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Syndicate, my favourite computer game of all time and a game that I had long joked I would fund a remake of were I independently wealthy, has been refused classification (and thereby banned) in Australia.  I will be writing more on that later, but for today I would like to investigate the likelihood of the classification review board – who review the classification board’s decisions where required – of overturning the decision.

According to the board’s website, the board is

an independent statutory body whose members are chosen from a range of backgrounds to broadly represent the Australian community.

So in order to make sure that Australia’s supposed thirst for censorship is correctly approached, a posse of completely different people that represent every nook and cranny of our civil and confident society has been hand picked by politicians.  Each independently can bring their own perspective and advocate their section of the community.  Right?  Meet the board.

•  Victoria Rubensohn is a convenor of the board and is a white, middle-aged woman who has a history of serving on several different types of boards and committees (like the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal).  She has university degrees in law and arts.
• Fiona Jolly is the deputy convenor.  She’s a white, middle-aged woman who has a history of serving on several different types of boards and committees (like the YWCA board).  She has a degree in law and arts.
• Ann Stark is a psychologist with the requisite degree in psychology.  She’s white, middle aged and has extensive experience in a number of community organisations; like boards and committees.
• Helen Blundell has a degree in arts and a degree in law.  She’s on boards and committees (including the YWCA board like Fiona Jolly), she’s white and middle aged.
• Melissa De Zwart is involved with several local community groups like boards and committees.  She’s middle aged and white, and she holds a degree in arts and law.
• Jane Smith is a middle-aged white woman who has a degree arts like everyone else on the board except Ann Stark, and she has a psychology degree like Ann Stark.  She’s Chair of the Committee for Revision of Mobile Premium Services (MPS) Codes and has experience with other community orgs like boards and committees.
• Peter Attard presumably represents the men of Australia; the white and middle aged ones.   Peter’s involved in a bunch of other community organisations like the Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM), judged ATOM student film awards and is a member of the Victorian Institute of Teaching.

Time and time again I see shout-outs on Twitter or in other communities, with the following format;

Hi folks! Anyone have resources for online safety for 8 – 12 year olds on YouTube, Facebook etc? Thanks!

There are no valid resources for this, because essentially every social networking community has a minimum age requirement of at least 13.  YouTube, Facebook, BeBo and Hi5 all do, it’s 14 for MySpace, 16 for Friendster, and Orkut is actually adults only.  The only exception is Twitter which dropped its minimum age limit of 13 in 2009.

This is important stuff.  ”All their friends are, so I don’t see the problem” is a common dismissal, so let me counter by actually showing what the problem is; when every one of these companies is making decisions about what is good and safe, they are not considering people younger than their age floor.  None of these organisations spends even a minute considering what’s good for your 10 year old.  ”How will parents explain this content to their 7 year old?”, not a question they spend any time on.  Outside of the way these organisations consider content and community, outside of the way they regulate social behaviour, each of them has a revenue model largely predicated on collecting private information and wholesaling it to advertisers.  Is your 8 year old mature enough to make the conscious decision to tell Facebook everything about herself in exchange for an online community?

Communities exist for children, such as YourSphere.

There are no resources on how to do this without being worried about safety and propriety, because if you allow your children to access online communities that are unsuitable for them safety and propriety will be an ongoing concern.  If you insist on doing it, I suggest constant, direct supervision as the only resource that may help.

I’m actually about ready to call it on the Australian Law Reform Commission’s review into the classification system in Australia; I can’t see how very positive outcomes are possible from here.  Approximately 2451^* submissions were received and the submissions appear to be from both individuals and groups, seeking both more and less regulation.  For all the reasons I can’t see that this inquiry will produce results that Australia needs, a coordinated and artificial-looking campaign thousands of individual submissions that politicians can dismiss as confected isn’t one of them.

So why am I being negative?

