South Australia attempts to ban internet anonymity

[Mr Flibble]

Anonymous comments banned for SA election

Michael Atkinson says speech still free
Media says censorship is 'draconian'
SOUTH Australia has become one of the few states in the world to censor the internet.

The new law, which came into force on January 6, requires anyone making an online comment about next month's state election to publish their real name and postcode.
The law will affect anyone posting a comment on an election story on The Advertiser's AdelaideNow website, as well as other Australian news sites.
It could also apply to election comment made on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
The law, which was pushed through last year as part of a raft of amendments to the Electoral Act and supported by the Liberal Party, also requires media organisations to keep a person's real name and full address on file for six months, and they face fines of $5000 if they do not hand over this information to the Electoral Commissioner.
'Still free speech'
Attorney-General Michael Atkinson denied that the new law was an attack on free speech.
"The AdelaideNow website is not just a sewer of criminal defamation, it is a sewer of identity theft and fraud," Mr Atkinson said.
"There is no impinging on freedom of speech, people are free to say what they wish as themselves, not as somebody else."
Mr Atkinson also said he expected The Advertiser to target him for sponsoring the law.
"I am also certain that Advertiser Newspapers and News Limited will punish me personally, viciously for being the attorney-general responsible for this law," he said.
"You will publish false stories about me, invent things about me to punish me."
The Advertiser's editor, Melvin Mansell, said: "Clearly this is censorship being implemented by a government facing an election.
"The effect of that is that many South Australians are going to be robbed of their right of freedom of speech during this election campaign.
"The sad part is that this widespread suppression is supported by the Opposition.
"Neither of these parties are representing the people for whom they have been elected to govern."
The Right to Know Coalition, made up of Australia's major media outlets including News Limited, publisher of The Advertiser and parent company of news.com.au, has called the new laws "draconian".
"This is one of the most troubling erosions of the right to free speech in Australia for many years," Right to Know spokeswoman Creina Chapman said.
Ms Chapman also pointed out that newspaper blogs such as AdelaideNow were moderated and publishers and broadcasters took responsibility for the material they published.

Liberal doubts
Opposition justice spokeswoman Vickie Chapman said yesterday while the Liberal Party had supported the amendment to the Electoral Act, she believed it would be too broad to implement if it included Facebook and Twitter.
Ms Chapman said Mr Atkinson should introduce a regulation to limit its scope.
"It is clearly not the intention of what we understood that to be," she said.
The SA law - which could also apply to talkback radio - differs from federal legislation, which preserves the right of internet users to blog under a pseudonym.
The law will apply as soon as the writs for the March 20 election are issued. The writs for the election can be issued any time between now and 25 days before the election. The law will then lapse at 6pm on polling day.
Mr Atkinson said there was no intention to broaden the law to take it beyond the period of elections.

For those of you outside Australia, Atkinson is the man responsible for Australia not having an R rating for games, he alone is blocking its implementation.

The attempts at censorship in this country are just getting more and more ridiculous. I look forward to seeing them attempt to enforce this on forums, facebook and other social networking sites. What a waste of government time and resources.

Still one positive this is going to put News limited and the talkback radio brigade firmly in the anti-Atkinson camp, so maybe we can finally get rid of this anti-thought arsehole and finally get sensible game classification laws in this country.

[General Zod]

So I guess that means everybody playing World of Warcraft in Australia has to start using their real names instead of their screen names? The fallout from this looks like it should be hilarious.

[Archaic`]

Impractical and unenforceable, and good free promotion for us in the Pirate Party. I expect we'll see this going to the High Court very quickly.

[Stark]

The only thing funnier than one retard humiliating the country with his stupidity is a group called the 'Pirate Party' seriously considering themselves a meaningful part of the political process.

Frankly I welcome this stuff. Just like the other dumb shit AU is doing at the moment regarding information and censorship, it's almost certain to destroy itself (probably without any participation by meaningless fringe parties). It's just a shame this even gets traction, but at worst I'll just leave the country and laugh like Alison did.

[General Zod]

Well that didn't take long.

"From the feedback we've received through AdelaideNow, the blogging generation believes that the law supported by all MPs and all political parties is unduly restrictive. I have listened. I will immediately after the election move to repeal the law retrospectively... It may be humiliating for me, but that's politics in a democracy and I'll take my lumps."

[Mr Flibble]

This is absolutely hilarious, they attacked News Limited, and when News limited responded in kind they backed down immediately, how could any politician in SA (hell most politicians in the world should know this) not expect a tough fight when taking on News limited?

