollars a year”?, let alone “often”.

    • Brad of Bentleigh says:

      10:42pm | 23/12/10

      yeah, I think a minister only gets around $120-$150K (plus allowances). I wouldn’t do the job for that… heck, I wouldn’t do ANY job for that.

      PS: I don’t think “free speech” is enshrined in law in this country, certainly not as it is in the US constitution. We have it by default, and expect it, but we’re not guaranteed it by law (as far as I know at least).

    • Jason says:

      07:01pm | 25/12/10

      What’s that Andrew - that a bunch of people, born equal, with the myriad of amazing opportunities available to us here in Australia have made bad decisions and ended up living in cars or on the street?  Sorry - most of the time people are poor is because they didn’t pay any attention or work hard in school (yes, the bullies) don’t step up to tough challenges (yes the victims), don’t take calculated risks (the fearful) and wonder why those who did pay attention, do step up and do take risks are more successful after years of the hard slog.  Politicians are people who have made something of themselves and take a lot of flak for simply standing up, suck it up and do it for yourself and stop taking away from those who earn it.  OH yeah, merry Christmas.

    • Craig says:

      08:11am | 23/12/10

      It is not only politicians who fear the spread of information outside their control, it is also our ‘Captains of Industry’ who fear the loss of their influence and profitable monopolies over price and distribution channels - from Media Moguls and Music Publishing giants to massive retailers.

      They all sing from the same hymn sheet “peoples’ choices need to be constrained to the products we offer, through the channels we use at the prices we set.”

      Their goal is to stop the wheel turning, freeze society in place. Sure we can have more innovative gadgets, but any tinkering with political and business models is off limits. You can have iPads, but not free media, green cars but not a green state.

      I think most of our ‘leaders’ have no concept of their own hypocrisy - they want change in a managed and careful manner - suiting their own timeframes and under their control.

      However the Internet genie, and their own populations, refuse to abide by the rules they set, flowing through legal loopholes that receive significantly more attention than the loopholes that allowed many of them to achieve their own wealth and power.

      We are fighting a war right now, and not a pretty one, between old style command-and-control thinking and the ability to form spontaneous matrix-like leadership and operational structures using real-time mass communication.

      Who is ‘right’? I don’t believe there is anyone objective enough to answer. Certainly those on both sides claim ‘rightness’ - as both sides have in every war. What is certain, however, is that all of the histories will be written by the winners.
      I expect many further casualties on both sides before we see peace.

      Reply

    • CABAL says:

      08:46am | 23/12/10

      This is indeed an important battle especially with various factions in the US proposing to put in a virtual button that could shut down all the internet sites hosted in the US (that allot of them) and many countries already using or developing fire walls for the whole population it makes you wonder if their is any governments left in the world that actually stand for the ideals they were founded on or if they are slowing turning into giant dictatorships, with a central bureaucracy running everything and the people endlessly exploited and lied to… mmm either way I will continue to vehemently oppose the internet filter here in AUS. Not that public opinion seems to count for much in this country anymore.

      Reply

    • Teejay says:

      11:55am | 23/12/10

      @cabal - we need to break the monopoly of the two major party blocks before we can pull the political elite of all shades into line.  Vote independent - it doesn’t matter who - and put the sitting member last on your ballot paper. The seismic shock of such a radical election result will bring much needed democracy to Australia.

    • nosthow says:

      09:24am | 23/12/10

      Not all are struggling Colin- the Labor Party are trying to put in place a new Infrastructure called the NBN which will see Australia the envy of the world re the Internet. Of course right on que Tony Abbott , the “Great Blocker”, has chimed in and is of course attempting to block that Infrastructure project. Good news though the chap he has assigned to the task of dismantling the NBN is none other than the great emailist himself Malcolm Turnbull and it has gladdened my heart to see Malcolm only giving lukewarm attention to his “task” - in fact he often slips up and praises the NBN god love him ! Of course it was also revealed Malcolm has $10 million of shares in a company that will ultimately benefit from the rollout of the NBN - go hard Malcolm ! You have got to love these Liberals Colin - just when you think they have sunk to the lowest ebb possible their Leader takes them to an even lower depth - how low can you go Tony - the new Limbo kid !

      Reply

    • Reg says:

      10:58am | 24/12/10

      I can’t help thinking that if someone suggested a communications system bases an tens of thousands of guys on push-bikes, motor-bikes or walking and with thousands of officers around the country by which ever home in Australia could have it’s letters popped in a box out the front, someone would say it was a silly fantastic expensive dream that would never come to fruition. And they’d have been faux-liberals for sure.

