Are proposed laws to govern mandatory internet filtering being drafted in secrecy? Will Australia rank with Iran and China in terms of censorship and secrecy about which sites are blocked? Prof Marcus Wigan asks some pertinent questions. Read more…
ARTICLE:
ALRC should investigate Conroy’s secrecy proposals
The implications of the global internet censorship processes of Communications Minister Stephen Conroy are highly relevant to the current Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry into secrecy laws in Australia.
For example, the ALRC inquiry calls for comment on the fundamental basis of the various bits of legislation, as well as on the currently alarmingly open drafting of proposed acts. All these aspects have major Commonweath accountability and secrecy implications.
The ALRC should not omit from its ‘Secrecy Inquiry and Consultation’ the extremely onerous provisions of the internet censorship proposals proposed by Minister Conroy.
These will make even the list of blocked sites a legally-protected secret, much like the provisions of other secrecy acts for genuinely serious issues such as National Security. Even for the tiny number – 10,000 – of sites ‘blocked’ for the initial tests, between 3 and 6% were valid sites (only 1300 are to be trialled for the current set). With such a high blockage rate, conservative when compared with US experinces with filtering, this an issue that is clearly calls into question principles other than common law, and harks more of the many recent precedents of intelligence agencies operating in preemptive mode.
Bear in mind that the basis for blocking an item/URL is explicitly ‘undesirable’ (an undefined and unaccountable term). The only countries with anything like this level of censorship are Iran and China. Tens of millions* of URLS will be blocked on similar ‘undesirable’ grounds by unaccountable bodies.
These blockages will apply to everybody, and be administered by such an uncontroversial body as ACMA, fully skilled and experienced in handling secret information!! (Irony is permitted I hope, under the terms of use of the ACMA site?)
There is to be no contestability of the inclusion of a URL in the draft legislation. Clearly many thousands (3-6% of 20 million is the basis for this assessment) will be blameless and commercially and personally negatively affected without recourse.
We appear to be almost at the point where this huge extension of unaccountability and secrecy will affect the majority of the population. Is this not an issue that ALRC should take up with some real concern?
* Iran is estimated to block 20 million – ie, several orders of magnitude above the internet censorship tests so far being done in Australia.
– Marcus Wigan, Emeritus Professor of Transport and Information Systems at Napier University Edinbrgh, and Professorial Fellow University of Melbourne
Have your say at: the ALRC Talking Secrecy online forum at http://talk.alrc.gov.au