The Federal Government is attempting to change freedom of information legislation to prevent the public discovering that Internet censorship laws have failed, according to civil liberties group Electronic Frontiers Australia.
New, proposed amendments to the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act would extend the Government's current powers to censor documents containing information about the activities of the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA) and the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC).
Currently, the FOI Act permits access to documents about Internet content that the ABA has issued take down notices against, as long as network address information that points to the content is blacked out.
The Government now wants the entire documents carrying such information to be exempt from access under the Act.
According to the EFA, blocking entire documents will prevent anyone from verifying the accuracy of Government statistics on the censorship regime.
Under the current version of the FOI Act, EFA can obtain documents that allow it to add up the number of take down notices issued by the ABA, and see how they were classified.
EFA said such numbers are important as the minster for IT & Communications, Senator Alston's, reports on the performance of the Internet censorship regime have been found to contain unusual inconsistencies.
"The numbers that come back in the minister's answers tabled in Parliament don't match the numbers that were reported in the Government's monthly report," EFA spokesperson Irene Graham told ZDNet Australia.
Statistics that EFA would no longer be able to verify independently would include the cost of commissioning the OFLC to classify content.
EFA believes the new laws will make it possible for the ABA to censor any document simply by writing a URL on it.
The censorship laws will be reviewed next January and Graham said the amendments are simply another measure to make data on the performance of the laws more difficult to obtain.
"The Government should not be permitted to use the failure of the Internet censorship laws as an excuse for making a wide range of documents exempt from disclosure under FOI," she said.
EFA has long argued that blacking out Internet tags prevents the public and anti-censorship groups from recognising the futility of the laws. According to EFA, most content the Government bans is simply re-hosted overseas at the same address, safely beyond the reach of the legislation.
"You have to ask the question: if the content is no longer available then how could giving [the public] its URL give us access to it?"
Losing access to the documents will also make it harder for civil liberties groups and the public to monitor the kind of content that the ABA and the OFLC are censoring.
Under the Internet censorship regime the OFLC classifies online content using guidelines applied to film. The Government can order an Internet Service Provider to remove content if its theme is divorce, homosexuality, drug use, or contraception. Technically, that may mean a large number of help and crisis sites targeted at youths need to be behind adult verification mechanisms to remain legal.
"With Internet laws the Federal Government could ban anything and there's no opportunity for any kind of public debate," said Graham.
The OFLC, the body that has been burdened with some of the logistical problems associated with executing the legislation, has chosen not to comment on EFA's statement.
The OFLC has never been forced to honour Federal Government assurances that it would maintain a database of describing Internet content it has classified. The proposed amendments to FOI laws could mean that the OFLC is never called on to honour those promises.
The Federal Government wants to change freedom of information legislation to prevent us discovering that Internet censorship laws have failed?
Why would they? Because we know it has failed and miserably at that.
They hired the wrong people, I know I went for one of the jobs and was unsuccessful and when I found out who was in charge I thanked my lucky stars that I wasn't offered the position.
The Internet censorship body should be handled by an outside group that know more about the net than the clowns at the ABA.
This should be debated in the media and not go thru committees in Parliament and then a "backdoor" vote in the House /Senate, your rights are being talked about here, and when they are taken away it could be too late.
That's my 2 cents.
John