Google goes to Washington on filter

Google goes to Washington on filter

From the Australian Newspaper online. 

GOOGLE Australia has voiced its concerns over the Rudd Government's controversial mandatory ISP filtering plan directly to the US State Department.

One of the internet giant's biggest worry is the filter's scope, which it believes to be too broad.

It is understood the matter was raised just over a week ago with representatives from the State Department.

The filter is meant to block content rated Refused Classification (RC) that includes, but is not limited to, child sexual abuse imagery, bestiality, sexual violence, detailed instruction in crime, violence or drug use and material that advocates terrorist acts.

Google and various internet experts believe the RC list could also potentially contain legitimate material.

The revelation comes following a report in The Australian on March 29 that the State Department had raised the filtering issue with Australian government officials.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy's spokeswoman this week confirmed that Australian and US officials have discussed ISP filtering.

The US government is against internet censorship -- a view reinforced this week by the country's ambassador to Australia,Jeff Bleich, who said he believes child pornographers can caught without resorting to mandatory internet filters.

Google Australia's head of public policy and government affairs, Iarla Flynn, said the company has both privately and publicly aired its views to various parties, including the US State Department.

Mr Flynn could not elaborate on those discussions.

"Our primary concern is the scope of the filter. We think it's too broad because RC goes well beyond child sexual abuse material and has a whole number of grey areas," he said.

"For example, it would seek to block material promoting or providing instruction in any crime and that would capture videos showing how to do graffiti ... in certain circumstances graffiti can be a crime, (but filtering) that to us seems excessive."

Mr Flynn said the boundaries of the proposed filtering were "very vague" and had the potential to go further through scope-creep.

"Euthanasia is a crime, therefore material which talks about or promotes euthanasia can also be captured within the scope of this filter," he said. "On an issue like euthanasia -- which is politically and socially controversial -- we think governments should be very, very slow to be blocking access to information on a subject like that."

Online free speech advocate Irene Graham has said that RC includes material deemed to "offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults".

The depiction of actual sexual activity between consenting adults involving lawful fetishes could also be classified as RC content and blocked by the filter.

The Classification Board decides what publications, films and computer games can be sold in Australia; there is no category for the internet.

State and federal attorney's-general decide on the guidelines for RC markings based on "community standards".

Senator Conroy has maintained that ISP filtering is one of many weapons in the government's cyber-safety armada.

His spokeswoman could not say if the minister agreed or disagreed with the US Ambassador's comments, but she reiterated the government's stance: it does not support RC content being available on the internet.

"RC material is already prohibited on Australian websites," she said.

"Under Australia’s existing Classification regulations this material is not available in newsagencies, it is not on library shelves, you cannot watch it on a DVD or at the cinema, and it is not shown on television.

"As we have consistently said, ISP-level filtering is just one part of the government’s $125.8 million cyber-safety policy, which also includes education, research and international cooperation. Importantly, the policy (provides) $49m for law enforcement by providing 91 additional Australian Federal Police officers to the Child Protection Unit."

Under the government's policy, RC material hosted here or overseas would be added to the filtering blacklist based on a public complaint to the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

"The policy does not apply to X18+ material and no material other than RC-content will be blocked," she said.

19 comments on this story

Higgs - six flaws in vulgar keynesism

This is an excellent and accessible summary of what has gone wrong with modern economics.

Amazing really...

http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_14_03_et_higgs.pdf

US: A Banana Republic without Bananas

From Washington's Blog. One of my favourite sources of information.

A Banana Republic With No Bananas

Experts on third world banana republics from the IMF and the Federal Reserve have said the U.S. has become a third world banana republic (and see this and this).
Are they right?
Well, let's look at Wikipedia's description of the four factors which make a country a banana republic.
Profits Privatized and Debts Socialized
The first feature of a banana republic as "A collusion between the overweening state and certain favored monopolistic concerns, whereby the profits can be privatized and the debts socialized."



✓ Check.
As I pointed out in November:

Nouriel Roubini writes in a recent essay:

This is a crisis of solvency, not just liquidity, but true deleveraging has not begun yet because the losses of financial institutions have been socialised and put on government balance sheets. This limits the ability of banks to lend, households to spend and companies to invest...

