There’s an obvious rebuttal to this that even Clive should be able to understand:

“The World Wide Web isn’t like ‘films, television, books, and magazines’. The World Wide Web is like films, television, books, magazines, speeches, lectures, meetings, soapboxes, panels, parties, coffee klatches, crafting circles, political rallies, noisy pubs, arts soirees, jam sessions, sports gatherings, fan conventions, and millions upon millions of people conversing with each other and showing each other stuff.

Unless you think the Government should be mandatorily and automatically filtering each and every one of these things, your analogy fails. Next?”

You seem to be arguing that because it would be easy for the community to discover if and when the ‘clean feed’ technology is ever applied to POLITICAL censorship, it would never happen.

I think you are right it would be easy for people in the community to detect. But the liklihood is that it would be ued, at least to start, on websites that the Government feels it can punish without serious debate. Take ‘fascist’ or ‘neo-Nazi’ sites, for example. Who is going to stand up for them in Parliament or the mainstream media?

An alternative scenario is that a swag of websites get targetted after a major ‘terrorism’ scare. Suppose someone in the 9-11 truth movement is arrested and charged with a bomb plot..

I don’t know the future – and ultimately I don’t know the mindset of the people pushing internet censorship. ‘Paranoia’ may be groundless. However, the key point – thatI don’t think you dispute – is that internet censorship of the ‘Clean Feed’ type could be very effectively applied to POLITICAL censorship – espeically if coupled with text-based filtering that scans for ‘duplicat’ material.

It seems to me, at minimum, to be ‘pre-adapted’ for that alarming purpose.

That’s not very far from ‘designed’.

Thanks for your comment on my blog

I don’t think this censorship proposal would work very well for down the track censorship of particular texts

Mark Newton has persuaded me that the list of banned sites will inevitably leak. This is because the list will end up in the hands of many employers at all ISPs, which makes it too hard to secure. Read his two letters, published as pdfs on the EFA site:
http://www.efa.org.au/2008/11/19/filtering-followup-to-newton-letter/

If the government is found out to have extended the censorship of porn to other politically motivated censorship then that would be very embarrassing for them. Apparently, however, this did happen in Findland, where an anti-censorship site was found on their list, when it leaked

So, why are they doing it? I think they see it as a vote winner and it’s consistent with the collectivist “caring” big brother mindset of the Labour Party, we will look after people who are too ignorant to look after themselves. Frank Furedi has written extensively on this topic, that we are developing a therapy culture:
http://www.frankfuredi.com/

And Jon—nice one, too. Professor Hamilton appears to be a little fast and loose with his arguments, quotations and attributions. One question: how much does Hamilton stand to gain financially from implementation of the filtering regime?

p.s. love the internet/church choir analogy.

We may lament Clive Hamilton use of the snappy one liner, but to paraphrase Voltaire, while I may disagree with what he says with them, I defend his right to use them.

After all, it allows me to use snappy one liners in response. Lines like: “if the principal architect of the Government’s Mandatory ISP level filtering policy can’t defend it without stooping to intellectual disgraceful arguments what credibility does the policy itself have?

The key difference with our snappy one liners is that we can back them up with devastating, rational argument. Clive’s are useless in that regard.

BTW: I loved the Venn diagram. Mind if I steal the idea, tweak it a bit and use it for T-shirt design?