Re: Re: [SLUG] Australian government to censor your internets

On 091216 at 10:27, david wrote:
> Steffen Schulz wrote:
> >But you also can not just make the list public. Any teenager outside
> >Australia will go for it, the very first time they get Internet access
> >in the life.
> 
> Teenagers  aren't the problem.

Content is rated because people don't want kids to see scary stuff.  If
you accept that scary stuff(or any input) influences teenagers and that
OTOH teenagers actively search for scary stuff to impress their peer
group(or whatever reason) and *if* you thus decide to make a list of
content not to be accessed, you better restrict the access to this
list. Otherwise the content that you wanted to prevent these people
from seeing is going to be what they look at *first*.

I made this argument for consistency, I'm not trying to advocate secret
blacklists here.

> Even if they were, do you really think that having some censor with
> an agenda controlling what you see is an answer to anything?

Of course not, I never said that. But you can not protect young people
from seeing stuff by giving them a list of things not to look at. That
works even worse than just not telling them.

Every parent prevents their kids from seeing some part of the real
word. Question is if and how much the state should support this
behaviour. But I did not intend to argue about this part here.


> If we are to be censored, it MUST be done in the clear light of day
> or we are no better than the worst fascists or communists.

True, but nevertheless contradicting what I assume to be the
actual/official goal of all this censoring.


> It's not at all clear what constitutes sexual violence or child
> abuse, and censoring it is NOT going to solve anything.

I agree on both accounts. We recently had this debate in Germany at
length. (To the surprise of every protester, the president declined
to sign it in the end, mentioning constitutional uncertainties.)

One of the core arguments in that dispute were practical experiments by
some people who simply contacted the hoster of content that is to be
blacklisted. The government was not able to present even a single
country where such content was not removed extremely fast. (It was
quite hilarious actually, they picked some random country with no
explicit child porn laws and got quite a reaction from the government
over there.)

People have different views on what should illegal, but that does not
mean there is no common ground. Consensus *can* be found if you target
the real thing and ignore, e.g., drug abuse instructions and sex
between/with teenagers.

> In the case of sexual violence, there isn't even consensus as to what
> it actually *is*.

True. Americans and British are certainly overdoing it and all the FUD
is also shaping the public opinion in Germany. But if you consider what
could be international consensus, with countries where teenage girls
are regularly married to older men, you should be able to see that this
would be a lower bound on what is certainly not acceptable.

> Then of course, there is the
> problem that people who are actually trying to do something useful
> will be barred access to the very material that might help.

I'm not familiar with Australian law, but it sounds like this PC-rating
is already in place. Regardless of the blacklisting, those people might
be convicted for possession/acquiring?

> Up until recently, there was a lot of child abuse going on in
> orphanages and convents which the blaze of sunlight has done more to
> eradicate than decades of censorship ever did.

Absolutely! This is also one of the core reasons why several
associations against child abuse where protesting against the
censorship plans of our government. 

But that does not mean that you should not remove the content from the
hoster once you tracked down and collected all the required evidence to
convict these people. This approach would actually help the
investigations *and* makes it more difficult for governments to setup
additional national censorship infrastructure. 



/steffen
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