This defence of Australian internet censorship is more disturbing than the censorship itself

For those who have been living under a rock (i.e. not checking reddit) recently, the government here in Straya is planning to censor our internet access in a clumsy stunt aimed at cornering the “think-of-the-children!” vote. Veteran lefty Clive Hamilton’s defence of the filter, however, is no tabloid hack job: although he couldn’t resist including some choice examples of porn site copywriting, the worst spectre he bothers conjuring is “evidence” that “indicates” some porn-hound boys may develop “perverse attitudes towards girls, such as being disgusted by pubic hair.” Gasp.

Indeed, with such slim pickings for the knee-jerk moralists, it’s hard to figure out exactly who Hamilton is trying to convince. The thrust of his argument seems to be that the selfish libertarians who want the internet to stay free should not be allowed to get in the way of parents who “club together and decide that it is too difficult or untenable for them to protect children by themselves and want their governments to help them”. Exactly why the parents needs the government’s help is never made clear – even if they really are incapable of monitoring their children, in itself a strange assumption, why do they need the government’s help to do so, and why should it involve intruding upon the private lives of all Australians? If they are already clubbing together, why can’t they solve this “problem” on the level of civil society and voluntary participation, leaving the rest of us out of it? Particularly perplexing is this oxymoronic declaration:

[Parents] don’t want to be the household spy and policeman, forever looking over their children’s shoulders or checking to see what they have downloaded on their mobile phones. They want governments to help them.

A word to the wise, Mr. Hamilton: when your opponents are accusing you of authoritarianism, it’s best not to associate the words ‘household spy and policeman’ with ‘government’ in your response. Is he really suggesting that most Australian parents hold a deep desire for governments to take over an aspect of parenting – guiding the child’s media consumption – that requires enormous trust, discretion and communication with the child? And why on earth did he couch this assertion in words that make the police-state overtones of the censorship plan so explicit?

Hamilton’s piece descends almost into self-parody with this brazen admission:

I have deliberately not considered the question of whether it is feasible to effectively filter extreme and violent pornography on the internet.

Why not? Because, of course,

We need a community debate on the question of whether we should do it before we consider the question of whether we can do it because too many internet libertarians and industry spokespeople cover up their refusal to countenance any sort of regulation by insisting that it won’t work.

That’s right: we need to decide that something should be done before asking whether it is possible, in order to prove that the reality-based nay-sayers were only saying it was impossible in the first place because they thought it shouldn’t be done. Where does the (incredibly well-evidenced) fact that it really can’t be done fit into this decision-making rubric? Nowhere. Catch-22.

I can’t even tell who is trying to convince who of what anymore in this bizarre and scary debacle. I just want my usually sane and reasonably free country to give itself a good kick up the arse and close the book on internet censorship for good.

Sydney protest, December 13 (Facebook event)

Australia to filter internet access

I made a conscious decision after the last federal election to stop following Australian politics. It took me a little longer than most Aussie children to realise that, like Australian history and Australian film, Australian politics is largely dumb, boring and irrelevant to daily life. So it was a little surprising to read today that our benevolent rulers plan to force ISPs to filter ‘illegal’ material from all internet traffic, and to block pornography and other ‘inappropriate content’ from users who do not specifically request an opt-out. This is idiotic for so many reasons I don’t even know where to start.

Firstly, let’s look at the practical aspects. As anyone who has come into contact with content filtering software at school or in a home knows, there is no way to filter internet traffic with any reasonable accuracy. Rivers of ‘objectionable’ data are going to get through, and lakes of perfectly unobjectionable content will be dammed behind insensate walls. If this ridiculous plan is actually implemented, this will result in incredible pressure on the government to ‘do something!’ about all the nasty stuff still getting through, and to ‘do something!’ about all the good, important stuff still getting blocked, which will drive the government to ‘do something!’ to make the filter more complicated, more expensive and a bigger speed hump for Australia’s already sluggish internet access. To top it off, for anybody who actually wants access to ‘objectionable’ material, there is no shortage of workarounds ranging from simple browser extensions to the old-fashioned methods of bringing smut across national borders. According to the government’s own report, none of the candidate filters work on non-web protocols such as P2P or instant messaging networks. In the worst case scenario, the government will thus begin cracking down on circumvention technologies themselves – and we all know how well that’s worked in the past. In short, any ‘great firewall’ will be both ineffective for its intended purpose, and a hassle to everyone regardless.

