Australia Censorship News

GameSpot AU interviewed Paul Hunt who ended his stint at Australia's censor as a deputy director.

GameSpot AU: How many video games did you look at during your time there?

Paul Hunt: During my time there I probably looked at 600 to 700 video games per year as a Senior Classifier, and about 15 to 20 per year as a Deputy Director. As a Senior Classifier I examined all the reports that came in on video games and then made a decision on how to proceed. Roughly 75% of video games were classified as per the reports that came with them. With the rest, they were either controversial or the report was not clear enough, and so they had to be looked at more in-depth. If anything was borderline, I'd put the Classification Board on it. We'd all read the report, maybe take a look at some video excerpts of the video game, and maybe we'd play it.

If a game was controversial then it would definitely be played by the members of the board — either physically by some of the board members, or someone would come in and play it for the board. Otherwise, the actual playing of video games was rather random. Sometimes I'd make the board play some games as not to lose their touch, but you can't have ten or so people spending forty hours playing a video game — it's just not economically feasible. We'd want to spend our time and money on the tricky ones, the controversial game, not the ones that were not at all hard to classify.

If a tricky game like something in the Grand Theft Auto titles came through, extra care was taken. All information would be reviewed by the board (as Senior Classifier, I'd put the entire board on it, not just a few members). Everyone would read the report and then watch a video of the controversial bits. By law, the applicant must point out to the board all the controversial content in the game. Afterwards, the board will want to see some of the game being played and that's when the applicant will bring in a skilled player to take the board through the game.

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Ministry of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy

Stephen Conroy has responded to an article published on the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald which revealed that the Government has sat on a report that labelled mandatory ISP filtering as being fundamentally flawed since February.

Senator Conroy also has announced the live trial has been delayed until mid-January.

From his press release:

The Howard Government, at the instigation of the Internet Industry Association (IIA), commissioned a report to be conducted by Mr Peter Coroneos, IIA's CEO. The previous government provided funding for the research and it was based on terms of reference agreed to by the IIA and the previous government. The report was to inform the previous government of the IIA's and other stakeholders' views, and international experience.

The report methodology was a literature review of existing studies as well as interviews and surveys. It involved no empirical testing of filtering technology.

The report highlighted a number of concerns the industry had previously raised with the current and previous governments, such as the potential for dynamic filtering to result in network performance impact and over-blocking and under-blocking content. It was not an analysis of the ALP's policy.

The Government is aware of technical concerns raised in the report, and that is why we are conducting a pilot to put these claims to the test, Senator Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, said.

Ministry of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy

Trials of mandatory internet censorship are due soon despite a secret high-level report to the Federal Government that found the technology does not work, will significantly slow internet speeds and will block access to legitimate sites.

Commissioned by the Howard government and prepared by the Internet Industry Association, the report said schemes for blocking inappropriate content  were fundamentally flawed.

The report says the filters would slow the internet (as much as 87% by some measures), be easily bypassed, and would not come close to capturing all of the government unwanted content available online. They would also struggle to distinguish between wanted and unwanted content, leading to legitimate sites being blocked. Entire user-generated content sites, such as YouTube and Wikipedia, could be censored over a single suspect posting.

It raises serious freedom-of-speech questions, such as who will be held accountable for blocked sites and whether the Government will be pressured to expand the blacklist to cover lawful content, including pornography, gambling sites and euthanasia material.

The report, based on comprehensive interviews with many parties with a stake in the internet, was written by several independent technical experts, including the University of Sydney's Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt. It was handed to the Government in February but has been kept secret.

I definitely think that what the Government is showing publicly … is such a small part of what they need to do in order to get this right, Professor Landfeldt said. He said he believed the Government had not released his report because its conclusions were too damaging: It's definitely not going to be workable to get a very significant reduction in access to this (unwanted) content that is available out there, it's fundamentally just not viable.

