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Early this month, having been told twice my website couldn’t be viewed from within Parliament House in Canberra, I did some investigating.

I reported the story in Big Brother filters Parliament House websites and tweeted a few politicians to make sure they knew about the issue.

Initially I was told by Parliamentary staff that NO websites are blocked for ANY parliamentarians. When I pointed out my own site was blocked, I was then informed that ALL sites with a .info suffix are blocked. This was explained as a spam prevention measure. Further details were politely denied to me.

One parliamentarian – Greens Senator Ludlam – did some follow-up recently via the Senates Estimates Committee. Kudos once again to Scott Ludlam, who delves into IT-related snakepits where others fear to tread…

Ludlam’s resulting media statement was entitled A tale of two filters: more than 35 million sites blocked to senators and staff. Here’s an extract (emphasis added):

More than a year on from the defeat of the Government’s proposed mandatory net filter, Australia’s parliamentarians have instead elected to heavily filter their own web access.

In budget estimates hearings this morning, Australian Greens communications spokesperson Senator Scott Ludlam established that the entire .info top level domain is blocked to Parliament House, knocking out an unknown number of sites including an anti-war blog and sites on energy policy and nuclear disarmament.

“Bizarrely, an additional blocklist containing upwards of 35 million sites is in effect for Senators and staff, but not House of Reps members and staff,” Senator Ludlam said.

“I could walk to the nearest public library and access a ‘.info’ website but they are banned to people working within the Commonwealth parliament. I spent two years campaigning to prevent a filter being imposed on the general public, who might now appreciate the irony of a vastly more expansive filter being imposed on MPs.”

So it turns out politicians who were (mostly, although with honourable exceptions) timid in their defense of public internet freedom, are themselves rather used to being treated like a bunch of junior school kids. Many of them have probably been unaware this censorship has been in place – although I did hear back from one MP who said he took regularly used his own laptop at work to access an unfiltered wireless connection.

Are there good reasons behind the censorship?

The overt reason given for blocking .info sites is because, in recent years, a significant proportion of sites with the .info TLD (top level domain) have been used to send out spam.  Yet it’s massive overkill to block web access to all the sites with a .info suffix – and that point seems to be recognized. According to IT blogger Matias Vangsness, the block may soon be lifted.

What about the 35+ million additional sites, specifically filtered out for Senators and staff?

Here’s what Vangeness says about this:

The block of some 35 million domains is a separate matter.

Back in 2008, Family First’s socially conservative Senator Steve Fielding was shocked to discover that, unlike their staffers, Senators could freely access websites containing “inappropriate” material including “pornography, illegal drug references, gambling, games, racist or hate sites, violence, illegal weapons manufacture or procurement”.

As a result, the filtering imposed upon Department of the Senate employees was extended to all senators and their staff.

“Should a senator require access to a website that may be restricted by the filtering system, they can arrange temporary or permanent access through the Usher of the Black Rod,” the Senate’s Deputy President said at the time.

Fielding ceased to be a Senator on 30 June 2011.

It seems to me that while the generic .info block is an absurdity, this additional block on Senators’ web access is actually more sinister.

The business of filtering is indeed a business. Companies compete to provide “out of the box” censorship solutions – for individual users and for large networks such as the education sector and government departments. Whichever “filter” the IT people in charge of the Senate’s self-censorship use to block 35+ million sites, at its core its a huge database of blacklisted sites generated by an editing process. How was the editing carried out? That’s their secret – akin to the recipe to Coca Cola. I’d guess there’s some poaching between competing lists; once a website gets on one blacklist it may well end up on most if not all of them.

The notion that it’s a simple matter to make an objective decision about what should be blocked and what should not is silly. Filters inevitably “undersample”. For example some hardcore pornography sites may not be on the database and therefore won;t be blocked as intended. But filters also oversample. That’s more serious. Legitimate sites with valuable information may get filtered out for no valid reason. I think that may apply to a LOT of websites I’ve found to be important sources of information over time.

The concept of “hate sites” is especially problematic. What is a “hate site”?

The usual response is they are websites that promote “hate” and violence”. Sometimes “anti-Semitism” is given as a specific example.

