On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, issued with authoritarian glee legal notices to X Corp and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to remove material within 24 hours depicting what her office declared to be “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail.” The relevant material featured a live streamed video of a stabbing attack by a 16-year-old youth at Sydney’s Assyrian Orthodox Christ the Good Shepherd Church the previous day. Two churchmen, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and Rev. Isaac Royel, were injured.
Those at X, and its executive, Elon Musk, begged to differ, choosing to restrict general access to the graphic details of the video in Australia alone. Those outside Australia, and those with a virtual private network (VPN), would be able to access the video unimpeded. Ruffled and irritated by this, Grant rushed to the Australian Federal Court to secure an interim injunction requiring X to hide the posts from global users with a hygiene notice of warning pending final determination of the issue. While his feet and mind are rarely grounded, Musk was far from insensible in calling Grant a “censorship commissar” in “demanding global content bans.” In court, the company will argue that Grant’s office has no authority to dictate what the online platform posts for global users.
This war of grinding, nannying censorship – which is what it is – was the prelude for other agents of information control and paranoia to join the fray. The Labor Albanese government, for instance, with support from the conservative opposition, have rounded on Musk, blurring issues of expression with matters of personality. “This is an egotist,” fumed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “someone who’s totally out of touch with the values that Australian families have, and this is causing great distress.”
The values game, always suspicious and meretricious, is also being played by law enforcement authorities. It is precisely their newfound presence in this debate that should get members of the general public worried. You are to be lectured to, deemed immature and incapable of exercising your rights or abide by your obligations as citizens of Australian society.
We have the spluttering worries of Australian Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw in claiming that children (always handy to throw them in) and vulnerable groups (again, a convenient reference) are “being bewitched online by a cauldron of extremist poison on the open and dark web.” These muddled words in his address to the National Press Club in Canberra are shots across the bow. “The very nature of social media allows that extremist poison to spray across the globe almost instantaneously.”
Importantly, Kershaw’s April 24 address has all the worrying signs of a heavy assault, not just on the content to be consumed on the internet, but on the way communications are shared. And what better way to do so by using children as a policy crutch? “We used to warn our children about stranger danger, but now we need to teach our kids about the digital-world deceivers.” A matronly, slightly unhinged tone is unmistakable. “We need to constantly reinforce that people are not always who they claim to be online; and that also applies to images and information.” True, but the same goes for government officials and front-line politicians who make mendacity their stock and trade.
Another sign of gathering storm clouds against the free sharing of information on technology platforms is the appearance of Australia’s domestic espionage agency, ASIO. Alongside Kershaw at the National Press Club, the agency’s chief, Mike Burgess, is also full of grave words about the dangerous imperium of encrypted chatter. There are a number of Australians, warns Burgess, who are using chat platforms “to communicate with offshore extremists, sharing vile propaganda, posting tips about homemade weapons and discussing how to provoke a race war.”
The inevitable lament about obstacles and restrictions – the sorts of things to guard the general citizenry against encroachments of the police state – follows. “ASIO’s ability to investigate is seriously compromised. Obviously, we and our partners will do everything we can to prevent terrorism and sabotage, so we are expending significant resources to monitor the Australians involved.” You may count yourselves amongst them, dear reader.
Kershaw is likewise not a fan of the encrypted platform. In the timeless language of paternal policing, anything that enables messages to be communicated in a public sense must first receive the state’s approval. “We recognise the role that technologies like end-to-end encryption play in protecting personal data, privacy and cyber-security, but there is no absolute right to privacy.”
To make that very point, Burgess declares that “having lawful and targeted access to extremist communications” would make matters so much easier for the intelligence and security community. Naturally, it will be up to the government to designate what it deems to be extremist and appropriate, a task it is often ill-suited for. Once the encryption key is broken, all communications will be fair game.
When it comes to governments, authoritarian regimes do not have a monopoly on suspicion and the fixation on keeping populations in check. In an idyll of ignorance, peace can reign among the docile, the unquestioning, the cerebrally inactive. The Australian approach to censorship and control, stemming from its origins as a tortured penal outpost of the British Empire, is drearily lengthy. Its attitude to the Internet has been one of suspicion, concern, and complexes.
Government ministers in the antipodes see a world, not of mature participants searching for information, but inspired terrorists, active paedophiles and noisy extremists carousing in shadows and catching the unsuspecting. Such officialdom is represented by such figures as former Labor Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, who thankfully failed to introduce a mandatory internet filter when in office, or such nasty products of regulatory intrusion as the Commonwealth Online Safety Act of 2021, zealously overseen by Commissar Grant and the subject of Musk’s ire.