Also hilariously before backing down Atkinson claimed this guy wasn't a real person, of all the commenters the guy could choose as an example he managed to pick one who not only was using his real name, but lived 500m from his office in his electorate.

I am amazed at how badly SA Labor are handling things at the moment. Rann totally screwed up his handling of the affair issue (if he just let it go, quietly denying it instead of suing it would have disappeared and been forgotten like strippergate was for Rudd), and now this, it is like they are deliberately trying to lose the election.

[Stark]

Wow so it's starting to sound like this guy is a bit wrong in the head; that this isn't a 'kids on my lawn' thing, it's that he's afraid of those internet kiddies or something. Crazy.

[Havok]

The only thing funnier than one retard humiliating the country with his stupidity is a group called the 'Pirate Party' seriously considering themselves a meaningful part of the political process.

Frankly I welcome this stuff. Just like the other dumb shit AU is doing at the moment regarding information and censorship, it's almost certain to destroy itself (probably without any participation by meaningless fringe parties). It's just a shame this even gets traction, but at worst I'll just leave the country and laugh like Alison did.

Bring Cherry, Ken and Flash with you to Oakland!

I'm curious, is this an issue because it is trying to regulate the internet or just because the idea isn't very feasible. Honestly, I'm not seeing the censorship angle with this. If you went to a town hall, you wouldn't be wearing a mask saying the things they are talking about.

[Stark]

Yeah, but if you're in a town hall saying nobody in any town hall anywhere can say anything about you without leaving your details at the door, you might look a bit stupid. It appears however that this is actually driven by some kind of paranoia on this old guy's part; he should be put in a home where professionals can care for him, not embarrassing himself repeatedly due to his fears of persecution.

[General Zod]

The only thing funnier than one retard humiliating the country with his stupidity is a group called the 'Pirate Party' seriously considering themselves a meaningful part of the political process.

Frankly I welcome this stuff. Just like the other dumb shit AU is doing at the moment regarding information and censorship, it's almost certain to destroy itself (probably without any participation by meaningless fringe parties). It's just a shame this even gets traction, but at worst I'll just leave the country and laugh like Alison did.

Bring Cherry, Ken and Flash with you to Oakland!

I'm curious, is this an issue because it is trying to regulate the internet or just because the idea isn't very feasible. Honestly, I'm not seeing the censorship angle with this. If you went to a town hall, you wouldn't be wearing a mask saying the things they are talking about.

You still have a certain degree of anonymity in public. When you're walking around town you don't have a bright neon sign giving away your name and address to any thief, stalker or religious peddler who walks by you. That's basically what this measurement is wanting you to do online.

[Spoonist]

The only thing funnier than one retard humiliating the country with his stupidity is a group called the 'Pirate Party' seriously considering themselves a meaningful part of the political process.

The Pirate Party is represented in the European Parliament through the swedish electorate. Not like that has any effect on your statement, I just thought you wanted to know.

[Stark]

That's not surprising given the copyright business that goes on in that area; expecting the same stuff in AU is just hilarious. Since all this nonsense happens because of one guy, I'm not really seeing how the 'Pirate Party' can do fuck all about it (unless they somehow get him booted with their no parlimentary support or something).

[Mr Flibble]

I'm curious, is this an issue because it is trying to regulate the internet or just because the idea isn't very feasible. Honestly, I'm not seeing the censorship angle with this. If you went to a town hall, you wouldn't be wearing a mask saying the things they are talking about.

The main issues I had with it were twofold:

Firstly it is utterly unenforceable, which in SA means what would happen in practice is the government would use it to crack down on their opponents, and not employ it on their allies, using the fact it can't be enforced everywhere as a smokescreen.

Secondly it would be annoying for me. If anyone made a comment about the SA election on testingstan (which, Lusankya or I may do just in jest somewhere you never know). I would be required to keep that person's real name and postcode somewhere, or delete the post (which would be the option I would likely choose in this case), in order to be in compliance with this retarded law, either options require some effort from me, and as such I would find it annoying.

[General Zod]

I'm curious, is this an issue because it is trying to regulate the internet or just because the idea isn't very feasible. Honestly, I'm not seeing the censorship angle with this. If you went to a town hall, you wouldn't be wearing a mask saying the things they are talking about.

The main issues I had with it were twofold:

Firstly it is utterly unenforceable, which in SA means what would happen in practice is the government would use it to crack down on their opponents, and not employ it on their allies, using the fact it can't be enforced everywhere as a smokescreen.