The releveraging of the public sector through its build-up of large fiscal deficits risks crowding out a recovery in private sector spending.

Roubini has previously written:

We're essentially continuing a system where profits are privatized and...losses socialized.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb says the same thing:

After finishing The Black Swan, I realized there was a cancer. The cancer was a huge buildup of risk-taking based on the lack of understanding of reality. The second problem is the hidden risk with new financial products. And the third is the interdependence among financial institutions.

[Interviewer]: But aren't those the very problems we're supposed to be fixing?

NT: They're all still here. Today we still have the same amount of debt, but it belongs to governments. Normally debt would get destroyed and turn to air. Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer. But the government is socializing all these losses by transforming them into liabilities for your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. What is the effect? The doctor has shown up and relieved the patient's symptoms – and transformed the tumour into a metastatic tumour. We still have the same disease. We still have too much debt, too many big banks, too much state sponsorship of risk-taking. And now we have six million more Americans who are unemployed – a lot more than that if you count hidden unemployment.

[Interviewer]: Are you saying the U.S. shouldn't have done all those bailouts? What was the alternative?

NT: Blood, sweat and tears. A lot of the growth of the past few years was fake growth from debt. So swallow the losses, be dignified and move on. Suck it up. I gather you're not too impressed with the folks in Washington who are handling this crisis.

Ben Bernanke saved nothing! He shouldn't be allowed in Washington. He's like a doctor who misses the metastatic tumour and says the patient is doing very well.

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calls it "socialism for the rich". So do many others.

Devalued Paper Currency
The second characteristic of a banana republic is "Devalued paper currency in the international community."
✓ Check. Here's a chart of the trade weighted US Dollar from 1973-2009.

And here's a bonus chart showing the decline in the dollar's purchasing power from 1913 to 2005:

Politicians Use Time in Office to Maximize Their Own Gains

The third characteristic of a banana republic is:

Kleptocracy -- those in positions of influence use their time in office to maximize their own gains, always ensuring that any shortfall is made up by those unfortunates whose daily life involves earning money rather than making it.

✓ Check. As I wrote last month:

Summers, Geithner, Bernanke and Congress like things just the way they are.

Of course they do ... they're bought and paid for:

• Lobbyists from the financial industry have paid hundreds of millions to Congress and the Obama administration. They have bought virtually all of the key congress members and senators on committees overseeing finances and banking. The Congress people who receive the most money from lobbyists are the most opposed to regulation. See this,this, this, this, this, this, and this.

• Obama received more donations from Goldman Sachs and the rest of the financial industry than almost anyone else

• Summers and the rest of Obama's economic team have made many millions - even in the first few months of being appointed, or right beforehand - from the financial industry

• Two powerful congressmen said that banks run Congress ...

The chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University(Donald J. Boudreaux) says that it is inaccurate to call politicians prostitutes. Specifically, he says that they are more correct to call them "pimps", since they are pimping out the American people to the financial giants ...

Corruption Remains Unchecked, Politicians Are Only for Show
And the fourth characteristic of a banana republic is:

There must be no principle of accountability within the government so that the political corruption by which the banana republic operates is left unchecked. The members of the national legislature will be (a) largely for sale and (b) consulted only for ceremonial and rubber-stamp purposes some time after all the truly important decisions have already been made elsewhere.

✓ Check. There's no accountability.
For example, former Vice President of Dallas Federal Reserve, who said that the failure of the government to provide more information about the bailout signals corruption. As ABC writes:

Gerald O'Driscoll, a former vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said he worried that the failure of the government to provide more information about its rescue spending could signal corruption.

"Nontransparency in government programs is always associated with corruption in other countries, so I don't see why it wouldn't be here," he said.

As I noted in October:

William K. Black - professor of economics and law, and the senior regulator during the S & L crisis - says that that the government's entire strategy now - as during the S&L crisis - is to cover up how bad things are ("the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts").

