What is the biggest threat to western democracies? IMO, it is not terrorists, it is our own incompetent and corrupt politicians.
Sadly, in the US we have lots of bad politicians, but we are not alone. Australia has a board that now officially blocks internet sites. And worse, they do not even list the sites that are blocked and the board has no over site. Now I can see blocking child porn sites, and sites that tell people how to do criminal activities, etc., but not disclosing sites they block is scary for civil rights..
Who knows when these people will decide nudist sites are bad. If our FCC wanted to fine CBS TV millions for Janet Jackson's famous nipple slip, who knows what governments will try to "protect" us from.
Here's the story:
"SECRECY, said British judge Sir John Chadwick, is the badge of fraud. He was speaking in the context of financial fraud but it seems equally to apply in Australia where governments wear the badge while robbing us of our freedoms, all the while pretending to do precisely the opposite.
We have over the past decade descended down a path of official deceit where governments erode our freedoms of association and expression while making it an offence to speak of their fraudulence.
It began in the hysteria of a post-9/11 world when the Government stole our presumption of innocence and the protections of habeas corpus under the pretext of protecting us, and then made it a crime to speak about its trespasses....
Secrecy became an end to itself, behind which the Government and its minions were able to hide their worst excesses and intimidate their victims.
Now, under the pretext of protecting us from corruption on the internet, a government of a different colour hides its abuses of power behind another veil...
More specifically, they should have been outraged over the Government's blacklist of 10,000 sites which were to be added to another 1300 identified by the unelected and faceless Australian Communications and Media Authority to be filtered out of our consciousness.
Just what might we be protected against? We may never know.
The ACMA list was said to be mainly of child pornography sites, but last year Broadband and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy could not even define the grounds for restricting the 10,000, although they were supposed to contain "illegal and unwanted content".
Now we learn the ACMA list of banned sites has mysteriously grown to more than 2300, with no public inquiry and no rights of appeal. Worse, we are not allowed to know what is on the proscribed list and anyone who wants to rescue us from our ignorance is threatened with up to 10 years in jail.
An outfit called Wikileaks put online a leaked list of what purports to be the banned list, including entirely innocent sites and blameless individuals. For its trouble, it was threatened with huge fines and placed on the blacklist.
Conroy denies the veracity of the list but we may never know because it is a dark secret shared by the Government, the ACMA and a favoured few who stand to get fat by perfecting the internet filter...
What next? Who next?...
It is a Kafkaesque exercise in mindless tyranny that is unworthy of one of the world's oldest, proudest and previously durable democracies.
Secrecy may be a badge of fraud. It is also the flag of frightened men."
For the full story
CLICK HEREHow does this effect nudists? We may be next with our sites censored. If the state of New Jersey serious thought about banning Brazilian bikini waxing, governments can easily decide that nudist resorts are illegal. They do that to nude beaches in the US all the time.
Here in the US, ex-President Bush in his famous speech explaining why he thought terrorists hated Americans. He said "They hate our freedoms." So of course what did he do. Instead of reasserting his belief in the Bill of Rights, he decided to take away our freedoms too. One of the biggest ones was the governments wiretapping every single phone call and collecting every single e-mail in the US. I guess Bush and Cheney felt if you take away Americans freedoms, terrorists won't hate us as much.
Censoring the net is no different that what China, North Vietnam, middle eastern countries and other totalitarian regimes do. It is sad that people are letting our governments get away with this.
But, sadly because of the conservative press who doesn't want to rock the boat, we don't have true investigative reporting like we used to during Watergate.
Citizens need to wake up. Remember what Benjamin Franklin said:
"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."
Too bad politicians never seem to learn from history.
Tom
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