There are a couple of reasons, but primarily there are a few things that have been raised variously by people (including myself) who’ve been around the block a few times on these issues, as fundamental failings of our classification and censorship systems.  While we differ in some of our approaches, there are a few take-away issues that the review needed to have at the front of the pack to have any credibility, these are;

• Australia is the only jurisdiction that has the not-illegal-but-we’d-like-you-to-think-it-is classification of “refused classification”, and it has failed miserably in that what it comprises and what that means is not understood by most people, and those who do understand it consider it inappropriate
• Mandatory Internet censorship is incompatible with a western-style democracy, not useful or inappropriate as a law enforcement tool and impossible to implement successfully as a policy outcome
• Classification in Australia does not deliver the outcomes Australians generally expect it to as a country, and it is plagued with mythological or unworkable pseudo-measurements like “community standard”, “reasonable person” and the concept of harm being inflicted by content which is experienced by audiences other than the ones intended to experience it (e.g. adult movies viewed by children)

10.3 When the Commonwealth, state and territory Attorneys-General and the Commonwealth Minister for Home Affairs agreed to refer the National Classification Scheme Review to the ALRC, they specifically agreed that the review would include the content of the RC category for films, computer games and publications.

Translation:  Telstra says it’s do-able so on the basis of that we’ll dismiss the other statements that it’s not.  We have not considered that Telstra’s interests might not be the same as the community generally, and we didn’t ask and therefore didn’t subsequently discover, Telstra’s methodology.  If we did we might have realised the trial was conducted with a single laptop.

On community standards the report ignores outright the refutation that such a thing can be understood to exist and used as an instrument with which to create policy, and suggests five yearly reviews on what “the community” has as standards.

It’s not doable.  The review is not going to “reform” anything; I don’t think that word means what the ALRC thinks it means.  There will be some cosmetic changes to the system, with a fresh splash of paint over a termite-eaten policy framework, and Australian communities and industry will be bound by the same problems as before, and do the same things as before to deal with it.  We’ll continue to see everyday folks ignoring the classification system in its entirety, and our media and content industries continue to slip under the waves of irrelevancy

A few days ago ZDNet reported that the government is looking for input into a “cyber whitepaper”, simultaneously and inadvertently breaking the news that the government has plumbed new depths of weasel words replacing actual online policy. From the article;

The discussion paper, hosted on a purpose-built Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet-run blog, presents facts and figures on a range of issues including digital citizenship, online collaboration, safety and security online, and the different levels of governance required to encourage online investment in Australia’s digital economy.

The blog is titled “Connecting With Confidence: Optimising Australia’s Digital Future” and it’s certainly concerning.  I’ll be making a submission, but my current worries are about the questions the site is asking, and the subsequent problems it seems to have created to solve.  From the blog, with my comments inline;

For example what is the role of government in cyberspace?

The term “cyberspace” is no longer used.  This is not a question of grammar, it’s a matter of the world understanding that prefixing nouns with cyber- or e- is a depreciated act of drawing distinctions between a theoretical “real life” without the Internet, and our online world.  This was a thing we did in 1998, it’s not something we do in 2011, because our lives span online and offline as we need.  We don’t even think of the Internet as a separate entity any more, we just receive the invitation to the barbeque online (Facebook, EventBrite or email), then we go to the house where it is and sit in the offline backyard.

The role of the government is as it always was.  Regulating people and behaviours.  It doesn’t matter where they are and how.

How do we promote the concept of digital citizenship?

“Digital citizenship” is a pointless neologism.  If it refers to civil and safe identity online, it doesn’t need promoting.  Australians conduct themselves in a range of different contexts in a range of different ways and it’s not the role of government to promote particular behaviours or identities beyond regulating those which are societally unacceptable with the law.

What information do consumers and small businesses need to better protect themselves online, and how can this information be better provided?

If this is and has been genuinely a policy objective, what was the point of convening a joint-select committee cyber-safety which ultimately did nothing but table a report about how frightening the Internet was for children?  What evidence to we have to suggest consumers and small businesses are exposed to new risks of business online that differ significantly in their approach and resolution to offline ones?  In particular, if it’s a focus of this whitepaper to empower people to protect themselves, does that mean police are struggling to deal with the threats to online business conduct which are presumably illegal if they are dangerous?

