news Greens Senator Scott Ludlam has publicly stated that he suspects law enforcement agencies of bugging his mobile phone, despite admitting that he doesn’t have a shred of evidence that such action might be taking place, and despite the fact that he has not had his mobile phone examined for bugging software.

In a radio interview with 6PR this morning (the full audio recording is available online here), Ludlam, who is the Greens Communications Spokesperson, said he first became suspicious that his phone had been bugged during the past week, part of which he has spent at several events with independent computer security researcher and hacker Jacob Appelbaum, an associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Appelbaum and Ludlam spoke extensively at an event in Melbourne on Saturday about the dangers of increasing levels of covert government surveillance on Australian residents. Today, Ludlam said at one point when he was with Appelbaum he noticed that “the battery on my phone was draining very fast”. Appelbaum’s view on the matter, he said, was that it could be a symptom that the phone was being wiretapped. Ludlam uses an iPhone, several models of which have recently suffered battery draining technical issues unrelated to wiretapping.

Ludlam emphasised that he had “nothing” to back up the idea that the phone was being tapped. “I wouldn’t even dignify it with the term evidence … it’s entirely circumstantial.” he said. “It was something I was whingeing to Jacob about, and he said: ‘You know what that can mean’.” In addition, he stated that he hadn’t “made any accusations” about the Government tapping his phone.

However, in the same interview Ludlam said it was “concerning” that “simply by being in the company of Jacob or people associated with Wikileaks that my phone might then have been wiretapped”. In addition, he noted that “it seemed interesting to note that there is no reason that we would be immune” from wiretapping, referring to himself and the organisers of the Melbourne event.

“I went through the same sort of psychology as most people,” he told the 6PR host. “Your first reaction is look, well I’m not interesting enough, I’m too boring to spy on, so I’m not worried about this. The second stage is saying, well maybe I am being spied on, but I’m not doing anything wrong, so it still doesn’t bother me, and the third stage is no, bugger that, we do deserve privacy, we have a right to privacy, and it’s not appropriate for, in my view, as many as a quarter of a million of these data access requests being made every year, with nobody having the foggiest as to what they’re for.” Ludlam was referring to telecommunications surveillance statistics recently published by local law enforcement agencies.

Ludlam linked the issue to a Sydney Morning Herald article published several weeks ago which revealed that the Federal Resources and Energy Minister, Martin Ferguson, had secretly pushed for increased surveillance by police of environmental activists who had been protesting peacefully at coal-fired power stations and coal export facilities, with some of the work being carried out by a private contractor, the National Open Source Intelligence Centre (NOSIC). If these kinds of activists could be spied on, he said, ” why not a Greens MP?”

The Senator noted he would be following up the issue with Australia’s Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, which oversees Australia’s intelligence agencies.

opinion/analysis
I am extremely surprised to find the normally level-headed Senator Scott Ludlam engaging here in what I feel I have no choice to describe as conspiracy theories.

Frankly, as the Senator has openly admitted, he has not a shred of evidence that his phone has been bugged. I consider it irresponsible of Ludlam to raise the issue in public without first finding that evidence, if indeed any exists. I would also consider it irresponsible of him, and potentially an abuse of his parliamentary position, for him to contact the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security about the matter, without first finding that evidence.

Now, I think it’s important to note here that I personally am highly suspicious of surveillance efforts by Australian law enforcement agencies, and I have personally made great efforts to bring these efforts to light. For example, I have been one of the main Australian journalists reporting over the past few years on the Attorney-General’s Department’s data retention proposal, which would dramatically expand police powers to retain Internet users’ data. In fact, I filed a Freedom of Information request with the department this week on the issue.

Likewise, I have consistently published information on other government censorship and control measures, such as various Internet filtering proposals and secret meetings about online copyright infringement. So I am not unsympathetic to Ludlam and Appelbaum’s views — far from it. I am not the Australian Federal Police’s favourite journalist and I’m probably on a list of rabble-rousers who would be first against the wall if the Attorney-General’s Department got their way ;)

However, I listened to the whole ‘War on the Internet’ event held by Ludlam and Electronic Frontiers Australia (the videos are available here), and I must note that I found much of the event to be chock-full of the sort of conspiracy theories which any rational journalist must feel uncomfortable listening to. The entire event had a more than blasé’ relationship with the facts, and I believe Ludlam’s suspicions this week about his phone being tapped are the fruit of spending too much time in the company of people like Jacob Appelbaum, who are visibly attempting to construct a narrative around inappropriate surveillance based on what, at least in Australia, is very thin evidence. I’m sure things are different in the US.

