What a hypocrite Obama is, and a narcissist Rudd is.
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Posted on 03/28/2010 7:15:19 PM PDT by myknowledge
The US government opposes the Federal Government’s planned internet filter, claiming it runs contrary to their policy of encouraging an open internet to promote economic growth and security.
Coming off the back of Google’s announcement they are no longer censoring their Chinese search engine, officials from Obama’s State Department are mounting a diplomatic assault on internet censorship worldwide.
The Punch reports today that US State Department spokesman Noel Clay raised concerns about the proposed internet filter.
“The US and Australia are close partners on issues related to cyber matters generally, including national security and economic issues,” Mr Clay said.
“We do not discuss the details of specific diplomatic exchanges, but can say that in the context of that ongoing relationship, we have raised our concerns on this matter with Australian officials.”
When asked for comment, Senator Conroy used a spokeswoman to deflect the issue, saying that the Government “liaise regularly on a broad range of issues (and) it would be inappropriate to discuss the details of these consultations”.
The Federal Government is facing increasing criticism over the proposed internet filter, from the likes of Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA), Yahoo! and Google. With the EFA running their Open Internet campaign over the last six months and now calling for donations to support their efforts to lobby the government over the proposed filter.
Google, has previously made statements against the proposed filter, with their submission to the Government on the proposed scheme heavily critical of the plans.
“Our primary concern is that the scope of content to be filtered is too wide,” Google wrote in its submission, also suggesting the filter would slow browsing speeds.
“Some limits, like child pornography, are obvious. No Australian wants that to be available—and we agree,” the Google submission said. “But moving to a mandatory ISP level filtering regime with a scope that goes well beyond such material is heavy-handed and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information.”
Lucinda Barlow of Google Australia said that Australia’s proposal went beyond filters used in Germany and Canada, which block child pornography and, in Italy, gambling sites.
“This enters the gray realms of restricted classification, seeking to ban politically and socially controversial material,” Lucinda Barlow told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
What a hypocrite Obama is, and a narcissist Rudd is.
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I cannot, for instance, post the word "penis" but I can post the word "weiner".
Many have asked the WarshPost to reconsider their "filter" since it ends up with people getting around it with quite bizarre structures.
Congressman Weiner would probably appreciate a change too not that i want to make his life any easier, but this business creates many millions of additional but useless google.com references so it's difficult to figure out what Congressman Weiner is doing.
In my view, every right.
What is being proposed by Senator Conroy goes far further than any filter proposed in any other non-totalitarian nation, including any high level proposals in the United States. There's a fairly good chance that FreeRepublic would wind up on the Labor government's blacklist. If it was just about blocking things like child pornography, few people would have a problem with it - but it's going to be used to block 'unacceptable' political opinions and a single racist comment (racist in this case, being as defined by the left) made on FR would constitute an excuse to block it.
I'm not that worried about the filter personally, because the High Court will rule it to be unconstitutional as soon as any case reaches it, of that I have no doubt. But that makes it a huge waste of money on top of everything else.
I reckon those British Subjects (with Aussie passports on the side) would immediately move to Great Britain!
Honestly, I think this is an inconsequential, and sensationalized post. No I don’t think FR is about to get censored.
If BHO had to worry about anything online, then it should be and should’ve been YouTube censorship. And, it had/has nothing to with something as socially serious as “child pornography”.
Under the rules and guidelines that will apply to the proposed Australian filter it will. Any site that contains material in violation of Australia's racial and religious discrimination laws will be 'refused classification' and will therefore be banned. That means all they have to do is find a single post that the left-wing people who will be administering this filter regards as 'anti-Muslim', and the site is banned. It is that simple. They decide if it's vilification, they ban the site. There's no appeals process, they don't even tell people they've done it. And it becomes a crime to even mention the sites URL after that.
This is a totalitarian law. Absolutely. I actually don't think the motivations behind it are bad ones. They genuinely do want to make the internet 'safe', but they are not prepared to accept that there needs to be a balance between that laudable aim and other things.
Thank you.
What you’ve mentioned is a complicated situation, particularly about web content, sites, topics & so on.
Filtering & filtering attempts began several years ago, so this isn’t recent news. I suppose this gov’t is playing the big brother more than ever.
Legally it really isn’t that simple. New legislation will have to be passed. However, there is already the basis in the Australian law to permit selective omission of content deemed discriminatory.
No doubt there will be legal, public & media scrutiny.
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