Pixelated Semantics

A schizotypical inventory

When satire looks like phishing, war looks like peace

It's been confirmed that a satirical website that featured an 'apology' speech from Man of Steel for the Iraq war was shut down 'under orders from the Australian Government'.

The SMH reports that writer Richard Neville's 'site had been shut down in response to a request from the Prime Minister's office on basis that it looked too similar to its own site'.

For either the PM's office or the IT companies involved to claim they cannot tell satire from 'phishing' betrays either an attempt at disigenuity or an ignorance of contemporary culture that is as believable as the PM's denials over the AWB scandal.

The author's defence is completely credible:

'I don't see how you can make judgements that ignore the content or intention of the site. To give the satire more impact it was important to make it look like an official speech. Obviously there was no hacking of the original site, and I did not choose to make it too close to the actual design, and my name and address were readily accessible.'

Unlike the response from Melbourne IT (which apparently allocated the address for the site) that 'to us it looks like a phishing site': those sites are almost solely dedicated to extracting personal information from unwitting users. Phishing is defined by the History of Computing site as 'to gain unauthorized access to one's personal data or account for malicious or fraudulent purposes': this is not what Neville was doing.

As Kevin Rudd says, 'the Howard Government now seems to regard lying as the way in which you run a country'. We can now indisputably add 'censoring' to the sorry trail of behaviour that betrays a serious government contempt for human rights and democracy.

Item posted by AutoEditor at 3:03 pm ::