The age of the internet and the world wide web is something to admire and loathe. Surveillance capitalism is very much of the loathsome, sinister variety. But ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, and the Australian government and other agencies do not give a fig about that. The tech giants have actually corroded privacy in commodifying data but many still retain stubborn residual reminders of liberty in the form of encrypted communications and platforms for discussion. To have access to these means of public endeavour remains the holy grail of law enforcement officers, government bureaucrats and fearful politicians the world over.
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So succinctly put.
Albo, O’Neill and the rest should put down the Kool Aid and get back to real instead of backing up a creature like Netanyahu regardless of cost to this country.
Agree. I accidentally watched the attack on the bishop and as shocking as it is, what stood out in stark contrast to the Bondi shopping centre attack (which was played on loop for a week by MSM) was the crowd reaction. At Bondi people fled, except for ‘bollard man’ and ‘redirection man’ (the man who stood guard to protect a woman and child retreating), and of course, the police officer who ended the madness.
As for the bishop with his immediate display of forgiveness, and the crowd intervention which speaks volumes of the bravery of those who put the welfare of others before self, I believe those 2 things are what the fearful controllers, who use our weakling politicians, want to hide from public view. Forgiveness mixes with ego like oil with water, and the harnessing of the ego of the individual is the long game that got us to this point in time. Think Edward Bernays and the manipulation of the public mind as a recent example of the weaponization of propaganda and the science of making the masses servile to an agenda.
As for encryption and being open, how about our politicians and those who work in media and the judiciary offer up themselves as pioneers? Let them prove how good is the loss of anonymity. Let them prove through example the benefits of having all interactions 24/7 recorded and held as part of the public record is a benefit. Let them be stifled by content restrictions and denial of basic human rights such as freedom of speech. It was e-Comm Inman-Grant who said a 2 year ago at a WEF meeting in Davos (of all places) – “I think we’re going to have to think about a recalibration of a whole range of human rights that are playing out online.”
Be in no doubt, the scheming ones want you to lose all of your rights, not just a few, and they are pretending it is all about your safety. This spy-craft is what they want to dump on the public.
US Presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy Jr has one solution, calling for the use of blockchain to track public spending and that it be made available to the public 24/7. Therefore, let us adapt that idea to record all private conversations and interactions of those who want to control us. And so it came to be that the first cabs off the rank were the politicians, media personnel, the judiciary. Let them enjoy that they want for us.
It’s a double bladed axe. Free sharing of information is one thing. Deliberately spreading misinformation is another, and a very serious one given how it distorts the electoral process. The difficulty is distinguishing being legitimate information and lies/distortiions. We’ve always drawn a line, the debate is over where and by whom. And that is not an easy question to answer.
leefe, Dutton a good judge or no?
In fact, anyone in the LNP anyone care to nominate to control the e-Commisioner?
Pete:
I can think of very few people in politics (present or past) I would trust to do that. Two older blokes – Barry Jones and Bob Brown; both have, as far as I know, always acted with integrity. Maybe someone like Quentin Bryce or Gillian Triggs.
It’s not a job I would like to have.
AP Commissioner Kershaw “… there is no absolute right to privacy.”
Of course there is. There are many aspects of one’s life that the government has no right or reason to know about or intrude upon. To argue the contrary is diving deeply into Orwell’s 1984 territory.
I call BS on this state enforcement apparatchik person, recipient of government monies as recompense for enforcing rules and regulations irrespective of the fundamental rightness and appropriateness of such rools & regs, and guarantee that there would be elements within his personal life that he would argue others have zero right of access to.
Thus, by definition, he is an outrageous liar & hypocrite.
The thread is neatly summed up by Canguro.
He calls bullshit and I second it.
I think many people dont understand that most of our policies come from America,it used to be England but now they just have the supporting roll put forward by the Americans, all you need to do is watch whats happening in American and then see how long it takes to get mirrored here in Australia they has just past legislation in America to Ban TikTok,lets just see how long it takes them to move on this.Freedom in this country is a allusion we are not only spied on by our own government,we have the entire US intelligence watching what we do,so i find it always amusing when they talk about other countries spying on us but fail to mention the main culprit of this is, our good old friends the USA.Have no illusions you don’t have freedom anymore that’s long gone,controls here to stay,makes no difference who you vote for,none really care what you think or want,i think the wheels are well and truly in motion leading to the destruction of human kind,world war is just around the corner,and we are allowing our politicians to walk us right into it,unfortunately we don’t have leaders here just followers, God help us all