Senator Conroy refused to comment directly on why the report has not been released or why the trials are going ahead given its findings. The proposed censorship is more restrictive than in any liberal democracy, says the online users lobby group, Electronic Frontiers Australia.

Professor Landfeldt, one of Australia's leading telecommunications experts, says some of the fundamental flaws include:

• All filtering systems will be easily circumvented.
• Censors maintaining the blacklist will never be able to keep up with the amount of new content published on the web every second.
• Filters using real-time analysis of sites to determine whether content is inappropriate are not effective, capture wanted content, are easy to bypass and slow network speeds exponentially as accuracy increases.
• Entire user-generated content sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia could be blocked over a single video or article.
• Filters would be costly and difficult to implement for ISPs and put many smaller ISPs out of business.
• While the communications authority's blacklist will be withheld from internet users, all 700 ISPs will have access to it so it could easily be leaked.
• The filters will not censor content on peer-to-peer file sharing networks such as Limewire, online chat rooms, email and instant messaging.

Filtering Trial Extended to Peer to Peer

THE Federal Government's controversial internet censorship plan may extend to filter more web activity than first thought, Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy said technology that could filter data sent directly between computers would be tested as part of the upcoming live filtering trial.

Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial, Conroy said.

Last week, two legal actions broadly redefined the landscape concerning the kind of media Australians are allowed to possess and view. Although both actions were taken in isolation, their combined impact has made a mockery of laws intended to protect us. Beyond ridiculous, our laws are so out of sync with the world at large, they have now become unenforceable.

In the first of these legal actions, Sydney judge Michael Adams ruled that a pornographic cartoon featuring the likenesses of cartoon family The Simpsons constituted child pornography, even though these representations were not in any way resembling of real people. Apparently the pornographic cartoon could fuel the demand for material that does involve the abuse of children.

Which begs the question: has Judge Adams ever watched The Simpsons? The casual, almost reckless child abuse that occurs every time Homer strangles Bart is precisely the sort of "abuse" that judge Adams seeks quash. As near as I can tell, television broadcasters and everyone who watches any episode of The Simpsons where Homer throttles Bart (there are many, many such episodes, plus last year's feature film) have violated Australia's laws concerning the distribution and viewing of materials which depict child abuse.

And let's be blunt: Homer does abuse Bart. There's no other rationale for Homer's behavior. It is child abuse. And any materials which depict child abuse in any way are wholly illegal under Australian law.

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Update: Simpsons Porn

21st August 2010. Based on article from  abc.net.au

William Bellew was convicted earlier this year after he was found with more than 100 images on his computer that were subject to charges.

The original trial heard Bellew liked to manipulate the images to resemble characters from the Simpsons.

Bellew was originally sentenced to a year of weekend detention, but he appealed against the severity of the sentence.

Today's order from the Supreme Court has imposed a six-month suspended sentence and a 12-month good behaviour bond.

Australia's Classification Board's ban of F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin has been overturned on appeal.

The game was banned in November, on the grounds of high violence, but Warner Bros. appealed the decision and submitted the game to the Australian Classification Review Board.

After reviewing the material, the ACRB agreed that F.E.A.R. 2 deserved a MA15+ rating uncut.

The game is rated 18 by the UK's BBFC.

The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference delegate for media issues, Bishop Peter Ingham, said other countries were miles ahead of Australia when it came to keeping the internet as safe as possible for children.

Comparable western countries, such as the UK, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland already have ISP filtering in operation, Bishop Ingham claimed.

In many of these countries, the ISPs themselves have initiated the filtering in order to live up to the community's expectations that illegal material or material that is harmful to children should not be available on the Internet.

It is disappointing to read reports that Australia's largest Internet provider, Telstra has said it will not participate in trials of the federal government's national internet filter.

Bishop Ingham said the ACBC held the position that whatever could reasonably be done to filter out illegal sites at ISP level, should be done: Arguments that civil liberties will be infringed by internet filtering are absolutely spurious, as the government's proposal simply aims to ensure that the material accessible on the internet is in line with the restrictions already in place in regard to DVDs or publications .

