Few Contribute To Aussie Classification Review 114
dopeywan.kenobi writes "The Australian Law Reform Commission are conducting a review of the Australian Classification laws, the outcome of which will influence Australian internet filtering and/or the long awaited R18+ Video Game classification. Public submissions on the matter have been accepted since 20th May 2011 and will close on the 15th July 2011. From the article : '[A]s yet only 80 public submissions have been made — 80 per cent of them from people who believe in government intervention for the sake of child protection. Considering, the furious debates within Australia's technology communities, does this reflect the national balance?...'It's likely down to the media for failing to inform the public on the matter.' Having read the questionnaire, I can't help but wonder if their convoluted phrasing is contributing to reports that people are only partially completing the form without submitting." I wonder how much of it, too, is that people don't want to be tarred as favoring child pornography just because they're uncomfortable with by-domain censorship.
Re:Call me "Anti Free Speech" if you like (Score:4, Insightful)
But I don't really have a problem with the concept of domain filtering or domain takedowns for child pornography.
I do. And my problem is: go for the ones that break the law, that is the solution.
Anything else is palliative care - not only it won't ever be effective, but also has side effects, can be easily abused and it also makes the "proper cure" harder (driving the illness bury deeper). .
Re:Call me "Anti Free Speech" if you like (Score:5, Insightful)
At what stage do you think media hysteria bombarded you sufficiently - as it has done with so many people - to think an image of child abuse is a special case, so much worse than any other sequence of bits which acts as evidence that some abuse has taken place? What about a picture/film of adult sexual abuse? If the adult is developmentally retarded? Animal abuse? A snuff film? An image of a dead baby? A woman executed for being raped? A war crime? Evidence of genocide?
Ask yourself whether your concern is with the image or with the discomfort you feel that someone enjoys the image. Then realise that people may enjoy any or all of the above. Then realise that almost all sexual abuse occurs within families or by other people in trusted caring roles - if you want to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut, you would stop far more child sexual abuse by outlawing the family unit.
The noncommercial distribution of CP seems reasonably to be a privacy issue for the child, as any photo/video taken without consent. Beyond that, all the resources should go toward identifying and stopping the abusers and helping the victims. To inform the abused that money which you are claiming to be using in their interest is going to be invested in pushing images of his/her abuse underground (and as the thin end of the wedge for general censorship [ispreview.co.uk]) is not only illogical, but cruel.
Also, let's be clear here: the IWF, one of the oldest Internet censorship frameworks in the Western world, doesn't even claim that its aim in blocking is to stop CP (it does help stop CP by acting as a clearinghouse for CP reports and sending evidence to authorities at home and abroad - but that's where its helpfulness ends). It claims that its blocking list is provided to stop people "accidentally" viewing CP. This shows how absurd the situation is: surely the correct response to accidentally doing something which isn't dangerous is to learn from your mistakes so you know how to minimise your chances of doing it again? But no, we're at the "punished for being raped" stage of hysteria, where I must worry about the legal implications of accidentally stumbling into CP. It's not that a single such incident is likely to lead to conviction, but that - in the UK at least - a single such incident may lead to arrest, and my arrest record can be studied by pretty much any potential employer.
Any good government knows how to make anyone a criminal or quasi-criminal at its whim. This is just another method. It has nothing whatever to do with stopping child abuse, and I say that as someone who has fundraised for kids' charities and supported certain groups for abuse survivors for as long as I can recall.
Re:Call me "Anti Free Speech" if you like (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is what to do in edge cases. Obviously a site dedicated exclusively to child porn should be shut down. But what about a website that happens to have child porn? Surely such videos have been uploaded to youtube, should youtube be shut down? What about dropbox, surely criminals use that to share illegal files. How about encrypted services, where it's impossible to know whether or not the data being transferred is legal, should those be shut down?
How about a small website, run by a company without the resources of youtube/dropbox, if they get shut down are they going to be in a position to get their website back online after removing the illegal material?
And worst of all, how do we, the people, know that a website shut down for child porn actually had child porn on it? Maybe it was shut down for some other reason, we have no way to find out.
They should be working with site owners to get individual images/videos removed, not shutting down entire sites, and they should be going after the guys creating the content not the websites who allow anything to be uploaded.