This is going to be yet another foray by the government that could be re-titled “how can government implement more regulation focussed on online issues in response to threats we have imagined should be policy priorities?”  I’ll be submitting.

A Gizmodo op-ed by Matt Buchanan meanders through a list of technology companies, entreating them to hire designers because that would make everything better, he then winds up with;

Nerds:

You know more about technology than anybody else, and anybody who knows less than you is a total dipshit. I love you for that. But normal people deserve wonderful technology too. And half the shit you call computing—running custom ROMs, reinstalling OSes, fucking with network settings—is like a chef sharpening his knives over and over and calling that cooking. Real computing is the actual stuff you do—cutting videos, editing photos, writing. Or at least it should be. Not the shit people do to make all of that work.

No.

For a start, people who know how to use computers well are largely sick to death of being contrasted with “normal people”.  It’s that type of nonsensical, arrogant, false dichotomy that leads to public policy being talked about in terms of normal, law abiding idiots who refuse to read instructions, and a handful of traitorous, evil geeks that circumvent censorship systems almost certainly to view child abuse images.

Secondly, running custom ROMs, reinstalling operating systems and changing network settings are part of computing.  I’m sorry that this is frustrating for you, but it’s true.  Your assertion of “Real computing” consisting of cutting videos, editing photos or writing is incorrect, because cutting videos is correctly called “cutting videos”, editing photos is more correctly termed “editing photos” and writing’s official name is “writing”.  Saying that these things are computing, is like a chef eating, and calling that cooking.  And when I say eating, I mean stuffing food in your ears.  And demanding that a kitchen hand come and put it in your mouth for you.

If Buchanan is so convinced that the core part of computing is design aesthetic, he should go write about technology for House and Garden magazine.

In July I spoke at the Australian Law Students’ Association conference at UNSW. It was a really interesting set of topics around censorship and privacy and a really engaged audience. They just sent me the highlight real and I had to share.

I usually comment on Australian issues of digital rights but I’ve been watching the fallout of the UK riots, waiting for (and subsequently receiving) the rhetoric about how social media’s use as an organisational tool in such disturbances means it should be subject to restrictions by police.

That’s presumably the same police that tweeted the following this evening;

Mum of two, not involved in disorder, jailed for FIVE months for accepting shorts looted from shop. There are no excuses!

So we should put police in charge of Twitter, because they know how to use it responsibly? Gloating over the severity of a sentence handed down to a mother, presumably splitting her family, when she was only so peripherally involved in the disorder as to receive a stolen pair of shorts.

Rather than the police having the ability to restrict Twitter to uphold community standards, how about we have the ability to restrict the police from using it to demonstrate disgraceful tastelessness. I hope the person responsible for this doesn’t make it to the end of their shift.

I first saw it on Ten TV news, but News.com.au is reiterating the story of Nathalie Brown, who joined Facebook pretending to be a child – so she could talk about pornography, sex and rape.  Well that’s not creepy at all.  From the article;

Ms Brown, a child behaviour consultant who runs Easy Peasy Kids, said she was not blaming Facebook for making children “morally devoid” but hoped her exercise would be a wake-up call to parents.

This PR exercise for Brown’s child behaviour consultancy is completely unacceptable and should be investigated.  Facebook’s terms of service;

4. Registration and Account Security

Facebook users provide their real names and information, and we need your help to keep it that way. Here are some commitments you make to us relating to registering and maintaining the security of your account:

1. You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.

Brown would have to have known this, and if she didn’t she should have.  In violating Facebook’s terms of service her access to the site was unauthorised.  To access a website when you are unauthorised, may be a federal offence in Australia.  The Criminal Code Act;

478.1  Unauthorised access to, or modification of, restricted data

(1)  A person is guilty of an offence if:

(a)  the person causes any unauthorised access to, or modification of, restricted data; and

(b)  the person intends to cause the access or modification; and

(c)  the person knows that the access or modification is unauthorised; and

(d)  one or more of the following applies:

(i)  the restricted data is held in a Commonwealth computer;

(ii)  the restricted data is held on behalf of the Commonwealth;

(iii)  the access to, or modification of, the restricted data is caused by means of a carriage service.

