[AusNOG] Hyperlink fines from ACMA [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Glen Turner]

Kayne Naughton wrote:
> According to Whirlpool posts the content assessment team is made up of 
> 400 matronly figures with scowls who dedicate their lives to ruining all 
> your fun (the other 120 or so are HR and Finance people). Last I saw 
> it's around 8 or so people in their 20s and 30s who are really quite 
> friendly - I've never once seen any of them breathe fire.

This issue isn't the friendliness or otherwise of ACMA staff.

The issue is that ACMA should not be classifying material in the
first place. We already have a censorship regime with free speech
and liberty safeguards which have been debated and agreed in
every state legislature of our Commonwealth -- the Classification
Board and Classification Review Board of the OFLC (I'll note
that ACMA lacks any equivalent to the second of these boards).

The ACMA's censorship regime lacks many of the protections for
liberty that exist in the OFLC's regime.  And the prosecution
of Whirlpool is a fine example of where ACMA is endangering a
liberty (the ability to ridicule government policy and to
embarrass the government and its functionaries) which the
OFLC would allow.

Furthermore making legal threats to Whirlpool and co was not
forced upon ACMA, it is a choice the agency has made. This
over-reaction says to me that ACMA is not an organisation
which is balancing public morals and public speech.  Or even
that it sees such a balance as desirable.

> None of this is my area of expertise (I spend my days fighting botnets 
> and spammers) so take it as a rough guide. My training in political 
> science is predominately from Year 10 Social Sciences and I am a lot 
> more at home in a debugger than a piece of legislation :)

Ah, spammers. The side-effect of a deliberate government policy.

For those unfamiliar with the story, the Australian Government agreed
in the Wassenaar Arrangement to discourage the use of cryptography in
e-mail clients. Australians who added support for PGP into the then-dominant
e-mail client Pine were threatened with imprisonment under a very serious
charge of exporting forbidden military technologies.

As a result we could never add reasonable encryption support to the
early e-mail clients. We could never add the crypto key support -- a
web of potential e-mail correspondents marked with levels of trust.
Of course, once you have a web, you also have those outside the web --
that is, spammers.

So the government got what it wanted -- most traffic on the Internet
is today unencrypted (well, at least until the content filter appears
and every Australian runs a tunnel to a free country). But the result
of that lack of encryption is that all e-mail senders are unverified.
So unsolicited, low value e-mail is slowly degrading the usefulness
of e-mail.

> As you can probably tell this is my own private opinion and does not 
> necessarily represent the views of ACMA etc etc.

Ditto. My private opinion, not that of my employer. Not even the advice
I'd give to my employer.

-- 
  Glen Turner