    • Tony of Poorakistan says:

      11:01am | 13/01/11

      Conceptually, the NBN is excellent. The problems we face are twofold - firstly, we have a pack of profligate pork-barrelers in charge of it and secondly, the money they were gifted by Howard and Costello has already been wasted on such frivolous past-times as BER rorts and pink batt fiascos, so that we will be paying through the nose for it until such time as we get a LNP Government at the helm to arrest the haemorrhaging. 
       
      Abbot’s idea, poorly articulated admittedly, was to fund the SAME backhaul infrastructure, but to use existing and additional technology from the POPs to the consumer and then build in the high-speed fibre to the premises as the money became available and demand dictated. 
       
      The real problem in most of Australia has been lack of competitive backhaul, caused by a succession of Governments (of both persuasions) allowing Telstra to become both wholesaler and retailer.  Unfortunately, the ALP seem hellbent on creating Telstra Mk II. The shambling, bumbling bureaucracy that is NBNCo already reeks of Telstra, both in terms of the people who are already there with their snouts in the trough and the lack of transparency, accountability and progress. Once this behemoth is in place and functioning, the Govt of the day will sell it off and we’ll be worse off than we were before, because every connection will be predicated on FTTP; ADSL, HCF and the like will no longer be available from competitors. There will be no choice except for the retailer who arranges for you to be connected, eg iiNet, TPG, Internode, Bigpond etc and *their* only differentiator will be the quality of their phone support and bundling content, which few people want or appreciate. 
       
      In other words, in typical ALP fashion, what could have been great will end up yet another statistic on the ALP’s list of failures. 
       
      And only the ALP could conceive of something as potentially productive as the NBN, then decide to cripple it with a filter.

    • Rossco says:

      09:46am | 23/12/10

      Hearing Gillard compare the internet to a movie theatre time and time again says nothing more than she is a rotten aged dinosaur with no concept of the internet or what it stands for. She is a national disgrace along with the rest of her Labor minions who push the filter.

      Reply

    • Chris says:

      02:54pm | 23/12/10

      It’s about World of Warcraft now, isn’t it?

    • LC says:

      06:17pm | 23/12/10

      You forgot to mention the ACL, who have been demanding mandatory internet filtering even before Kevin Rudd became opposition leader.

    • HeatherG says:

      10:32am | 25/12/10

      Chris,

      You know, jokes aside, yes.

      Sort of.

      Internet filters, as proposed, could theoretically seek (I say “seek” advisedly) to regulate the internet in a similar way as, say, the PAL/NTSC system regulates the sale of DVDs. See, the ability to torrent movie files, ignoring ethical considerations regarding piracy, has rendered much of that system obsolete, and Gillard’s belief of the “internet as movie theatre” gives us an idea of one of the agendas behind this—profit margins.

      The fact that the filter as proposed would spectacularly fail to do any such thing seems to be beyond the likes of Gillard and Conroy, because they don’t understand such things. China has the sort of draconian regulation that Labor seeks, yet citizens still manage to get past it. Paedophiles and the like already do the same, why drive the more stupid ones (who currently don’t have the knowledge to do so) underground?

      As for other sexualised images, any parent who couldn’t be bothered to learn how simple it is to protect your kids from such images and is happy for the false security of a filter that doesn’t actually work, needs to have a good hard look at themselves. If you don’t “have time” to take the 10 minutes out it takes to lay down a few rules, then you don’t have time to have kids, period. I am capable of looking after my own children in that regard, thanks, I don’t need or want a nanny state to do it for me. Labor, want to help my kids? Stop taking funding out of Universities, roads, etc., for useless hack filter programmes that everyone but you knows won’t work, you bunch of…. *cough*

      However, what the filter would do is unnecessarily choke things at the local level. NBN be damned—the net is only as fast as its slowest point. And that would be a PITA for MMORPG gamers, myself included.

    • Andrew says:

      12:03pm | 23/12/10

      Of course they are struggling… Until the birth (and serious uptake) of the internet, the gov’t of the world closely controlled their borders and what went in and out.

      Now in modern times, they have no control. It’s like having a massively secure door with a hole in the wall next to it.

      Gov’t just can’t get their head around the idea that we have something which is not under any one entities control, you don’t need a license to use or publish information to, and it has no respect for borders.

