December 16, 1997

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

The much-anticipated cross-examination of Irene Zundel has once again been postponed. It might or might not start late in the afternoon today. This cross-examination is anticipated with great eagerness by the sensation-hungry media and will likely carry on through the rest of the week.

Meanwhile, I have started doing direct posts to the fight-censorship groups. I hesitated for the longest time because much of the posts preoccupying these good folks are technical, but moles are very active in those groups, misinforming, diverting and confusing, and I decided it was time for some old-fashioned truth antidotes.

I could use help - not the mud-slinging alt.revisionism kind but calm and reasoned voices from our finest and our best: those in our midst with legal and technical knowledge, and those who can speak with intelligence and wit and counteract the ex-Nizkorite type hairsplitting tactics and talmudic gyrations. We need help in focusing the issues that play.

This fight-censorship list is an "open to the public" list, but you must request to be on it, and you must behave yourself. It is NOT a list that will debate the merits of Revisionism - nor should it. Its members understand, moreover, that the main forces of censorship originate out of the Simon Wiesenthal Center camps. Whether they are willing to act on that awareness in a forceful and principled manner is another matter altogether. Careers are at stake, and it is clear that many are afraid.

To join, send "subscribe" to fight-censorship-request@vorlon.mit.edu Please consider joining. I would like a small, brainy, tough intellectual "Revisionist strike force" on that list; not mere numbers, please, and certainly not white noise. I want lean, polite Revisionist intelligence - and, above all, emotional restraint.

Less than a week ago, December 6 through 10, I ran a series of court excerpts both in my ZGrams and in this list to show how Canadian freedom of speech was going to be curtailed by the Revisionist opposition by using the "sword and shield" of the Canadian Human Rights Commission through its Tribunal hearings to whip up fear about Ernst Zundel's ever expanding influence on still-thinking people in Canada. Could the stepped-up Zundel "persecution through prosecution" have anything to do, by any chance, with a recent study by two political scientists, Jack L. Granatstein, a professor at York University in Toronto, and H. Graham Rawlinson who just published "The Canadian 100", a classification of the 100 most influential Canadians of the Twentieth Century, according to how well they are known?

In this study, Ernst Zundel holds 44th place. He didn't get there by peddling UFO trips to Antarctica, as Nizkor will have you believe. So it is not as though the struggle in the courtrooms of Toronto around the Zundelsite is nothing but marshmallows your average cyber warrior can ignore. It's very serious business.

With these legalese excerpt I posted, I probably bored my ZGram readers, who are used to lighter fare, but I was primarily speaking to, and pleading with, the members of these fight-censorship groups and the world-wide free-speech movements, hoping that I would be able to finally make them see what is beginning to be revealed in these hearings in Toronto.

Many of these people are experts in Human Rights who, ***out of sheer self-interest*** might come to our aid and put their expertise and idealism behind, or at least next to, the savagely politically besieged Zundelsite. I was hoping that at least some of them would say: "All right. I may not like you folks, but on the other hand, I have some principles." They talk among themselves - with Jamie McCarthy trying his darndest, doing his Signature Hairsplitting Act - but so far, not one of them is ready for the "Zundel taint", which is no easy stigma in today's politically correct environs. The sharp teeth of the forces of destruction are, meanwhile, gnawing on their sinews, and sooner or later, the pain will be felt by these folks.

This isn't about us. As I have said before so many times, this isn't about jackboots and Heil-Hitlering, although it is politically expedient and doesn't cost a penny to make folks believe such a thing. This is about the Human Rights Commissions industry as "creatures of international politics," as one former employee of one of these commissions in Australia has described them.

The message below is an industry message to this fight-censorship group sent out from Australia by one of their members - and, as before, beyond most ordinary people's vocabulary and expertise, including mine. But the guinea pig reference toward the end of this write-up brings into focus what I have been saying all along: That there are countries, weaker than the USA that do not have America's traditions of constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech protected by a First Amendment - countries and even continents that will be used to spearhead mental terror and intimidation of the kind still unimaginable to the complacent ones who dabble in pornography and smut sites on the Net.

They, and the rest of society, have not got a clue about what the "impossible" tyrant has in mind for all those whom they deem an information threat to their global dictatorship!

Here is the communiqué out of Australia:

[ This message is an edited version of a message sent to an Australian
ISP industry group mailing list, and excerpts from another message sent to Lorrie Faith Cranor, W3C ]

A press release from the Australian Commonwealth Attorney General is included below. In summary, it foreshadows legislation which will create criminal offences for the following actions:

1. knowingly placing offensive or illegal material on the net; 2. inviting (or conspiring with, inciting, aiding or abetting)
others to place it there, or
3. specifically inviting others to access that material, or 4. transmitting it

The union of those explicitly includes making it a criminal offence to transmit offensive material even if you didn't know it was there. The "aiding or abetting" clause together with the "transmitting" clause also serve to create a criminal offence of passively passing through offensive material on behalf of one of your users or even on behalf of another ISP in a peering arrangement. Point (1) above does not restrict criminality to placing material in Australia, so those of us who want to speak without government censorship wouldn't even have the alternative of using an overseas server. The "inviting others to access" clause even covers hyperlinks!

"Steal This Book," is a banned publication in Australia, so it would presumably count as "illegal" material (along with 30,000 other books banned by the OFLC). I could land myself in jail by creating a link to it on my web page (under (3) above). Keeping the web page overseas would not be a defense as long as I was under Australian jurisdiction at the time that I created the link.

