Australian
Web Site Forced
To Shut Down
By Richard Phillips
24 March 2006
World
Socialist Web
One
week before the third anniversary of the criminal invasion and occupation
of Iraq, the Australian government forced the closure of a satirical
web site that powerfully exposed several key lies told by Prime Minister
John Howard to justify participation in the US-led war.
Authored by Richard Neville,
former editor of Oz magazine—a well-known satirical publication
that challenged British censorship laws in the 1960s—the site—johnhowardpm.org—was
suspended after a high-level intervention by the prime minister’s
department and the federal police.
The web site consisted of
an “apology speech” from Howard in which the prime minister
announces that he is reversing his support for the invasion of Iraq.
It cites several Howard speeches, including an address to the Institute
of Public Affairs in May 2004 when he claimed that hospitals, electricity,
water, sewerage and other basic services were being restored to ordinary
Iraqis. In the “speech”, the prime minister claims that
he is now “a troubled citizen” and that all US-led forces
should withdraw as soon as possible so that the Iraqi people can “regain
control of their future”. Although the site remains blocked, the
speech is now available as a pdf at “John
Howard’s apology: reflections of the situation in Iraq”
Posted on March 13, the site
received over 10,500 hits in a little over 24 hours before it encountered
unexplained “technical difficulties”. Neville contacted
Yahoo!, which maintained for several days that it was looking into “technical
problems”. On March 16 he phoned Melbourne IT and one of its representatives
admitted that Greg Williams from the People, Resources and Communication
Division of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet had ordered
the site’s domain name be suspended, effectively shutting down
the site.
Williams falsely claimed
that the site looked like the prime minister’s own web site and
therefore violated its property rights. Melbourne IT also admitted that
the company had received three phone calls from the Australian Federal
Police, including from the AFP’s Australian Hi-Tech Crime Centre.
Not surprisingly, Yahoo!
has not objected to this violation of the right to free speech. Last
year it provided the Chinese government with information that led to
a 10-year jail term for a Chinese journalist who provided information
to western news services about growing inequality in China. The multi-billion
dollar corporation responded to protests over this action by declaring
that it regularly responded to requests from police agencies for information,
not just in China but in other countries as well. Yahoo! also has a
long-standing agreement to censor Chinese language search engine and
other services, in line with Beijing’s dictates.
Bruce Tonkin, Melbourne IT’s
chief technology officer, later told the media that johnhowardpm.org
looked like “a phishing site”—a bogus web site used
to “fish” for Internet users’ financial information
and passwords and therefore had to be taken down.
These claims are, of course,
totally bogus. The site, which follows a long tradition of political
satire and was registered in Neville’s name, was blocked not because
it was “phishing” or violating intellectual property rights,
but because it constituted an effective and politically embarrassing
exposure of the Howard government and its lies.
No one from the police or
government, the web hosting company Yahoo! or the domain name registration
body Melbourne IT, bothered to contact Neville before his site was censored.
Nor has he been provided with any written notification or explanation.
There appears to be no immediate
or clear legal framework through which Neville can appeal against what
has occurred—an Australian government bureaucrat can simply phone
the domain name registration body and demand that the domain name be
cancelled, thereby dismantling the site.
What has happened to Neville
sets a dangerous precedent for the future. Using these police-state
methods any political cartoonist, filmmaker, artist, writer or actor
satirising a government politician can now be accused of copyright infringements
and censored and/or prosecuted.
Government interference to
take down the “Howard apology” site is the latest in an
escalating assault on basis democratic rights. The government is acutely
sensitive to any exposure of its political record and is attempting
to suppress and marginalise all opposition to its participation in the
illegal occupation of Iraq.
Over the past few years,
with tactical support from the Labor Party, it has introduced a range
of repressive measures, including the 1999 Online Services Act to control
Internet content and last year’s repressive anti-terror and sedition
legislation.
Under the new sedition laws
any Internet site, film, broadcast or publication expressing sympathy
or support for anyone opposing or resisting Australian military interventions
overseas can be banned and its authors jailed for up to seven years.
Organisations can also be outlawed and their members jailed for “urging
disaffection” with the government. While Neville has not yet been
charged with sedition, the government could move to do so at any time.
* * *
Richard Neville told the
World Socialist Web Site yesterday that he was deeply shocked by the
suppression of his site. “It was like being struck on the head
with a hammer when Melbourne IT told me that the site was taken down
after phone calls from the prime minister’s department,”
he said.
“For a prime minister’s
secretary to be involved in this sort of thing is bizarre. What are
they so paranoid about? In fact, I didn’t believe it and my first
reaction was that I wanted it in writing. They told me they would do
this but it still hasn’t happened.
“To suggest that I
was trying to violate the property rights of the prime minister’s
web site is ridiculous. Every link in the speech takes the reader to
information contradicting everything Howard had said and still says
about Iraq.
“This is a complete
violation of my basic rights and if it can happen to me it can happen
to anyone. Anybody who believes this action was taken solely because
of the similarity between the two sites may as well believe in fairies.”
Neville pointed to the Howard
government’s repressive new sedition laws and said that Melbourne
IT had obviously been placed under political pressure.
“I can’t pretend
to know how this all works but the atmosphere these people are now operating
in is one of paranoia. What would have happened to them if they had
left the site up? After a phone call from the PM’s department
and from three federal police I guess they got the message,” he
said.