Indeed, as I have previously documented, 7 out of the 8 giant, money center banks went bankrupt in the 1980's during the "Latin American Crisis", and the government's response was to cover up their insolvency.

Black also says:

There has been no honest examination of the crisis because it would embarrass C.E.O.s and politicians . . .

Instead, the Treasury and the Fed are urging us not to examine the crisis and to believe that all will soon be well.

PhD economist Dean Baker made a similar point, lambasting the Federal Reserve for blowing the bubble, and pointing out that those who caused the disaster are trying to shift the focus as fast as they can:

The current craze in DC policy circles is to create a "systematic risk regulator" to make sure that the country never experiences another economic crisis like the current one. This push is part of a cover-up of what really went wrong and does absolutely nothing to address the underlying problem that led to this financial and economic collapse.

Baker also says:

"Instead of striving to uncover the truth, [Congress] may seek to conceal it" and tell banksters they're free to steal again.

Politicians are for sale.
And Congress made a big show of passing derivatives reform legislation, but actuallyweakened existing regulations. In fact, the legislation was "probably written by JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs" (two of the biggest derivatives players). In other words, Congress just rubber-stamped decisions which were already made elsewhere.
The same is true with every other piece of financial "reform" legislation which has been passed. See this and this.
It's all for show, folks. Dodd, Frank, Obama and all the other politicians (with the exception of a handful trying to do the right thing) are "consulted only for ceremonial and rubber-stamp purposes some time after all the truly important decisions [about economic legislation] have already been made elsewhere"
Without the Bananas

Wikipedia gives some additional background on the term "banana republic":

Banana republic is a pejorative term originally used to refer to a country that is politically unstable, dependent on limited agriculture (e.g. bananas), and ruled by a small, self-elected, wealthy, and corrupt clique.

Well, America isn't dependent on limited agriculture like bananas. But just about the only areas of growth are in the military and in giant companies lavished with buckets of cash and special "favors" by Uncle Sugar.
As one commentator succinctly put it, America has become:

A banana republic with no bananas.

Socialist reflections (HT: Bob Hoye)

"Socialism as an alternative has disappeared from the discourse. Capitalism has won an enormous victory and all we could do was watch."

- Socialists In America Meeting, National Post, April 3, 2000

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of 'liberalism', they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without knowing it happened."

- Norman M. Thomas, Leader U.S. Socialist Party, 1948

"Every collectivist movement rides in on a Trojan Horse of 'emergency'. It was a tactic of Lenin, Hitler and Mussolini".

- Memoirs: The Great Depression, 1929-1941, P. 461, Herbert Hoover

"We are not going to save our way out of this recession. We've got to spend our way out of this recession."

- House Majority Whip, The Hill, February 5, 2010

"The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

- Margaret Thatcher, 1976

From: http://www.safehaven.com/article/16414/pivotal-events

Quotes on Government

From: http://tkcollier.wordpress.com/2008/07/22/anti-government-quotes-through-history/

I don’t make jokes… I just watch the government and report the facts. -Will Rogers

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free! -P.J. O’Rourke

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money aspossible from one party of the citizens to give to the other. -Voltaire (1764)

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you! -Pericles (430 B.C.)

No man’s life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session. -Mark Twain (1866 )

Talk is cheap…except when Congress does it. -Unknown

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.-Thomas Jefferson

“If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read thenewspaper you are misinformed.” -Mark Twain

Suppose you were an idiot.  And suppose you were a member of Congress….But then I repeat myself. -Mark Twain

I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like aman standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. -Winston Churchill

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. - George Bernard Shaw

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. -G. Gordon Liddy

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. -James Bovard, Civil Libertarian

Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. -Douglas Casey,

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. -P.J. O’Rourke, Civil Libertarian

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavours to live at the expense of everybody else. -Frederic Bastiat, French Economist (1801-1850)

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. -Ronald Reagan (1986)

The government is like a baby’s alimentary canal:  a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other. -Ronald Reagan

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. -Winston Churchill

The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin. -Mark Twain

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. -Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903)

There is no distinctly Native American criminal class…save Congress. -Mark Twain

What this country needs are more unemployed politicians. -Edward Langley, Artist (1928 – 1995)

The Regulators Knowledge Problem (HT: Hayek)

Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Progressives can't get past the Knowledge Problem

By: GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS 
Contributor
April 4, 2010

"If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?" -- President Reagan, Jan. 20, 1981.