If the goal of this censorship of “hate sites” was truly to banish “hate” from the media as a whole, I’d have some sympathy – although it wouldn’t overcome my general insistence on free speech and information flow. But of course that’s not the case at all! “Hate” is easy to find on the mass media and its certainly plentiful on the web. There is, for instance, a huge amount of Islamophobia around. There’s blatant war warmongering in the mainstream media – and lots of it. Does anyone seriously imagine all that ”hate” will be filtered out for Senators? Of course it won’t! They’re free to watch as much Fox News, CNN, the BBC and Al Jazeera as they wish – all of them over the last year alone purveying war propaganda as they’ve spun a one-sided case for aggression against Libya, Syria, Iran etc.

What does get blocked by these filters is material the editors hate. What that is depends on who they are and what guidelines they implement.

My impression – and I invite feedback on this – is that whoever is in charge of these filters, they generally have a zionist bias. Hence material that’s highly critical of that sectarian interest is likely to be blacklisted. Labelling what they dislike “hate sites” is a clever way to rationalise censoring it. Yet some of that material, arguably, is most important political and historical commentary.

As for “anti-Semitism” – a bizarre, invented term that dates only from the late 19th century and can be regarded as zionism’s siamese twin – why should any one group of people be singled out in this way? Why should anti-AnythingElseism be acceptable – but not “anti-Semitism”? We can’t have double standards, can we?

A common answer is that Jewish people have experienced quite unparalleled suffering throughout history – especially during the Second World War. Yet these claims are contended by some scholars, Jewish and non-Jewish. Surely the only way to develop an informed view on the matter is by examining the full range of views?

In this context, Australia’s Senators may like to try a simple experiment. People using the internet via networks in public libraries, government departments, schools and universities can also try this test. In fact, anyone can do it – in Australia or elsewhere, to get some insight into whether or not your computer or mobile device is subject to unwarranted zionist censorship.

Here’s the test: do the following links work for you?

• Dr Arthur Butz: The Hoax of the 20th Century
• Campaign for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) Library
• Dr Alan Sabrovsky interview on Press TV about 9/11
• John Cornelius: The Hidden History of the Balfour Declaration
• Israel Shamir: The Pardes
• Dr Israel Shahak: Jewish History, Jewish Religion, The Weight of 3,000 years
• Gilad Atzmon’s Political Writings

I’d argue all these references have significant value for anyone trying to make an informed decision about whether blocks on what some influential people designate as “hate site” are appropriate or not.

Do these links take the viewer to cesspools of tasteless, ugly and content-free malevolence? Or are they references to works of some scholarship – however contentious the subject matter?

If Australia’s Senators can’t access web pages such as these while at work, how can they make informed decisions about censorship? If they can access all these links… well, I hope the references may be of some interest anyway.

Blocking so-called “hate sites” is a particular concern, but logically the argument can be extended to “apolitical” sites as well – including gambling and porn. In my view it should. How can politicians decide whether to ban things they can’t see? It’s a nonsense.

The Reverend Fred Nile MLC - does his homework, prayerfully

This precise topic came up in the New South Wales Parliament back in 2010, as I reported in Two sides of a sex-obsessed Parliament. At that time, the story broke in the media that some NSW politicians had been accessing pornographic websites via their Paliament House computers. Unknown to most of them, their internet access was being monitored..

One such politician – who happened to be a Minister – must have had a guilty conscience. He apologized and resigned, thoroughly humiliated.

Then it turned out the office of none other than the moral crusader The Reverend Fred Nile had also accessed copious amounts of porn. Fred’s old enemies – and there are many – rubbed their hands in anticipation.

But instead of going into moral meltdown, Nile pointed out that an upstanding Christian parliamentarian who seriously wants to crusade against wickedness on the web must have full access to the material and at least have staff check it out. Nile’s staff members, he assured us, are all righteous types and weren’t just “sitting there perving”. Not at all! They’re were all doing legitimate research work!

Many folk chuckled at the extraordinary nerve of the man – and I was among them. But Fred faced down his critics and got away with it. He got away with it, ultimately, because he’s right.

Even sewers need inspecting occasionally.

The NSW Legislative Council apparently “gets” that rather obvious proposition – but the Senate doesn’t. Being substantially older than the Federal Upper Chamber, perhaps it’s more mature?

The Australian Senate, at the time of writing, remains in short pants.