Secondly it would be annoying for me. If anyone made a comment about the SA election on testingstan (which, Lusankya or I may do just in jest somewhere you never know). I would be required to keep that person's real name and postcode somewhere, or delete the post (which would be the option I would likely choose in this case), in order to be in compliance with this retarded law, either options require some effort from me, and as such I would find it annoying.

It's also entirely unenforceable, because people could just make their boards and chat logs private with no way for the government to notice it if they felt like giving them the finger.

[Feral Abacus]

It's also entirely unenforceable, because people could just make their boards and chat logs private with no way for the government to notice it if they felt like giving them the finger.

Atkinson's crusade was really aimed at one site in particular, the Adelaide Advertiser, where the bulk of anonymous political commentary on state elections happens. Enforcement would take the form of suing Murdoch to provide the names and addresses of posters. Ultimately thats what this comes down to, one paranoid, angry politician trying to silence commentary from the local paper.

[Mr Flibble]

Another article on the backdown (bolding mine).

South Australia's Attorney-General Michael Atkinson admits he misjudged public opinion on the state's attempt to curb political comment on the internet. Mr Atkinson says he will repeal a law which would have meant that anyone posting comment or blogs during an election period would have had to give their real name and postcode. Opponents had branded the law an attack on freedom of speech, and Mr Atkinson says he listened to community concerns in his decision to overturn it. "I now understand that bloggers demand the right to publish, on the net, political commentary in the election period anonymously or under an assumed name," he said. "I miscalculated the strength of feeling among teenagers and people in their 20s who have grown up with the internet and blogging and I underestimated their desire to have as a right the ability to make political commentary in the election period anonymously or under an assumed name. "When one gets public opinion wrong, as I did, one has to change one's mind."

Free speech win
Civil libertarians say the Attorney-General's back flip is a win for free speech. George Mancini of the SA Council for Civil Liberties says public outcry made the Government think twice. "Nice little victory for democracy and freedom of speech in South Australia so that people don't need to be feared (sic) about speaking out and they can maintain their privacy," he said. The state Opposition says Mr Atkinson should resign over the matter. The legislation was supported by the Opposition Liberal Party but shadow attorney-general Vickie Chapman now says the party was misled. "He clearly wanted to use this legislation to hunt down any of those who criticised him or the Government and that was made absolutely clear yesterday by his statements and behaviour," she said. "And indeed even the information and assurances were given by the Electoral Commissioner, [and] we consider she has been misled."

You can really see his bitterness at the whole thing (and I suspect some bitterness about the R rated games issue is involved) leaking through when he describes it as being teenagers and people in their 20s who were against this.

[sketerpot]

And now, Bruce Schneier explains why this is dumb in general:

Universal identification is portrayed by some as the holy grail of Internet security. Anonymity is bad, the argument goes; and if we abolish it, we can ensure only the proper people have access to their own information. We'll know who is sending us spam and who is trying to hack into corporate networks. And when there are massive denial-of-service attacks, such as those against Estonia or Georgia or South Korea, we'll know who was responsible and take action accordingly.

The problem is that it won't work. Any design of the Internet must allow for anonymity. Universal identification is impossible. Even attribution -- knowing who is responsible for particular Internet packets -- is impossible. Attempting to build such a system is futile, and will only give criminals and hackers new ways to hide.

Imagine a magic world in which every Internet packet could be traced to its origin. Even in this world, our Internet security problems wouldn't be solved. There's a huge gap between proving that a packet came from a particular computer and that a packet was directed by a particular person. This is the exact problem we have with botnets, or pedophiles storing child porn on innocents' computers. In these cases, we know the origins of the DDoS packets and the spam; they're from legitimate machines that have been hacked. Attribution isn't as valuable as you might think.

Implementing an Internet without anonymity is very difficult, and causes its own problems. In order to have perfect attribution, we'd need agencies -- real-world organizations -- to provide Internet identity credentials based on other identification systems: passports, national identity cards, driver's licenses, whatever. Sloppier identification systems, based on things such as credit cards, are simply too easy to subvert. We have nothing that comes close to this global identification infrastructure. Moreover, centralizing information like this actually hurts security because it makes identity theft that much more profitable a crime.

And realistically, any theoretical ideal Internet would need to allow people access even without their magic credentials. People would still use the Internet at public kiosks and at friends' houses. People would lose their magic Internet tokens just like they lose their driver's licenses and passports today. The legitimate bypass mechanisms would allow even more ways for criminals and hackers to subvert the system.