Second come the reasons for having such a filter at all. According to the current plan, there will be two blacklists: one covering illegal material, which will be universally applied, and one covering ‘not child-friendly’ material, which will be opt-out. What possible justification can be given for this second filter other than the most blatant, cynical populism? Anybody who wants to filter their children’s internet access can go out and buy an inaccurate, easily circumvented filter to install in their own homes. Why do we need an inaccurate, easily circumvented filter for every ISP? What if parents want more fine-grained control over their filtering? Who takes the blame when parents rely on centralized filters, and something slips though the net? What poor souls at the ISP will be forced to field tens of thousands of tech support calls from confused, angry parents? How is will the opt-out be administrated anyway? Will the government subsidise ISPs for the administration costs involved?

When it comes to the illegal blacklist, the ramifications do not need to be spelled out. I’ll simply say that anybody who thinks the chance of a ’slippery slope’ into Orwellian state censorship of thought is overblown should note that this is exactly what is being explicitly proposed. No slippery slope is required. Sedition is illegal under Australian law; the filter, as described, would universally block access to material critical of the government. Information about other illegal activities, such as drug use or euthanasia, could also be blocked. It would be naive to think the filter will meticulously remove all content of dubious legality; given that it is a purely populist proposition, it would be a counterproductive to introduce any drastically unpopular restrictions. On the fringes, however – and to many people sedition, drug use and euthanasia are decidedly fringe topics -  there is plenty of room for incredible restrictions on free speech which would go largely unchallenged by a majority of the population.

For what it’s worth, should the great firewall ever come to fruition, I pledge to post any and all circumvention methods I hear about to this blog. Let’s hope that it never has to come to that.

ADDED: Check out this blog, this activism site and this amusing parody site.

I’m putting in the poll below purely to try out the new WordPress polls thing. Have fun with it.

Children are not second-class humans

What’s wrong with this picture? (Apart from the over-repetition of a phrase I would be hypocritical to condemn).

It took me a little while to figure out why it bothered me so much. Take a look at the list of possible ‘policy violations’ and ‘inappropriate behavior’: no chewing gum or public displays of affection in this school. Who gets to decide what language is inappropriate, or what behavior is disrespectful or disruptive? Could not accepting “no” lead to – never! – independent thought?

I’m not insensible to the fact that children will generally grow up to be ratbags unless given boundaries while growing up. In fact, I would go as far as to say that parents have a duty to moderate the behavior of their children in the same way that they have a duty to provide them with food or housing. Yet this is too often taken to mean that children are a second-class kind of human, not yet ready for the rights of self-ownership and freedom magically endowed upon them us the second we turn eighteen. If parents have a duty to limit and guide their children, this unconscious logic goes, surely it is reasonable that they have the right to do so.

This ‘duty to infringe a right’ is true, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, the way our societies treat children goes far beyond the license allowed by this reasonable position, yet we are so used to seeing children as second-class humans that we completely fail to recognize it. We take it for granted that schools are authoritarian cages, because we know that without discipline most schools would be madhouses. Yet the need for discipline is a specific reason to allow for specific limits on the freedom of children; to assume that these specific cases excuse authoritarianism in all aspects of the life of a child is a case of faulty generalisation. The default status of children, as it is of all humans in the libertarian conception, is total self-ownership and freedom. Reasonable cases can be made for encroaching on these freedoms, but these must be argued one at a time and never taken for granted.

This is especially true when children are compelled to go to school. In adult life, we accept limits on our behavior when we are on or using other people’s property. Although we are free to smoke, we accept that a shopkeeper has the right to throw us out of the store if we light up against their wishes. Thus, the imposition of rules on in schools seems doubly legitimate: children need to have their behavior limited, and the teachers have the right to enforce standards of behavior on school grounds. Yet children are compelled to go to school, and rarely even have a choice in which school to attend. They are forced to spend a significant portion of their waking lives on somebody else’s property, and therefore to follow somebody else’s rules. If an adult was kidnapped and held by force on somebody else’s property, we would not consider it illegitimate for them to flout the property owner’s rules.

