Sunday, March 22, 2009

Swedish newspaper names Australia as the country that exercices most control of the Internet

Loose thoughts by Bjorn Landfeldt

Australia is getting quite a reputation among the international community as the country most controlling and censoring the Internet together with Turkey. Dagens Nyheter (DN), Sweden's largest daily newspaper reports on studies carried out by Oxford Internet Institute, Harward, Toronto Uni and Cambridge in a project called ”Open net initiative”.

It doesn't feel good to be put in the same category as Turkey when it comes down to freedom of speech and human rights issues in any form

The authors of the report are concerned with the prospect of censorship and what different regimes will use it for in the future. It is clear that content filtering will lead to segregation in the Internet user community and that well educated and computer savvy segments in society will be able to get around censorship much easier but the less educated masses will become much more limited in the information they will have access to.

Having seen the blacklists leaked in Norway, Denmark, Thailand and Australia lately (which the respective governments did not want) is a sign that current government's intentions may not be future governments intentions and since we know scope creep is a reality, there is definitely reason to ask what such a move might lead to.

It is not reassuring to read Access Denied from MIT press, which has an overview of the filtering activities going on globally. The state of Australia has not been updated since 2007 and the report still maintains that Australia is not seeking to implement ISP level filtering. Even though, when the report was written, Australia got hardly flattering reviews. From the report:

"Overall, though, Australia’s Internet censorship regime is strikingly severe relative to both its neighbor and similar Western states. It is not, however, at the level of the most repressive regimes that ONI has studied".

The most oppressive regimes here are China and Iran.

This is rhetoric used by our strongest allies, the US and UK.

It is also worth noting that Senator Conroy claims that we are joining other countries such as Sweden in our filtering efforts but Sweden seems to think we are an oppressive nation in this regard since there is no talk of mandatory, only voluntary filtering in Sweden (plus stronger freedom of speech and freedom of information legislation).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't worry. When the swedish block-list leaks we will crush the competition. If there were only child-porn sites it wouldn't need to be secret.

Bjorn Landfeldt said...

It is actually quite interesting looking at foreign media and reports on Internet filtering. It is true that there is a black list maintained by Swedish police and that many ISPs in Sweden uses this list. However, the filtering is not mandatory so when there is scope creep, each ISP can react and determine if the new sites should be included. End users can also opt for an ISP that does not filter at all if they don't lie the idea of filtering. Having said that, it is no secret that the Swedish government has done some pretty shady things in the past (see the IB affair for example) and they have many ways of putting pressure on ISPs to accept filtering without necessary legislation. It is just that Australia is openly moving faster than the rest of the western world along the path of censorship and control.