Economist Friedrich Hayek explained in 1945 why centrally controlled "command economies" were doomed to waste, inefficiency, and collapse: Insufficient knowledge. He won a Nobel Prize. But it turns out he was righter than he knew.

In his "The Use of Knowledge In Society," Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants and needs exists in no single place in any economy. The economy is simply too large and complicated for such information to be gathered together.

Any economic planner who attempts to do so will wind up hopelessly uninformed and behind the times, reacting to economic changes in a clumsy, too-late fashion and then being forced to react again to fix the problems that the previous mistakes created, leading to new problems, and so on.

Market mechanisms, like pricing, do a better job than planners because they incorporate what everyone knows indirectly through signals like price, without central planning.

Thus, no matter how deceptively simple and appealing command economy programs are, they are sure to trip up their operators, because the operators can't possibly be smart enough to make them work.

Hayek's insight into economics and regulation is often called "The Knowledge Problem," and it is a very powerful notion. But recent events suggest that it's not just the economy that regulators don't understand well enough -- it's also their own regulations.

This became apparent when various large businesses responded to the enactment of Obamacare by taking accounting steps to reflect tax changes brought about by the new health care legislation. The additional costs created by Obamacare, conveniently enough, weren't going to strike until later, after the November elections.

But both Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and Securities and Exchange Commission regulations require companies to account for these changes as soon as they learn about them. As the Atlantic's Megan McArdle wrote:

"What AT&T, Caterpillar, et al did was appropriate. It's earnings season, and they offered guidance about , um, their earnings."So once Obamacare passed, massive corporate write-downs were inevitable.

They were also bad publicity for Obamacare, and they seem to have come as an unpleasant shock to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who immediately scheduled congressional hearings for April 21, demanding that the chief executive officers of AT&T, John Deere, and Caterpillar, among others, come and explain themselves.

Obamacare was supposed to provide unicorns and rainbows: How can it possibly be hurting companies and killing jobs? Surely there's some sort of Republican conspiracy going on here!

More like a confederacy of dunces. Waxman and his colleagues in Congress can't possibly understand the health care market well enough to fix it. But what's more striking is that Waxman's outraged reaction revealed that they don't even understand their own area of responsibility - regulation -- well enough to predict the effect of changes in legislation.

In drafting the Obamacare bill they tried to time things for maximum political advantage, only to be tripped up by the complexities of the regulatory environment they had already created. It's like a second-order Knowledge Problem.

Possibly this is simply because Waxman and his colleagues are dumb, and God knows there's plenty of evidence that Congress isn't a repository of rocket scientists. But it's just as likely that adding 30 or 40 IQ points to the average congressman wouldn't make much difference.

The United States Code -- containing federal statutory law -- is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117pages long and composes226volumes.

No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer. This means, of course, that when Congress changes the law, it not only can't be aware of all the real-world complications it's producing, it can't even understand the legal and regulatory implications of what it's doing.

There's good news and bad news in that. The bad news is obvious: We're governed not just by people who do screw up constantly, but by people who can't help but screw up constantly. So long as the government is this large and overweening, no amount of effort at securing smarter people or "better" rules will do any good: Incompetence is built into the system.

The good news is less obvious, but just as important: While we rightly fear a too-powerful government, this regulatory knowledge problem will ensure plenty of public stumbles and embarrassments, helping to remind people that those who seek to rule us really don't know what they're doing.

If that doesn't encourage skepticism toward big government, it's hard to imagine what will.

Examiner Contributor Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, hosts InstaVision at PJTV.com and blogs at InstaPundit.com.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Reflections/Progressives-can_t-get-past-the-Knowledge-Problem-89780997.html#ixzz0kqLClG2l

Entrepreneurial government

This post (available at a third party website) is somewhat Hayekian in its approach to essential government services.

http://www.12manage.com/methods_osborne_ten_principles_reinvention.html