      The internet was never designed to be used so widely (look up IPv6 for proof of that), it was never designed to be controlled (first network with no “core”), it was never designed to be secure (sharing information widely \  quickly and easily was the goal, if you wanted secure use a telephone) .

      Reply

    • kerrie o'rourke says:

      12:27pm | 23/12/10

      labor struggles with nothing.
      liberal struggles with everything.

      Reply

    • Andrew says:

      08:50am | 24/12/10

      BS. Both side of politics are equally inept when it comes to the internet…

      On one hand you have Julia that feels that an internet pages can all (aka the entire internet) be classified as easily as a movie or a book, completely forgetting about the shear number of pages out there, the fact that they are created so easily and quickly, and they don’t actually need to be “brought to Australia” for us to access them,

      As for the libs, well, here you have a group of people whos choice of IT minister a few years back said once said “I don’t see the need to help my kids play online games” when once asked about improving internet speed from dial-up to broadband. Unfortuantly their continued choices don’t actually have a clue.

      The sad thing is there are pollies out there who understand tech and have an interest in it, such as Kate Lundy, but to appease the “Australian Christian Lobby Gods” she is not allowed anywhere near the IT portfolio.

    • Reg says:

      02:25pm | 23/12/10

      It seems I’ve strayed into a bunch of anarchists left over from the nineteenth century and turned up in the 21st. We’ve got all your IP numbers boys and we’ll be around.

      Reply

    • LC says:

      03:10pm | 23/12/10

      This comment would be rather amusing if it were not for the fact this could actually become reality, especially with the government going out of it’s way to get it’s web snooping plans made law as silently as possible.

    • Reg says:

      06:10pm | 23/12/10

      LC, don’t think for one moment that there are not some on this very forum who collect details of each participant as part of a personality dossier. If one has to be so protective about every detail of their lives, then they should wall themselves up in a cave. Just look at the disclosure that is rampant on Facebook. The SS, just like the NKVD, depended on neighbour betraying neighbour for their function, because the task was far too large for even they. This has been standard as far back as the French Revolution and will continue to be so. As Eric says, knowledge is power.

    • guy lee hanlon says:

      04:01pm | 23/12/10

      in every country on earth,all governments panic the minute they are forced to think or forced to do sothing.everything and everyone panics them all the time everywhere.
      this is called politics.or government.

      Reply

    • Damian Parkhill says:

      05:31pm | 23/12/10

      In other news - the UN has weighed in on the fight for Internet freedom by clearly showing its support for it.

      http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2010/12/22/un-statement-on-wikileaks

      While I have little doubt the tools in government will respect the UN or the fact that they are a signatory to the UN charter of human rights which requires them to respect internet freedom as freedom of expression and speech, it is nice to know that us the people still have people up the top willing and able to fight the good fight for us

      Reply

    • Steve says:

      09:39am | 24/12/10

      The UN is nothing but a stuffed shirt

    • LC says:

      02:41pm | 24/12/10

      Agreeing with Steve. The UN isn’t going to do anything about it other than talk.

    • Tripper Smurf says:

      07:22pm | 23/12/10

      People will look back at 2010 and 2011 as being the moment when freedom of speech either failed or suceeded in full.

      Reply

    • Jane says:

      07:30pm | 23/12/10

      What Eric says. This battle will be world changing - and it needs to be.

      Reply

    • crackerjack says:

      08:45am | 24/12/10

      If you really want to know about the internet ask Julian Assange. He knows a lot and issharing his knowledge

      Reply

    • Brian Greig says:

      11:43am | 24/12/10

      A few years ago when I was a Democrats Senator, I sat on the Senate’s IT Committee. One investigation we did was into online gambling - which the Howard Government was moving to “ban.” On the morning of the inquirey at Parliament House Canberra, the committee was delayed several minutes because its chairman (a Liberal Senator), was unable to work out how to plug his mouse into his laptop. And so there it was: the perfect illustration of the uninformed moving to regulate information. The chasm between knowledge and understanding. The myth and the reality.

      Reply

    • Rich says:

      08:32pm | 26/12/10

      “imagine if the internet was replaced with a collection of a hundred national networks, each operating on a different set of rules and regulations”.

      Actually, this is exactly what we have today. The internet is a heterogeneous mass of telecommunications equipment held together by the use of some common protocols and a domain name system.

      While I’m not advocating for any particular view, it’s worth noting that governments around the world already control what you can see on TV or read in a newspaper, yet we still claim to have a free press and free speech.

      Reply
 
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