Pornography of any kind is harmful to human dignity and often degrading to women. Research shows that internet pornography is also becoming more and more harmful to marriages and relationships. In particular, every parent knows that much of the pornographic material that can be found on the internet ought not to be accessible to children.

We call on the community to get behind the federal government on this important issue and support its attempts to keep pace with the rest of the world when it comes to cleaning up the Net in a fair and reasonable way.

Fiona Patten, chief executive officer of adult industry group Eros Association, said people who could not access adult material online would buy it from sex shops.

Queensland already had at least 116 sex shops - more per capita than any other Australian state. If the filtering goes ahead, Queensland will see an explosion of adult shops because, if people can't access adult material online, they'll go to retail outlets instead, she said: Increased demand will lead to more shops.

Keith Boswell, who runs three BeDaring Adult Shops in south-east Queensland, said some traders had complained of a downturn in business since the economic slump, while others reported business as usual.

There is enormous demand for non-violent erotica in Queensland, so I think adult stores are probably more resilient when it comes to discretionary spending. If the filtering goes ahead, I think some people who prefer to look online will be embarrassed to go into stores.

Protestors across Australia rallied against the Federal Government's plan to censor the internet yesterday.

About 300 protestors gathered in Perth to voice their concerns for the Government's planned internet filter aimed at increasing child safety in cyberspace.

Greens Senator Scott Ludlam likened the Government's plan to post office workers checking every letter to see if anything was dodgy and getting rid of that mail. He said the internet reflected human culture and the Government's proposed censorship would not fix violence issues facing the nation.

The Federal Government suggested this mistargeted, misdirected and flawed proposal to censor the internet ... it will potentially make things worse.

He questioned who would monitor the blacklist of banned websites and who would be the decision makers determining what Australians were allowed to access.

Ludlam urged protestors to continue voicing their concerns to Government through rallies, emails and online: These kinds of rallies will bring these things down and get us back to issues of violence in the community. I believe this is winnable, what we're doing is working.

Based on article from news.com.au

Hundreds of people attended rallies in Australian capital cities yesterday to voice their opposition to the Rudd Government's planned internet filtering scheme.

The rallies, held in seven cities including Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, were the first in a series of demonstrations organised by anti-censorship group Digital Liberty Coalition (DLC).

In Sydney a crowd of up to 300 mostly young and tech-savvy protestors gathered at Town Hall to hear guest speakers including bloggers and musicians criticise the web filtering scheme.

DLC Sydney rally coordinator Jerry Hutchinson said the low take-up of existing free web filtering software, introduced by the previous government, showed that parents were not interested in the concept: Why? Because people can monitor their own children – they don't need censorship in their home.

DLC plans to hold anti-filter demonstrations in capital cities once a month until March, when it will promote a national protest in Canberra called March in March

The Northern Territory Attorney-General's office says stricter pornography laws will be introduced to Parliament sometime next year.

Australia's national adult retail association, Eros, says the Territory has some of the most lenient pornography laws in the nation and it has been pushing for local laws to conform with the rest of the country.

Attorney-General Chris Burns had said that stricter legislation would be introduced to Parliament this year.

But his office now says the legislation is not finished, but it should be ready to put to Parliament in the first half of next year.

Even the ultra-conservative politician known for his attempts to censor television has strongly opposed the Government's plans to introduce mandatory internet censorship, highlighting the policy's lack of support across the political spectrum.

The proposed filters would not have blocked any of the 15,000 child porn videos and half a million child abuse images uncovered by police in a major sting this week as they cannot filter traffic on peer-to-peer networks - only websites.

In a post on his blog, South Australian Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi expressed concern that the filters would inadvertently block legitimate content and be expanded to cover other controversial material opposed by the Government of the day, such as regular pornography.

