ID cards, CCTV, the ban on "glorifying terrorism" and the crackdown on protest

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Wired

JAMES EAGLE discovers a Labour Party that's even more repressive than the British party.



DESPITE Blair and Brown's best efforts, with ID cards, CCTV, the ban on "glorifying terrorism" and the crackdown on peaceful protest, their government isn't the most repressive Labour Party in the world.

British Labour is being outdone on that front by its Australian counterpart under Kevin Rudd, who beat immigrant-bashing rightwinger John Howard and his Liberal-National coalition in last year's elections.


The world is well shot of Howard, who was doing his own bit to best Britain in how slavishly he could obey Washington's every command. But Rudd's winning no friends with plans for an internet censorship scheme which, according to Colin Jacobs, the chairman of civil liberties group Electronic Frontiers Australia, involves "more technical interference in the internet infrastructure than what is attempted in Iran."


The "clean feed" scheme is swathed in secrecy, but the government says that it will involve mandatory filtering of all internet connections in homes and schools - supposedly to crack down on child porn, but, as proved by local councils' abuse of British anti-terror laws tinyurl.com/5ns48n, surveillance and censorship have a way of extending their tendrils far beyond their original bounds.


The civil liberties group is fighting the plan hard nocleanfeed.com, pointing out that it will be hugely expensive, deeply unpopular and, probably, entirely ineffective against anyone with any technical skills.


In fact, it could even help paedophiles to find child porn. If the blacklist of sites is leaked - which it surely would be, since every internet service provider in the country would have to have a copy - then the government has effectively spent tens of millions of dollars compiling a handy reference guide on where to find child porn.


As IT expert Richard Clayton has pointed out www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/cleanfeed.pdf, a similar system deployed by our very own BT can actually "be used as an oracle" to "compile a list of illegal websites."


The looming Australian fiasco is proof of a lesson which our Labour government still needs to learn - that cheap populism makes for very bad policy.


Elsewhere, the long-running saga of a US teacher wrongfully accused of exposing her pupils to internet porn finally came to an end last week - and the outcome did her no justice at all.


Supply teacher Julie Amero had been made to use a computer which, due to the failings of the school's IT department, was heavily infested with malicious software, causing an endless stream of porn pop-ups to appear in her web browser.


As a result of shoddy "expert" testimony at her trial in January 2007, she was convicted and faced up to 40 years in jail. That was overturned.
The state of Connecticut dropped the four most serious charges last week tinyurl.com/5wzbl4.


But, exhausted and driven into hospital by the gruelling ordeal, Ms Amero caved in and accepted a deal where she pleaded guilty to a single lesser charge of "disorderly conduct," paying a $100 fine and losing her teaching licence in the process.


So, despite being clearly innocent, she has lost both her health and her livelihood thanks to the vindictive incompetence of her state's legal officials.


Fingers crossed that something substantial emerges from internet mutterings about a legal counter-attack by civil liberties groups to win hefty damages for Ms Amero.

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