I try to keep my political views out of this blog but with recent news that the Australian Government is to introduce mandatory internet filtering at the ISP level, I must add my voice to those that are crying out against this massive reduction of freedom of speech.

If you haven’t heard about the Australian Labour Party’s plans, they involve forcing all ISPs to implement a Chinese-style great firewall that will prevent access to domains and URLs that are listed on a secret list.

NoCleanFeed Elsewhere

A great deal of discussion has centred around this issue and I won’t go into why censorship is bad or why the plan is doomed to failure. Instead here are a bunch of links discussing (well, attacking) the Communications Minister’s position far more eloquently than I can:

• Cory Doctorow, on BoingBoing.net - Great Firewall of Australia will nationally block sites appearing on a secret, unaccountable list
• Duncan Riley of The Inquisitr - Australia Confirms Censorship Plans, Tells Fibs On The Filtering Trial
• Slashdot Geeks discuss the issue
• Even the Australian Government’s own report suggests that the filter can be easly bypassed

For more up-to-date commentary, see the No Clean Feed site from Electronic Frontiers Australia or even see the #nocleanfeed hashtag on twitter.

NoCleanFeed Censored Twitter

I’ve made a (admitedly frivolous) twitter toy to raise some awareness of this issue, that shows the #nocleanfeed twitter stream and Kevin Rudd’s tweets with random words blacked out - unless they contain some swearing.

I hope you enjoy it and it provokes some discussion, so please RT!

The NoCleanFeed Twitter Toy is here.

Creative Commons licensed photo by Tarale.