[LINK] Fwd: Just in: Conroy going ahead with censorship

[rene]

On Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:12:34 +1100, Stephen Wilson wrote:

> Bernard Keane's piece had nothing at all to do with getting public
> servants to *pay attention* to your concerns. Rather, it was
> expressly about how to waste their time.

They would be 'forced' to pay attention to the extent to which public 
opposition to mandatory blocking was "wasting their time", if it is 
believed by them, you, or anyone else that responding to citizens asking 
questions about government policy is a waste of their time. 

I'm not actively advocating the people do what BK suggests, but I am saying 
that I fully understand the level of frustration among concerned citizens 
whose personal time has apparently been 'wasted' in writing detailed, 
considered letters to politicians who have responded with disdain in the 
form of a completely irrelevant "standard response" letter. Some such 
people might consider an alternative approach is worth a try. 

> I'm not happy with the government's handling of this either.  And I'm
> all for protest in general.  So why not go and picket?  By jamming
> public servants' processes for responding to correspondence, all
> you'll do is piss people off, and you won't  even get any air time on
> the TV news.

BK did not suggest that the *only* thing people do is write letters to 
pollies. 

Picketing or marching *about censorship* does not get any air time on the 
TV news etc either, unless something like 1 million people have the time 
and availability to put in an IRL appearance at a particular time and place 
- which is not going to happen. The TV news in general (inc. most of ABC) 
is completely clueless/ill-informed about Net technologies and existing 
censorship law - and just repeat/spout govt spin.

The last time I can recall that IRL public demonstration/protects appeared 
to have any effect whatsoever on gov't pre-conceived censorship plans was 
the 1995/96 march to NSW parliament about its then Net censorship policy 
plan (which was subsequently dropped). 

More recent public demonstrations re censorship appear to have had no 
effect - it's actually imo easier to just ignore a bunch of people out in 
the streets than it is to ignore the "effort" required to produce responses 
to letters.

Irene