Already we have a filter on the internet for all parliament house computers. It blocks some political sites, alternative lifestyle sites and other sites that, while not to my personal taste, are hardly grounds for censorship, he wrote: Imagine if such censorship was extended to every computer in the country through mandatory ISP filtering. Who would be the ultimate arbiter of what is permissible content?

In his blog post, Bernardi acknowledged that his position on the web censorship issue would surprise many and said a big part of me wants to support it . However, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy's plan was so devoid of detail that it was impossible to form a considered opinion.

24 hours since its launch, hundreds of people have used Senator Conroy's new blog as a place to protest against his proposed net filtering scheme.

The Digital Economy Future Directions blog was launched by Senator Conroy yesterday as a place for people to comment on various areas of digital policy.

Conroy noted that an upcoming blog post, How do we maintain the same civil society we enjoy offline in an online world?, would touch on the issue of filtering. We welcome your feedback about the [filtering] issue in response to this post.

But readers didn't wait for that post to go live, instead flooding Minister Tanner's welcome post with over 400 posts in less than 24 hours.

Commenters attacked the filters as technically unfeasible. Many comments spoke passionately about freedom and censorship. Commenters even got political, with threats to campaign against the Rudd Government if the filters are implemented.

There was one lone voice that supported the filters.

Government's plan to censor the internet is in tatters

Based on article from watoday.com.au

The Government's plan to censor the internet is in tatters, with Australia's largest ISP saying it will not take part in live trials of the system and the second largest committing only to a scaled-back trial.

The live trials, scheduled to kick off before Christmas, were supposed to provide a definitive picture of whether the filters could work in the real world, after lab tests released by the Australian Communications and Media Authority in June found available ISP filters frequently let through content that should be blocked, incorrectly blocked harmless content and slowed down network speeds by up to 87 per cent.

But now Telstra and Internode have said they would not take part in the trials. iiNet has said it would take part only to prove to the Government that its plan would not work, while Optus will test a heavily cut-down filtering model.

An appeal judge in Australia has ruled that an animation depicting well-known cartoon characters engaging in sexual acts is child pornography. The internet cartoon featured characters from the Simpsons TV series.

The central issue in the case was whether a cartoon character could depict a real person. Judge Michael Adams decided that it could, and found a man from Sydney guilty of possessing child pornography on his computer.

The defence had argued that the fictional, animated characters were not real people, and clearly departed from the human form. They therefore contested that the conviction for the possession of child pornography should be overturned.

Justice Michael Adams said the purpose of anti-child pornography legislation was to stop sexual exploitation and child abuse where images of real children were depicted. But in a landmark ruling he decided that the mere fact that they were not realistic representations of human beings did not mean that they could not be considered people.

He ruled that the animated cartoon could fuel demand for material that does involve the abuse of children, and therefore upheld the conviction.

Rather than jail the man, however, he fined him Aus$3,000

A video sharing website user who re-posted somebody else's video of a man apparently swinging a baby around has had his house raided by an armed Australian police anti-paedophile squad.

The user Biggles9 has been charged with accessing child abuse material, downloading child abuse material and uploading child abuse material with the intent to distribute . He is out on bail and is due to appear in court 18 December. He posted the clip, which he found on MetaCafe, to LiveLeak, a UK-based citizen journalism site.

The Queensland-based Task Force Argos allegedly acted on information supplied by British police. They arrested him and seized computer equipment. They questioned Biggles9 for about seven hours.

According to LiveLeak founder Hayden Hewitt, who has been in regular contact with the long-time member since he was charged, Biggles9 did not ask for a lawyer to be present because he did not believe there was any case to answer. Hewitt said he had been told that the clip Biggles9 uploaded to LiveLeak was the only data of interest that the police's digital forensic search found.

According to Hewitt, Biggles9 found the clip on YouTube, via MetaCafe, which aggregates video sites. It was also available on several other video sharing sites. LiveLeak and YouTube have removed the footage, but it is still accessible elsewhere on the web.

