Stainless Steel Mouse freed
In China they detain you for being an Internet dissident, as Liu Di knows. The 23 year old woman, using the online nickname "Stainless Steel Mouse", has just spent a year behind bars. Her alleged "crime" was publishing several articles on Chinese Internet sites. These satirize the government and the Communist Party's refusal to protect the freedoms of speech and the press. It seems to be policy in China to supress Internet-based political opposition.
Here, they'll just disappear your website. Australia's government, despite only 7% public support for goverment Internet censorship, has legislated that material determined to be "prohibited content" or "potential prohibited content" by the Australian Broadcasting Authority may be censored online. [Content becomes "prohibited" after complaints are made about to the ABA and it is determined to be "prohibited content" by the Office of Film and Literature Classification/Censorship.] The offending content-provider is issued with a take-down notice.
Under recent amendments to the legislation, the government no longer even has to publish a list of taken-down sites. A site may be removed from an Australian server with no public notice of the action. This state of affairs is mildly described by EFF Australia as "unlike any existing or proposed laws in countries similar to Australia."
Ironically, even the National Office for the Information Economy has observed that "Factors that may reduce market penetration of the Internet" includes "censorship and surveillance by governments resulting in the public using the Internet less".
As well as Internet, Broadcasting, Publishing, Cinema and Videos, Games, the Postal Service, Advertising, and Telephony are all subject to government censorship. Originally instituted to combat foreign spying during World War 1, our censorship laws have persisted and expanded long after the justification for introducing them has expired.
Item posted by AutoEditor at 10:32 am ::
