p2pnet view P2P | Politics:- “You simply can’t have free access to the internet. It has to be controlled, censored and people have to be held accountable for their actions on it. We punish people who drink, we punish people who speed and we have to implement laws to that effect when it comes to the internet.”

That’s Matt Warren (right), the man who runs Deakin University’s school of information systems in Australia.

He’s cited in the same story as 11-year-old Jessi Slaughter who became “something of a minor celebrity on tween gossip site StickyDrama, where she was linked to a relationship with the lead singer of Blood on the Dancefloor and made an overnight YouTube star for her foul-mouthed tirade against her ‘haters’,” says news.com.au.

With this in mind, “Should ISP filter be an election issue?” – the story asks.

Because the possibility of the introduction of online ‘filtering’ is hugely contentious in Australia, which is close to an election under its new Labour government leader, Julia Gillard, who deposed Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister who, like Warren, believes the net is there to be censored.

Now the Australian federal government will hand-pick an “expert” to “manually check up to 10,000 blacklisted web pages”, says The Australian.

“The proposal, which one critic described as too traumatic and absurd, will come to fruition over the next year if Labor wins the August 21 election”, it says, going on >>>

Labor will take to the polls its controversial policy of mandatory ISP-level filtering of refused classification (RC) content.

On July 9, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the government would recommend to state and territory ministers that a review of RC be conducted.

The review, expected to take a year, meant the filtering plan would be introduced in 2012 under a Gillard Labor regime.

The plan was “put forward to quell fears Labor would quietly add links to non-RC web pages — such as anti-Labor sites — on the list”, says The Australian, adding:

“A spokeswoman for Senator Conroy confirmed the expert would be a person and not an organisation. When asked if that person would enter into a browser each URL on the entire RC list to ensure its legitimacy, she said: ‘Yes, the independent expert would be a person (such as a retired judge) and they would examine the list to ensure it includes only RC content’.”

“On how it was possible that the expert would be able to access pages automatically blocked by all Australian ISPs, the spokeswoman said: ‘The independent expert will have powers to carry out their job.’ The government is not saying how much the expert will cost taxpayers.”

RC is short for ‘refused classification’, a euphemism for sites the wise auld heads running the Oz government consider unsafe for the eyes and minds of its citizens.

(Cheers, Filip)

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news.com.au – Jessi Slaughter and the 4chan trolls – the case for censoring the internet, July 20, 2010
hugely contentious- Australian net ‘filter’ scheme doomed, July 10, 2010
The Australian – Government plans for expert to check each banned web page, July 20, 2010

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 at 10:48 am and is filed under Freedom, P2P. 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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