🚀 go-pugleaf

ryan@zip.com.au (Patrick Ryan) wrote:

>5. Will the legislation make it easier to catch peadophiles ?

>It will merely force the perpertrators to use readily available
>encryption techniques which will require police forces to use multiple
>supercomputers (which they don't have)  in order to read a simple
>message. This combined with the daily exponential increase in network
>traffic will only make it difficult for police agencies.

They might make encryption illegal. Or they might mandate
encryption techniques which allow spies and secret police to
decrypt any message. The digital mobile phone encryption in
Australia is organised this way. The Federal Police and the
spy agencies have the encryption keys to allow them to
listen to conversations on digital mobile phones.


>6. Perpertrators can fake their mail addresses making it next to
>impossible to prove that a person sent the offending transmission.

Oddly enough this is the reason the Senate Committee into
Internet Censorship suggested mandating strong encryption -
to make it mandatory to create encrypted digital signatures
on all messages, so that people couldn't hide their
identities.


>On the recieving end, you have no way of stopping someone sending you
>incriminating material. This leaves every mail user susceptable to
>extortion, entrapment, or libeling ( after evidence at the NSW Police
>royal commision they are already expecting massive numbers of appeals
>and retrials due to police libels and other misconduct).

Police frequently lie in order to gain conviction. The
courts take a dim view of any defence case which suggests
that the police are manufacturing evidence. Even when
defence counsel prove police lies, the police are rarely (if
ever) tried for perjury. The system condones the practice.
The proposed NSW Internet censorship legislation will give
police an extra tool to use dishonestly.


>8. Does an electronic mail or USENET message meet the legal definition
>of evidence? 
>(excuse backyard legal interpretation).
>- dangerous precedent indeed. One of the requirements is along the
>lines that the evidence cannot be tampered with? But it can be
>modified at any point in the network to a point that someone can claim
>that the message received was not the one transmitted. (headers ,
>reply to addresses - are a classic example) . EDI documents are only
>legal because of the contractual agreements between the two parties
>and a third party which keeps a copy of all EDI transactions between
>the two parties, for validation purposes.

EDI also uses recognised encryption techniques which are
accepted by the courts as proving the contents of electronic
messages.


>9. Internet Providers can stop the illegal material?

>The NSW police force, don't have the necessary resources to stop the
>material - how is an internet provider suppose to stop it. Prosecuting
>an internet provider would be like prosecuting Australia Post because
>someone tried to smuggle a marsupial.

This argument works better if it is inverted. Internet
providers can not review and censor all material. The volume
is too high for manual review. It is not technically
possible to use automatic methods to identify illegal
material.

The press release states that it will be illegal to provide
access to material defined as offensive (excuse my
re-wording). It is absolutely impossible to review all
material on the Internet therefore being an Internet Service
Provider will become illegal.


>10. Internet Providers have a commercial obligation to ensure that
>traffic integrity is maintained.

None of the major businesses who are hanging their shingles
on the World Wide Web are aware that their sites will close
because their providers will be forced to shut because of
censorship, and that even if their sites don't close there
won't be anybody to look at them.

Are the Internet Service Providers supporting the protest?
Apart from Zip Australia (hooray for Zip) they seem
strangely silent.


>12. Can we submit our web pages to the Censorship board? are they
>ready to take on the additional workload?

No - the thrust of the proposed NSW laws (as well as the
Senate Committee's report) is to avoid imposing any
additional workload on Government. The users and providers
will shoulder the full responsibility for staying within the
law. There won't even be additional enforcement costs.
Enforcement will be selective and prejudicial.


>13. If the law is going to be really dangerous it will leave the
>definition of "offensive" wide open so that any crank can get a USENET
>or LISTSERV group removed or an INTERNET user prosecuted.

Any crank - or any headline-seeking police officer.


I've read all the well-considered contributions to the
proposed march leaflet. For what it's worth, I think there
are two major problems so far:

1) the focus is negative

2) there are too many aspects of the issue being discussed

Taking number 2) first - many of the issues being discussed
have answers. I've put some of these above - cost of
enforcement, hiding identity, using encryption. Some of the
other issues don't have answers, particularly the risk that
Internet Service Providers will be forced to shut down.
Unfortunately, the perception of the general public (and the
politicians) will be determined by a mental scorekeeping
process. In the final score we lose by about five points to
two. The result - censorship.

My suggestions - concentrate on the points that can't be
contradicted:

It is physically impossible to review all the content on the
Internet.

There will always be offensive material on the Internet - by
any definition of offensive, which is why it is pointless to
argue definitions, MA15+ or any other.

The proposed NSW law will make it illegal to provide *ANY*
access to the Internet.

Internet Service Providers will be illegal.


Then ...
turn the words into something positive:

The Internet is an extremely valuable information resource -
for education, for business, for community, for recreational
research (I continue to be amazed at the number of people
researching their genealogy).

The proposed NSW Internet censorship law will make it
illegal to provide access to the Internet in NSW (is there a
positive way to make this point?).

The solution to the problem of offensive material - personal
responsibility and parental supervision. I don't know the
best way to word this part. Somebody else?

Another advantage of cutting the words down to the
essential, uncontradictable points is that it might fit into
the proposed A5 format without cutting the text down to
4-point.

Is "uncontradictable" a word?

Michael Wines.