On top of all this, the magic attribution technology doesn't exist. Bits are bits; they don't come with identity information attached to them. Every software system we've ever invented has been successfully hacked, repeatedly. We simply don't have anywhere near the expertise to build an airtight attribution system.

Not that it really matters. Even if everyone could trace all packets perfectly, to the person or origin and not just the computer, anonymity would still be possible. It would just take one person to set up an anonymity server. If I wanted to send a packet anonymously to someone else, I'd just route it through that server. For even greater anonymity, I could route it through multiple servers. This is called onion routing and, with appropriate cryptography and enough users, it adds anonymity back to any communications system that prohibits it.

Attempts to banish anonymity from the Internet won't affect those savvy enough to bypass it, would cost billions, and would have only a negligible effect on security. What such attempts would do is affect the average user's access to free speech, including those who use the Internet's anonymity to survive: dissidents in Iran, China, and elsewhere.

Mandating universal identity and attribution is the wrong goal. Accept that there will always be anonymous speech on the Internet. Accept that you'll never truly know where a packet came from. Work on the problems you can solve: software that's secure in the face of whatever packet it receives, identification systems that are secure enough in the face of the risks. We can do far better at these things than we're doing, and they'll do more to improve security than trying to fix insoluble problems.

The whole attribution problem is very similar to the copy-protection/digital-rights-management problem. Just as it's impossible to make specific bits not copyable, it's impossible to know where specific bits came from. Bits are bits. They don't naturally come with restrictions on their use attached to them, and they don't naturally come with author information attached to them. Any attempts to circumvent this limitation will fail, and will increasingly need to be backed up by the sort of real-world police-state measures that the entertainment industry is demanding in order to make copy-protection work. That's how China does it: police, informants, and fear.

Just as the music industry needs to learn that the world of bits requires a different business model, law enforcement and others need to understand that the old ideas of identification don't work on the Internet. For good or for bad, whether you like it or not, there's always going to be anonymity on the Internet.

[Stark]

You can really see his bitterness at the whole thing (and I suspect some bitterness about the R rated games issue is involved) leaking through when he describes it as being teenagers and people in their 20s who were against this.

You have to love how he can't stand that people make 'anonymous' political commentary, even though people have been doing it for thousands of years. Oh noes, that guy's facebook status says 'FUCK LABOR'! Someone, get him!

[Winston Blake]

Wow so it's starting to sound like this guy is a bit wrong in the head; that this isn't a 'kids on my lawn' thing, it's that he's afraid of those internet kiddies or something. Crazy.

It seems he thought that most of the anonymous commentators were dastardly Liberal sockpuppets, sniping at him from the shadows of the intertubes. He wanted to throw back the veil and shout 'Gotcha!'. Instead he ends up shaking hands with some perfectly ordinary law student:

"REPORTS of your non-existence are greatly exaggerated" declared Attorney-General Michael Atkinson as he came face to face with the man he publicly said did not exist.

The state's top legal officer met blogger Aaron Fornarino at Queen St cafe yesterday afternoon in the electorate of Croydon, where they both live.

It was an awkward exchange at first, given that on Tuesday morning Mr Atkinson declared his coffee partner was not real and that his name was being used as a front for Liberal party comments on the AdelaideNow website.

Yesterday he was genuinely apologetic.

"My information was, foolish me, that you didn't exist and that the other political party was exploiting your name . . . and for that I completely apologise," he told Mr Fornarino.

"Clearly you do exist and you've got your own views that are soundly based and you articulate them well, I only wish that we'd spoken earlier."

[Lusankya]

Wow so it's starting to sound like this guy is a bit wrong in the head; that this isn't a 'kids on my lawn' thing, it's that he's afraid of those internet kiddies or something. Crazy.

This guy is a bit wrong in the head. One has to be to think it's a good idea to do something that pisses off both the voters and News Limited when one lives in the city where Rupert Murdoch was born.

On the other hand, he's popular with Mike Rann (who chooses his position), he's in a Labor seat safer than Port fucking Adelaide and the state Liberals still don't know how to find their own arses, so he doesn't actually have to worry about being sacked, so I guess he can say whatever crap he wants without consequences.

[Molyneux]

For those interested: this is the SAME fucking Michael Atkinson who has blocked the creation of an R18+ rating for video games (meaning that any game he doesn't like can be banned a rating, and thus blocked from legal sale) in Australia.

He's a arrogant, knows-better fuckwit, and this only further demonstrates that already-obvious fact.