It shows a man described as being of eastern European appearance in what appears to be a living room with a sofa and TV, and a baby in a nappy. The man picks up the baby and begins swinging it around very fast, at first by its two arms and then by one. Later, he turns the baby through somersaults. At the end of the performance he holds the baby normally and approaches the camera. The baby smiles.

It's currently unclear what prompted the raid on Biggles9's home by armed police. A few days after the clip was posted, Hewitt was contacted by a child protection group based in the US, which asked if he had any information about the source of the video. Hewitt didn't, but added an appeal on the page hosting it for anyone with information to get in touch. Soon after, Gloucestershire police asked him to remove it on grounds that people might copy what they saw. LiveLeak declined to remove the clip.

About a month later, Task Force Argos raided Biggles9. He contacted Hewitt and requested the clip be taken down on the advice of his lawyers, which LiveLeak did.

In his post-arrest blog, Biggles9 wrote: I'm just trying to warn all the uploaders and moderators to be very careful of what is posted and approved when it comes to children; no one needs to go through this crap over something that is so petty. H e added he is confident sanity will prevail.

It has been revealed that one of the most important elements of the live ISP filtering pilot, testing the impact filtering a blacklist of 10,000 URLs has on network performance, will be a closed network test and will not involve actual customers.

Here's an extract from a letter sent by Senator Conroy to an Australian Whirlpool member:

In consultations with ISPs, concerns have been raised that filtering a blacklist beyond 10 000 URLs may raise network performance issues, depending on the configuration of the filter. The pilot will therefore seek to also test network performance against a test list of 10 000 URLs.

This will be a closed network test and will not involve actual customers. The list of 10 000 sites will be developed by the technical organisation assisting the Department on the pilot, which has access to lists of this size. As this test is only being performed to test the impact on network performance against a list of this size, and actual customers are not involved, the make-up of the list is not an issue.

It's certainly worth the cynical note that simulated users also do not publicly complain that their Internet performance is degraded under the system.

Members of Senator Conroy's own political party have called on him to change his policy, Ban This URL has learned. We want an opt-in system, Janai Tabbernor, president of New South Wales Young Labor, told Ban This URL.

The junior political party unanimously passed a motion at last weekend's conference, calling on Senator Conroy to switch to an opt-in system instead of a clean feed, and to redirect the funds to the national broadband network.

Motion 42 read:

The Internet is a free medium for the open communication of ideas and opinions without hindrance, and thus, should not be censored.

NSW Young Labor supports individual discretion and choice with respect to the internet, rather than censoring the world wide web and its content.

The point is that we don't condemn the Minister or the government, said Tabbernor: We generally support what the government and the Minister are trying to achieve, and we agree with his objective: we want the internet to be a safe place.

The original proposal put to the electorate at the 2007 Federal Election was an opt-in system, pointed out Tabbernor.

It's tough being a government these days; who has the energy to clean up the Internet after a hard day's work bailing out the financial sector? Not the Australian government, it seems. Rather than actually doing something about illegal content, they just make a list of it and tell ISPs to filter everything that's on the list. Sidestepping the murky political details and—for the moment—the civil liberties problems inherent in this approach, let's take a closer look at the technical aspects of such a plan.

...

My conclusion: this isn't going to work. There's no way to build a filter box that can filter all the URLs where porn is hosted throughout the Internet. A DNS-based filter that helps naive users avoid being confronted with explicit content would probably work to a certain degree. An IP-based filter for a small amount of very illegal content—that would be the stuff that even the spam hosters in China don't want on their servers—may also work. But anything more ambitious than that is certain to fail; either it won't work very well, or it will bankrupt the ISPs.

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SBS has dropped an episode of its Swift and Shift Couriers comedy after the family of Jake Kovco expressed concerns over a storyline which sees its characters delivering the ashes of a deceased Australian soldier.

The military bungled the transportation of a soldier's remains, and sent them to Cairo. After the ‘family' of the soldier bans the military from further involvement, the hapless courier company comes to the rescue in order to lift its company profile.