If someone else in Australia clicked on that link, many individuals (those responsible for all the ISPs and peering networks between me and the person who clicked on it (under 1, 2 and 4 above)) would also be legally criminally liable for transmitting that content to the browser. It'd just be a matter of waiting for the police to use their boundless powers of discretion to work out exactly who to prosecute.

Enter PICSRules.

PICSRules is a high-level language which has been designed to run on proxy servers to filter content based on PICS labels (eg: RSACi labelling -- see "Alex Haley vs. Nazi Sluts" at http://www.mrlizard.com/haley.html) or based on URLs (and it provides a rich set of wildcards and other syntactical elements to ensure that URL filtering can be as broad or as precise as the implentor wishes).

There are other proxy-based filtering systems, though -- URL access controls in "squid", for example... what makes this one so different?

The fact that the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA) has invested development dollars and time to assist W3C in creating this spec.

The Government department which will in all likelihood end up with legislative authority over the Australian Internet has been active in international forums to encourage Internet players everywhere to come up with a world-wide standard Internet censorship system which can be implemented with a minimum of hassle on proxy servers.

Another place you'll see the ABA is on the OECD committee which is looking at coming up with a PICS-based rating system which transcends national cultural differences.

When the OECD's effort is completed there will be a PICS labelling format which will be consistently applicable to all Internet content anywhere in the world; When W3C approves PICSRules early next year there will be a filtering language spec designed for proxy servers which will be able to use that world-wide consistent labelling scheme by blocking out labels which don't match the ABA's view of what constitutes Australian Community Standards. And behind it all will be a law proposed a couple of days ago by the Attorney Generals Department which will SPECIFICALLY include criminal penalties for those who passively and unknowingly transmit offensive material.

So, here are my left-of-field radical civil libertarian worst-case predictions for 1999:

- The ABA will approve many codes of conduct under the Federal
legislation discussed in "Principles for a Regulatory Framework for On-Line Service Providers under the Broadcasting Services Act 1981" which we responded to in August (see http://www.efa.org.au/Campaigns/contreg.html for Electronic Frontiers Australia's resources on this). The ABA will use its powers of veto over Codes of Conduct to reject any industry-based code which doesn't follow the schema outlined below.

- At least one of those approved codes of conduct will be developed
by a consortium of Australian ISPs which run International links (or about half a dozen major ones), whereby they'll agree to maintain proxy servers governed by PICSRules based policies developed by those ISPs (remember, this is voluntary self-regulation!) with the "assistance" of the ABA and Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC).

- If you're an ISP, you'll be immune to prosecution under the
A-G's legislation discussed at the beginning of this message and the press release at the end if you force your users to use one of the PICSRules proxy servers. AS AN ISP, IT WILL BE YOUR CHOICE: The Government needs to claim that this whole sorry mess is voluntary, and the Internet needs to save face by sending out press releases which agree with the Government's assessment that this is a "self-regulatory" scheme. So yes, ISPs *will* be able to decide not to self-censor.
Meanwhile, AS AN ISP'S CUSTOMER YOU WILL HAVE NO CHOICE, except inasmuch that you can choose to use an ISP which doesn't use the PICSRules based proxies. Contractual arrangements between ISPs and users will make it clear whether filtering is implemented or not; Users will therefore be voluntarily entering into a contract with an ISP who has specifically stated that they'll be censoring content, which will further the "voluntary" propaganda that will accompany this development.
So theoretically there will be an enormous marketplace comprised of people who don't want filtering supplied by a group of ISPs which don't filter, yes? Well, yeah, and pigs might fly.

- Although ISPs will be able to decide not to filter, any which
do not force their users to make use of a PICSRules proxy will be criminally liable for their users transgressions or the transgressions present on any home pages their users access, as outlined in the discussion of the A-G's legislation above.

Result: ISPs who "voluntarily" submit to complete domination by the OFLC and ABA will be free from prosecution; Those who don't will spend their whole lives wondering if the federal police are going to break down their door at dawn tomorrow morning. No ISPs will pick that option, thus the only alternatives available for Internet users in Australia will be ISPs who "voluntarily" submit to the PICSRules filtering system instigated by the ABA.

Now, I really don't want to believe this. But I cannot fathom any other reason why the ABA would be interested in spending tens of thousands of dollars in W3C membership, travel costs and expert consultancies for the purposes of developing PICSRules. If anyone else has any suggestions, I'd rather believe them than believe my scenario above.

For the Americans on this list: Australia, like the rest of the world, DOES NOT HAVE A FIRST AMENDMENT. If our Government decides tomorrow to pass legislation which, say, restricts our freedom of speech so that we are not allowed to make soapbox speeches about guinea-pigs (to pick an innocuous example), then there will simply be no more soapbox speeches about guinea-pigs. There is no recourse to anything like your Supreme Court; The Government has the final say and that's that. And, what's more, since hardly anyone in the country actually wants to make soapbox speaches about guinea-pigs there will be widespread public acceptance of the law: In general, Australians will only object to laws which affect them personally :-(

W3C must refuse to ratify PICSRules as a standard. We might be able to influence national developments by standard lobbying and letter writing campaigns, but there will be nothing we'll be able to do about this if PICSRules ever becomes widespread enough to make ABA's and DoCA's proposed censorship schemes realistic."

Thought for the Day:

"We refuse to be enslaved by the Holocaust Dogma, and we shall resist any attempts to have this dogma forced on us."

(Dr. Fredrick Toben of the equally embattled Revisionist Adelaide Institute, Australia)

Comments? E-Mail: irimland@cts.com

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