Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy: trying to sell Australians Internet Censorship, calls it 'filtering'
Ever since governments in Australia first showed signs of having caught an irrational, hysterical, politically-suicidal mania for ‘filtering’ (censoring) this nation’s Internet at ISP-level, I’ve believed this is really about political censorship.
Concerns over pornography and child abuse have been used to ‘sell’ this policy to a sceptical public, especially by the inept Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy. But it’s just window dressing.
I’d like to be wrong about this. I hope so – but fear not.
Support for my suspicions came last week from the other side of the world.
Germany recently announced plans to ‘filter’ the internet at ISP-level. This is the very same policy the Rudd Government has been pushing here in Australia, with little success to date except to upset almost every nerd in the land. What’s more, Ministerial explanations from both Canberra and Berlin might been torn from the same song-book.
On 23rd January 2009 OpenNet Initiative ran a report entitled Internet Censorship in Germany (emphases added in all the following extracts):
According to German news publication Der Spiegel, German officials are calling for ISP censorship of offensive cites in order to quell the spread of child pornography, CNET and The Inquisitr report.
With implementation slated for March, Germany’s proposed censorship scheme will follow a model similar to Norway’s to block access to child pornography. In such a model, the government issues a list of sites to be blocked by ISPs.
German Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen: her ISP-level Internet 'Filtering' policy is virtually the same as Senator Conroy's in Australia
”This news represents a rising trend in Internet censorship and ISP filtration in Europe and worldwide.
An earlier report on the ZeroPaid website – German Minister Announces Plans for Mandatory Web Filtering – has more detail:
Germany’s Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen announced recently (GOOGLE TRANSLATION) to that country’s legislative body that she was working with her colleagues Wolfgang Schäuble and Michael Glos to combat child pornography on the Internet.By early March they intend to have a “binding agreement” with all the major German ISPs to prevent access to such material.
She prefers the term “blocking access” to filtering since it will be done through a list, updated daily by the country’s Federal Office of Criminal Investigations (BKA), and submitted to ISPs to be implemented.
Critics are rightly concerned that it’s a slippery slope towards “blocking” or filtering of other illegal or offensive material.
Australian citizens are also concerned by similar proposals being pushed in their country by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. It began as an optional proposal to have so-called “clean feeds” that blocked access to pornography and child porn, but soon expanded to a mandatory filtering system that some elected officials have even expressed hopes to include gambling and sites and elusive “offensive” content for all.
“We must not dilute the issue,” she counters. “Child pornography is a problem issue and clearly identifiable. You can not consider what future government will or will not do and focus only on what needs to be done now.”
Google Blogoscoped has yet more interesting information:
Germany will start to hand out blacklists to internet providers, several German news sources, like Spiegel, report. This move is proclaimed to only filter child porn. In about 6-8 weeks the dealings with the ISPs should be finalized, German family minister Leyen said, expecting the technical implementation to go live this year. Already, German regulatory offices have been working with search engines like Google to block content based on a blacklist. (Google Germany, for instance, bans certain Holocaust denial material, as that is illegal in Germany.)
In regards to objections that, once such censorship technology is in place, other areas outside child porn might be blocked too, Leyen said child porn is easy to be separated from other things. She admitted, however, that she wasn’t able to say what future politicians might do with the censorship technology..
As to the effectiveness of this blocking, the issued press release said “Technically experienced internet users will always find ways to route around the barriers.
”Recently in the UK, thousands of internet users weren’t able to edit Wikipedia. The UK Internet Watch Foundation had issued a block due to Wikipedia hosting a 1976 album cover of rock band Scorpions which partly showed a young nude girl. The ban had been lifted later after protest and much reporting. According to other reports, the IWF recently issued bans against specific web pages or images of historical web archive Wayback Machine in relation to the Protection of Children Act, but some ISPs apparently then blocked the Wayback Machine altogether.
Now, I think, we may be getting close to the motivation that really inspires the multi-jurisdictional push to introduce Internet ‘filtering’.
Germany, which already has draconian ‘Holocaust Denial’ laws (and scholars in prison to prove it), is already desperately trying to make it harder for citizens to locate material critical of the official ‘Holocaust’ narrative de jour. It – or whoever is foisting this policy on the German Government – presumably hopes that ISP filtering will help.
Germany’s Family Minister must know full well that dedicated researchers will get round the annoyance of a compulsory ISP-’filter’ (using VPNs, Proxy servers etc). Similarly, she must know that avid porn watchers will easily get round the Government’s crude attempt at censoring pornography.
But I doubt that’s the key concern. What the people who influence German Government policy behind the scenes want to achieve at this stage, I suspect, is to make it next to impossible – in the course of normal, legal usage of the Internet – to access material that might disturb that’s nation’s mandatory historical verities.