Penalty:  2 years imprisonment.

Brown was not clever. This was not citizen journalism or an exposé of an underworld of cybercrime and child safety by a concerned mum.  Brown was at best a creepy business owner who created a fake account on a social networking site to talk to children about sex and rape, at worst she may have committed an offence.  That the media have taken the angle they have on this is appalling.

So if you haven’t noticed this afternoon, the standing committee of attorneys general meeting took place today.  All of the states with the exception of New South Wales (who abstained and are thus ignored) agreed in principle to introduce an adult rating for computer games, similar to that in every western style democracy like us – like the 18 in the UK, or the R in New Zealand.

So we won! Right?  All the efforts of essentially the last two decades to convince Australian politicians of what the rest of the world knew from the beginning have born fruit.  Yeah?

We have won a category, we have established in the Australian classification system that there is a category that will from here represent the category of computer games that are for the exclusive attention and enjoyment of adults.  But what goes into that category?  Ideally the games that are banned here would drop down into that R rating, and the top end of MA that just snuck in before would be promoted up out of the hands of fifteen year olds, right?

Barely an hour after the announcement by the attorneys general, the Australian Christian Lobby – one of the most vociferous opponents of the rating – issued a press release welcoming it.  Why?  Because they are driving at the new adult rating  essentially replacing the existing MA15+ category, making the games that are currently targeted at teenagers adults-only, and pushing for that which is rated for adults only overseas to continue to be banned.  While the various groups pushing for R18 for games pushed for a category, a poor job was done at articulating what it should contain, and the door was left open for the ACL and apparently the NSW attorney general, to redefine some of our classification guidelines to promulgate the myth that computer games are more “impactful” than movies.  What we needed to say, wasn’t “we want an R18 for games”, but “we want a category for computer games the same as other countries have, because our adults are the same as theirs”.  This is one reason why I’ve been somewhat doubtful about campaigns like “Grow Up Australia”, which seem to try to embarrass politicians into change, and leave out some of the finer points about where the issue gets framed inside of our overall hokey classification scheme.

The ACL, and other fringe moralising groups, are not going to rest.  Until there’s no RC category at the top for content they find offensive to be shifted up into, this will keep happening.  In a way, I somewhat wish that the decision had waited for the ALRC review into classification that’s pending – I think it could’ve taken away the mats and the ACL would’ve blanched at how high up they were.  Added to their arsenal is now the argument that gamers “got what they wanted and are still complaining, illustrating they simply want access to more revolting entertainment”.

We all need to keep an eye out and I’d advise leaving the champagne in the bottle for now, but have a glass of wine for progress.  In particular, Ron Curry?  When you want to collect, I owe you a drink for a hard fought battle.  And if anyone in a bar shows me their Espresso Communications business card, I’ll buy them a glass.

According to Delimiter, Vodafone may be looking at applying the Interpol “worst of” list-based voluntary filter that Telstra and Optus have already inserted.  From the article;

VHA (Vodafone) supports the development of the new Internet Industry Association (IIA) ISP code, which will help guide the mobile internet industry in appropriately dealing with illegal content.

This is interesting because it’s the first time I’ve actually heard VHA own up to the fact they are now essentially an ISP – they had for the longest time been doing an AT&T and ignoring the growth of their data products and the increasing apathy around voice.  Granted, this is not really the way I wanted to see them acknowledge the changes in their industry, but it is better than nothing at all.

I’m a Vodafone customer for my mobile phone.  If they implement the Interpol “worst of” list, I’ll consider it a unilateral change to the contract and I’ll be exiting that contract within hours.