p2pnet news view P2P | Politics:- Internet freedom advocates at Electronic Frontiers Australia are “gearing up for an important fight in the new year as the Australian government proposes mandatory national Internet filters with a secret blacklist,” says the EFF’s Deep Links in the US, going on the EFA is “looking for volunteers and colleagues — particularly Australians, but they can use help from outside Australia as well — to help take on this critical issue.

“As Lelia Green wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald, the censorship proposal risks ‘legitimating a range of repressive policies pursued by some of the globe’s least accountable governments’.”

Says Electronic Frontiers Australia >>>

1. Filtering update

On Tuesday the 15th of this month, Minister Stephen Conroy called a snap press conference to announce that the live trials of ISP filtering were successful and that the Government was moving ahead with its mandatory filtering policy.

This means that at some point in the new year, legislation will be introduced in Parliament which will require all Internet service providers to begin filtering a list supplied by the Australian Communications and Media Authority within 12 months or face heavy fines. This filter will apply to all Internet connections in the country and will be mandatory.

Interest in the policy has been high in the Australian and international media and opposition is mounting. EFA has been spreading the word in the media (see below), and we are working on several campaigns to ratchet up the pressure on the Government next year. We will begin with the Internet Blackout campaign in January, with much more to come.

As usual, we can use your help. See below for some projects requiring enthusiastic volunteers. We also have an opening for a full-time campaign manager, so if you or somebody you know want to help us take the fight to Conroy, read on!

For more background on the filtering proposal, see efa.org.au or check out EFA’s fact sheets at http://www.efa.org.au/mandatory-internet-filtering-fact-sheets/.

2. EFA in the media

The recent days have seen EFA make numerous appearances in print, radio and TV expressing why the Australian public should be leery of Conroy’s filter. Our media activism is one of the best ways we can reach a broader cross-section of the Australian community and complement our direct campaigns both online and off. Here are a few articles you may have missed:

• Australian Filter to block obscene sites (Sky news)
• Net filter helps no-one (ABC Online)
• Big Brother laws to be brought in for web (Sydney Morning Herald)
• Conroy’s filter just the beginning (ZDNet)
• Australia announces controversial Internet filter (AFP)
• Joining China and Iran, Australia to Filter Internet (Fox News)
• Australia introduces web filters (BBC)
• EFA on the “7PM Project”

3. How you can help

We are currently working on a number of different campaigns, including:

• A mainstream media campaign;
• Postcards for people to mail in to a designated address with a hand-written message, to be delivered to the Minister;
• A national day of action on Australia Day, 26 January 2010;
• A week of internet blackout, from 25 to 29 January 2010;
• A campaign to send christmas cards and presents to the Minister;
• A continued letter writing campaign;
• A testimonials site that collects interviews with key figures about why the filter should not go ahead;
• Web banners for webmasters to link to the campaign.

We are looking for volunteers on each of these projects, and are continuously looking for new ideas to help progress the campaign. We are particularly looking for:

• A web designer – see below;
• A project manager – see below;
• A developer to create a small web application to coordinate community activism by handing out timeslots to volunteers.
• Writers to update the information on our websites, write opinion pieces, draft sample letters, write some simple fact sheets and talking points memos;
• Graphic designers to create logos, postcards, posters, banners;
• Event managers to take responsibility for organising national celebration events on Australia day.
• Community managers, project managers, or anyone else with skills or ideas to help us organise this campaign.
• People to collect signatures for a petition.
• People to take delivery of a stack of postcards and distribute them to people who will write a message and post them back to us.

Steps you can take:

• Contact us at email@efa.org.au with your ideas and feedback.
• Send us feedback on the campaign, and where you’d like to see EFA target its resources.
• Renew your membership or make a donation so that we can continue to fund our ongoing activities.
• Suggest other ways we can step up the campaign.
• Join our Alert mailing list, which we will use to call for specific action.

4. Campaign manager

EFA is looking to hire a campaign, community, and project manager for our campaign against mandatory internet filtering. The position will be a minimum three month contract, and the successful applicant will be expected to take charge of coordinating a number of different projects, including rebranding our nocleanfeed site to create a campaign hub, organising testimonials from key figures, coordinating online and paper petitions, soliciting donations and organising fundraising, coordinating with other interested industry and activist groups, commissioning television commercials, and providing focus to social media campaigns.

See our position description here.

5. Web developer for redesigned campaign site

We are looking for a professional web developer who can create a wordpress theme for our new campaign site. We are moving away from the ‘nocleanfeed’ branding towards a more positive and mainstream message. We are also updating our campaign site to better enable us to present up-to-date information and provide a coordination hub for the many different groups that are opposing mandatory filtering.

We are looking for a professional web designer, either paid or volunteer, to help us with this project. Please contact Colin Jacobs for more information.

6. R18+ for Computer Games campaign

The Commonwealth Minister for Home Affairs has finally released the public discussion paper on the introduction of an R18+ rating for computer games.

EFA intends to lodge a comprehensive submission and we have engaged a writer to lead the drafting of EFA’s paper. Our submission is being made in conjunction with AusGamers and the group of volunteers who have joined our campaign mailing list. The draft structure of the submission will be opened for discussion over the New Year break, and the final draft will be presented for editing at the end of January, for submission by the end of February.

To become involved, please join our campaign list.

In 2006, the New York Times reported that the People’s Republic of China was defending its Internet censorship and surveillance practices by claiming that they were not particularly different from those of other countries, says the EFF, adding >>>

The Times reported that a Chinese official argued (in the newspaper’s paraphrase) that “the controls [China] places on Web sites and Internet service providers in mainland China do not differ much from those employed by the United States and European countries”.

“If you study the main international practices in this regard you will find that China is basically in compliance with the international norm,” [Liu Zhengrong] said. “The main purposes and methods of implementing our laws are basically the same.”

[...]

“It is clear that any country’s legal authorities closely monitor the spread of illegal information,” he said. “We have noted that the U.S. is doing a good job on this front.”

This argument sounded like a weak rationalization in 2006, and the Times noted various qualitative differences between Internet restrictions in the PRC and those in liberal democracies. But researchers have told us that governments around the world, including Australia’s, seem eager to chip away at those differences. The forthcoming book OpenNet Initiative, according to its authors, reports on an alarming trend where “Internet filtering, censorship of Web content, and online surveillance are increasing in scale, scope, and sophistication around the world, in democratic countries as well as in authoritarian states.”

The OpenNet Initiative researchers have also noted that governments are increasingly looking to other countries’ practices as precedents. Soon illiberal regimes’ claims that Internet censorship and national firewalls are a widespread international norm could ring less hollow. Some year soon, it may be sober fact rather than rationalization.

EFA’s fight against Internet censorship in Australia is crucial. We hope Internet users around the world will join it.

Stay tuned.

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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

January, 2010

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 2:09 pm and is filed under P2P, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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