I mean this seriously, since I live about 10,000 miles away; what's the story behind this burst of censorship lately? (A link is fine, but I don't have a clue what to even look for to get an answer.)
Nothing. There hasn't been a burst of censorship recently. As far as I'm aware, censorship laws have remain unchanged for quite some time. What's happened within the last year or two though is that through social media, Americans have become aware of the strict censorship laws that exist within Australia. Many of these people have mistakenly come to the conclusion that such censorship in Australia must be a recent development.
The truth is that if anything, censorship has become less severe. The video games that pass through the Classification Board today without a problem are far, far more violent than what used to require modification a decade ago.
In regards to Internet censorship, it seems consistent with the current legislation. If a government believes that it is the will of the people that extreme porn and violent video games be banned, then the legislation is ineffective if such material is easily accessible via the Internet.
The censorship is not a new thing. I was watching of all things an old interview with Frank Zappa circa 1983 (Rage, ABCTV) ~ http://www.abc.net.au/tv/guide/netw/200705/programs/LE0630V0... and he was talking about his albums. Album after album was censored. Australia has always had this background level of censorship only now it's more visible.
The current censorship trouble is being driven by the Minister for Communications ~ http://www.google.com/search?q=senator+stephen+conroy you can read more here ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Conroy Another in a long line of political religious zealots keen on pushing through legislation of dubious merit. [0]
[0] I say dubious merit in this case because tracking the kinds of offenders should attacked as a Network science problem not a censorship one.
When Amazon first launched some friends of mine were thrilled at how easy it was to order books that were on the banned books list. Four or so of them ordered PIHKAL.
They all got delivered, except for one. The last guy had a knock on his door and the rest of his order hand delivered by a customs/federal police officer/similar who advised that it probably wasn't smart to be ordering banned books from overseas. He wasn't prosecuted - it was a "we know where you live, bucko" kinda visit.
In this particular case, you friends can always order e-books, and in case your credit-card transactions are tracked, you can always find pirated versions and download them through an encrypted connection.
And what's ironic is that the censorship of a book makes it a lot more popular that it would've been otherwise.
What next? Plant a chip in every human being that triggers on certain patterns of the brain's electrical impulses? I'm pretty sure there's going to be a crack for that.
Interesting. You can sort of understand the correlation between specific recipes for elicit drugs like amphetamines which are dangerous. I'd never thought about classes of information restricted that way. Nuclear physics is another I can think of. Whole slabs of nuclear theoretical physics have been removed from common knowledge. Another, military information of which Paladin Press is well known for.
The irony, the information in each of these areas are still mostly actively used, or at least only a locked up "instruction manual" away.
Also, there is a single Australian senator (Steven Fielding) from a religious right party called Family First who holds the balance of power. His support is often required for the passage of government legislation, and the strong suspicion is that deals on things like internet censorship have been done behind the scenes.
Finally and most critically in my view, we have no enshrined right to freedom of speech or expression in our constitution and most Australians are too apathetic to demands these rights, and protest the government's actions.
This seems to be a serious design flaw in democracy. One person (or one small party), with the ability to swing the majority vote one way or another, ends up with a disproportionate amount of power.
We see this with the Quebec separatists in Canada, and in the US, with their "independent" senators.
So the alternative to numbering every box (and what most people do for the senate), is to just put a "1" in the party of your choice. They then decide who the preferences go to. I'm not kidding.
In the case of Steven Fielding, the 2 major parties both gave him their "preferences" above each other, but neither of the major parties got enough votes to get the seat, so he got it. How many people actually voted for him as their preferred candidate? 56,376
Translation: "no True Social Democrat would ever be in favor of censorship."
This is a classic example of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
In the US, campus speech codes against "hate speech" are often worse than this, and campuses overwhelmingly conform to left-leaning views. http://www.thefire.org/index.php
Articles and that and others inevitably focus on pornography. Discussions end up going off to a side about whether or not kids or even adults should watch porn and what is going too far. All those things are completely irrelevant because they are talking about what should be filtered.
You can read all about it here: http://nocleanfeed.com/learn.html