SBS was approached by members of Jake Kovco's family who expressed concern at some of the content in this week's episode of Swift and Shift Couriers, an SBS spokesperson told TV Tonight.

After reviewing next week's episode and in light of the impending memorial service for an Australian soldier recently killed in Afghanistan, SBS exercised sensitivity and made a decision not to broadcast the second episode of Swift and Shift Couriers scheduled for next week.

This week will see the Australian launch of Grand Theft Auto IV for PC, and in a statement, Rockstar confirmed to GameSpot AU that unlike the console versions currently on sale, the Australian PC retail release of GTA IV will be sold completely uncensored.

Grand Theft Auto IV PC has been rated MA15+ strong violence, sex scenes, coarse language, and drug references by the Australian Classification Office. The PC game is unedited in any way and identical in content to the international version, a local Rockstar rep said.

Update: Confirmed

28th December 2008. Based on article from refused-classification.com

Rockstar obviously came to the conclusion that they had over reacted because when it came time to get the PC version rated they submitted the uncut game. This was rated MA15+ (Strong violence, sex scenes, coarse language and drug references) on November 8th.

Australia's Classification Board has explained why it banned the upcoming horror-shooter F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin.

Games On Net says the censor deemed the violent content high in impact and unsuitable for a minor to play, citing as examples a nail gun that can be used to pin bad guys to walls, after which they will fall to the ground in a bloody mass, and a sniper rifle that will tear bodies apart at close range.

[The protagonist] uses his sub machine gun to explicitly bisect an enemy, the two parts of the body lying separately on the ground, with copious blood spray, the board noted in one specific example of in-game action it used to back up its decision. There are also a number of explicit close range decapitations involving both human and mutant creatures. The decapitations are the result of close-up throat slashing from behind and close-up gunshots to the throat. The copious blood spray covers walls, objects and even the game's camera lens, while partially-dismembered corpses and severed heads also feature prominently.

The ratings board also blamed the game's enhanced graphics and realistic behavior of human and mutant foes for the decision, which it said heightened the impact of the violence to the point where it cannot be accommodated at the MA15+ classification.

Support for the Government's plan to censor the Australian internet has hit rock bottom, with even some children's welfare groups now saying that that the mandatory filters are ineffective and a waste of money.

Live trials of the filters, which will block illegal content for all Australian internet users and inappropriate adult content on an opt-in basis, are slated to begin by Christmas, despite harsh opposition from the Greens, Opposition, the internet industry, consumers and online rights groups.

Holly Doel-Mackaway, adviser with Save the Children, the largest independent children's rights agency in the world, said educating kids and parents was the way to empower young people to be safe internet users.

She said the filter scheme was fundamentally flawed because it failed to tackle the problem at the source and would inadvertently block legitimate resources.

Furthermore there was no evidence to suggest that children were stumbling across child pornography when browsing the web. Doel-Mackaway believes the millions of dollars earmarked to implement the filters would be far better spent on teaching children how to use the internet safely and on law enforcement.

The constant change of cyberspace means that a filter is going to be able to be circumvented and it's going to throw up false positives - many innocent websites, maybe even our own, will be blacklisted because we reference a lot of our work that we do with children in fighting commercial sexual exploitation, she said.

James McDougall, director of the National Children's and Youth Law Centre, expressed similar views to Save the Children.

He said the mandatory filters simply would not work and children should be able to make decisions for themselves. Concerned parents could easily install PC-based filters on their computers if they desired, or ask their internet providers to switch on voluntary filtering: I take issue with the minister's perspective that children are themselves the danger in a sense that we have to make this decision for them because they are not capable of making it for themselves - I think there's very little evidence to support that and plenty of evidence to show that children are responsible decision makers given the skills and information.

Other childrens' welfare organisations, such as Child Wise and Bravehearts, continue to support the filters, saying the flaws are acceptable as long as they help block some child pornography.