Again, this is not to say that all school discipline is illegitimate. I am simply pointing out that the criterion by which it can be justified is narrow and specific – namely, that the encroachment on the child’s freedom is part of the parent’s, and by extension the teacher’s, duty of care – rather than broad and unrestricted. The onus is on the adult world to demonstrate, in each and every case, why a right should be taken away. This includes an onus to demonstrate that there is not a better, more free way of achieving the same end. Libertarian paternalism tries to increase freedoms in the adult world by influencing rather than controlling behavior. Yet the idea of ’soft’ behavior modification often seems absurd in the school context, and not infrequently in parenting: we argue out loud that children will run wild given half the chance; and believe subconsciously that there is nothing really wrong with encroaching on their freedom anyway.

The second point I have already delt with. The first is, again, quite reasonable on the surface. Children get up to enough trouble in school and at home as it is; it seems natural to assume that, if the boundaries are lifted, their behavior would become correspondingly worse. Again, this is a faulty generalisation that breaks down when we look at specific cases.

Let’s go back to the detention note linked to at the beginning of this post. Assuming that the school is in the US, the code of ‘uniform violations’ is probably targeted at crude or bigoted slogans or images. (Most uniform codes at non-US high schools, such as the one I went to here in Sydney, cover such heinous sins as ’sleeves too long’ and is are not worth even trying to defend). Since dictating what a person can and cannot display on their clothes is a violation of their freedom of speech and expression, there must surely be a correspondingly weighty benefit to the child’s upbringing of this policy. It can’t be reasonably argued that this benefit accrues to the child wearing the clothing: they would have seen it anyway, so it’s not protecting them from any unsavoury ideas; and they are free to wear it outside school, so it’s not modifying their behaviour in any real way. Is it to protect other children from crude language, sexual content or so on? Anybody who thinks that children are not exposed to sex, drugs, violence, bigotry or crude language and could thus have their innocence shattered by a t-shirt slogan is a fool with a very poor memory of their own childhood. Is it out of fear that it will provoke unruly behavior in the other students? This is possible, yet unlikely; and it is a very thin premise on which to restrict so fundamental a freedom.

The most reasonable explanation for uniform policies, and ironically the one generally given to students in Australian schools, is to maintain appearances. School administrators have strong incentives to find simple ways to cause big gains in the perceived quality of their schools: private schools have money on the line, and public school administrators have their reputations, performance-linked pay incentives and ultimately their jobs. Enforcing a uniform policy is a cheap and effective way to present a more polished image. It costs only the freedom of students, which nobody cares about, and the cost of enforcement, which is marginal and accrues mainly to teachers. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and when a school administrator is given near-absolute power over their students, it is natural that they will frame rules in their own interest.

Not all school rules are of this type. Many are reasonable restrictions on behaviour which generally do advance the care of the child. Others, like ‘no littering’, are reasonable compromises between a school administrator compelled to maintain the property over which they hold stewardship and the compulsion of students to attend in the first place. Nobody has ever mastered the art of parenting or teaching, and there will always be difficulty in establishing what is genuinely worth forcing children to do. In general, however, the socially accepted level of control lies far, far over the line into unjustified authoritarianism. The rule against ‘public displays of affection’ (PDA) may have had the wrong-headed intention of preventing promiscuity among teenagers, but in reality simply curbs their freedom of association and social interaction while pushing out of sight what they’re going to do regardless. If you want a reality check when considering a rule imposed on children, consider the same rule being imposed on yourself, or upon an adult if you are a child. How would an adult react if forced to spend 6 hours a day on somebody else’s property, and then told that kissing their partner during that time was forbidden? It is not exaggeration to say that this is the kind of authoritarianism for which the west routinely condemns Islamic states, yet it somehow it can be imposed upon children without a hint of outrage. Many adults may find (or pretend to find) the idea of teenage sexuality repugnant, yet repugnance has never given anyone the right to tell another what to do.

Children are not second class citizens. They are humans with the full rights and freedoms naturally accorded to us all. The only difference between a child and an adult is that children are owed a duty of care from their parents, and that when well justified, this duty can extend to putting boundaries on the child’s freedom. These boundaries, however, must be constantly justified, and the least freedom-infringing methods constantly sought. This doesn’t come naturally. The second-class position of children is ingrained into our culture and our institutions. This does not, however, make it right. Worse, children do not have anything like the voice that adults do in defending their rights. Power corrupts, and adults routinely exploit this defenselessness to take what rights from children they can. This does not make it legitimate, and it does not make it right.