One can appreciate the problem. After all, the officially-sanctioned ‘Holocaust’ narrative seems to have changed so much over time. How embarrassing to have pages of un-revised history around on the web for the public to discover! Who wants a child, when researching yet another compulsory essay or project on ‘The Holocaust’, to get confused by previous versions of history?
When John F Kennedy wrote in Profiles in Courage of “the memories of the gas chambers at Buchenwald and other Nazi concentration camps” he was doubtless referring to the popular belief at the time that the Nazis ran homicidal gas chambers on German soil.
Jewish American lawyer Mark Lane visited Dachau – another German concentration camp – shortly after the war. He reported being shown a homicidal gas chambers and being told the Nazis massacred Jews therein. Years later, in the Introduction to Best Witness, he wrote:
During 1946 on furlough from the Army of Occupation while stationed near Hitler’s hometown, Linz, Austria, I drove to Dachau. The curator of the establishment showed me some cells, pointed to the gas chambers where hundreds of thousands had been executed, and explained that a debt was owed by the democracies to the few Jews who had survived.
I brought no engineering degree to the concentration camp. I was still a teenager who had entered the army immediately after having been graduated from high school and my skepticism regarding official pronouncements in general had not as yet been finely honed upon the stone of repeated government falsification.
I left Germany to return to my headquarters outfit in Austria, a pilgrim, one more witness to the fact that hundreds of thousands of prisoners had been gassed to death in Dachau.
Yet today, no ‘Holocaust scholar’ of repute claims there were any homicidal gas chambers on German soil. Preumably Kennedy was told a lie and Lane was shown a fake?
Even Deborah Lipstadt, ‘Holocaust Scholar’ extraordinaire (whoever could call Ms Lipstadt a ‘Denier’?) avers that there were homicidal gas chambers only beyond Germany’s boundaries. This is an extract from Ms Lipstadt’s ‘Denying the Holocaust‘:
Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust: Clarifies there were definitely NO homicidal gas chambers inside Germany - another earlier claim dropped from the official 'Holocaust' narrative
When I was a schoolboy in the 1960s (at a time before the word Holocaust was commonly used for what later became its primary meaning), my history class was taught the Nazis made soap out of Jewish corpses. It made a deep impression on me at the time. How revolting!
Yet today, no credible scholar maintains this wartime propaganda myth anymore.
Jewish death toll numbers during World War Two are also highly sensitive; it is illegal in numerous jurisdictions to question whether the overall total of Jewish deaths in ‘The Holocaust’ was fewer than six million.
Surely the two plaques reproduced below have some relevance to this issue? On the left is the plaque at the entrance to Auschwitz that was on display until c.1990. On the right is the later plaque. Spot the difference?
Auschwitz plaque until the late 1980s
The amended Auschwitz plaque
George Orwell wrote “Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past“.
The German Government, at present, is probably having a spot of bother ‘controlling the past’. It may well need technological help… and fast.
Perhaps the German Government was hoping for “successful results” from Australian trials of ‘Internet Filtering’ before proceeding with its own version, but hadn’t counted on Senator Conroy’s staggering incompetence – or the ferocity of popular resistance in the usually snoozy Land of Oz.
___________________
Last word to the Israeli Ministry for Foreign Affairs, which has an essay published in February 2000 by Professor Shewach Weis, then Israel’s Ambassador to Poland, on its website. The title is The Impact of the Holocaust on Politics (emphases added):
When the United Nations resolved, on November 29, 1947, to establish two states in Palestine, one of them a Jewish state, and to create an economic union between the two states, it was clear that underlying the decision of the majority of the UN’s fifty-one member nations at that time was the Holocaust.
In a sense, the community of nations “compensated” the Jewish people for its loss by granting it a state of its own. We were also worthy of statehood in view of the historical events and settlement activity in Palestine that preceded the Holocaust, but some of the states that voted in favor made their decision in the shadow of the horrors of the Holocaust and the hundreds of thousands of refugee survivors who were pounding at the gates of their historical homeland. Since then, Israeli and Jewish politics have often stood on the awesome bridge that leads “from Holocaust to resurrection.” In my estimation, one of the strongest underpinnings of Israel’s security doctrine is the Holocaust consciousness and the historical resolve expressed in the slogan “Never Again!”
When the Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces in the mid-1990s, Ehud Barak, later to become the county’s Prime Minister and Defense Minister, visited Auschwitz at the head of a delegation of officers and soldiers and proclaimed there, facing the crematoria, that “we have come here too late,” he expressed, along with yearning, a stance of defense, state, and political nature. When the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Abba Eban, in his speech after the Six-Day War, made it clear that the war had been a defensive one that was meant to forestall an “Auschwitz borders” situation, he was expressing the State of Israel’s political attitude. When the Israeli Right adopts Eban’s speech (the last thing that he wanted) in its anxious opposition to the Oslo Accords, it is putting the lessons of the Holocaust to political use.
Thus the Holocaust becomes a source of fear and a lesson for Israel’s politics and its regional and global relations.
