[LINK] the clean feed story available

[Jan Whitaker]

At 11:57 AM 20/03/2009, Jan Whitaker wrote:
> >... and is this the thin
> >end of the censorship wedge?
> >http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2009/2512171.htm

from the transcript -- fascinating!
[snippet]

Last year one of the Senate committees decided that if federal public 
servants had to have their computers filtered to stop them looking at 
undesirable content, then the senators should also live under the 
same set of rules.

It was an impressive gesture of egalitarianism. Trouble is, the 
Senate Committee forgot to tell the rest of the senators that their 
computers in the parliament were now being filtered.

So when Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi got a Google news alert telling 
him that he'd appeared on the website of the Australian Protectionist 
Party, he thought he'd take a look and see what they were saying about him.

Cory Bernardi: I was prohibited from accessing a couple of sites, 
which were content related to me, whether they were pleasant sites or 
unpleasant sites.

Wendy Carlisle: This was to do with your stand on opposing gay 
marriage and abortion and things like that?

Cory Bernardi: It was, yes. And so there were sites out there that 
were broadly supportive of my position and there were sites that were 
broadly condemning of my position. But I'm interested in what people 
say about me and I'm interested in their arguments, and that's how we 
inform ourselves as politicians. But I was prevented from accessing 
these sites and one of them because it contained sexual content; it 
was a gay newspaper online. It's not my habit to normally frequent 
it, but if they're writing about me, I am interested in the story.

The other one was a political website, with a political party of 
which I don't share their views, but they wrote about what I wanted 
there too. Now that brought home to me [that] there are two websites 
that I'm not able to visit because someone else has deemed them inappropriate.
[/snippet]



Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

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