TL;DR: Show us the evidence, Senator Ludlam, or else stop discussing the matter in public.

Image credit: Still taken from EFA video broadcast of the War on the Internet event

news Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlam has attacked the Federal Government, which his party is in broad partnership with to form Government, for holding what he said were “offensive” secret meetings with the content and ISP industries on the issue of illicit Internet file-sharing.

The last known meeting was held on 23 September and convened by the Attorney-General’s Department. It saw major Australian ISPs sit down with the representatives of the film, television and music industries with the aim of discussing a potential industry resolution to the issue of online copyright infringement. The issue has come to the fore over the past several years due to the high-profile court case on the matter ongoing between iiNet and the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft.

The Attorney-General’s Department has subsequently revealed a representative of several public interest groups — the Australian Communications and Consumer Action Network (ACANN) and the Internet Society of Australia (ISOC) had requested to attend the meeting and been denied. It has also declined to release any information about what specifically was discussed at the meeting.

Speaking at Electronic Frontiers Australia’s ‘War on the Internet’ event on Saturday in Melbourne, Ludlam, who is the Communications Spokesperson for the Greens, said the various parties had been “locked in a room by a former Attorney-General and told to sort something out” — asked to resolve the question of how content creators could make money in a world where file sharing through platforms such as BitTorrent was popular.

“What I find the most offensive about that, is that they locked the people out of the room that actually matter,” Ludlam said. “All of the writers, the creative artists, the performance people, they’re not in there. The rights holders are in there. The end users, the consumers … us, are locked out of the room as well.”

Ludlam said it was the “intermediaries” who were discussing the issue under the auspices of the Attorney-General’s Department, who had been told to come up with something that was “not too offensive” for their corporate interests. “They’ve locked out the producers and consumers. The model which will be introduced in Australia, when we get to hear about it, will probably be stuffed and offensive,” he added.

The Greens Senator said in the US, where the past week has seen a huge amount of protest actions held to defeat anti-piracy legislation in the form of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), it was similar organisations running the anti-piracy agenda. Ludlam called last week for the Australian Government to support efforts such as Wikipedia’s site blackout to protest the SOPA and PIPA legislation.

“… the intermediaries: We don’t need them any more. These people are trying to preserve their incumbency in an age which no longer requires them, because things have changed.” Ludlam said that he was interested in having a “real conversation” about how the creative industries should be remunerated in a file sharing world. “If the Government’s not going to ask that question, then we will,” he said.

The talks were previously being held under the auspices of then-Attorney-General Robert McClelland. McClelland lost the role in a cabinet reshuffle late last year, however, with Prime Minister Julia Gillard appointing Health Minister Nicola Roxon to the Attorney-General’s portfolio in his place. Roxon had been Shadow Attorney-General in Opposition.
In a statement issued today in relation to Ludlam’s comments on the SOPA and PIPA legislation, a spokeswoman for the Attorney-General’s Department said it was aware of the debate in the US, but that things were different in Australia.

“The Government is not currently considering similar legislation in Australia,” they said. “It is the Government’s preference for industry (content owners and Internet Services Providers) to work together to develop a code to address the issue of online piracy. The Department is facilitating ongoing discussions between content owners and ISPs’ representatives, including the Australian Content Industry Group and Communications Alliance, to address online copyright infringement. The next meeting is scheduled to take place in early February.”

The statement mirrors similar statements issued by the Attorney-General’s Department and the Office of Robert McClelland and the Attorney-General’s Department during his tenure.

Despite the ongoing nature of the talks, Ludlam and senior figures from the Opposition have previously declined to respond to repeated requests for comment over a period of several weeks on the Internet piracy issue and the meetings being held by the Attorney-General’s Department, with Ludlam stating at the time in Delimiter comments that the issue had come up at a time when his team was “extremely stretched”. The Greens were looking at the issue, he added, but not until it was “a properly informed one” backed by good policy resources.

Image credit: David Howe, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence

news The Australian Greens Party has demanded that Australia’s Labor Federal Government support efforts such as Wikipedia’s site blackout initiative to protest the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and associated legislation currently being considered by the US Government.

Wikipedia overnight revealed it would black out the English language version of its website to protest SOPA and the associated PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), following similar announcements by other popular organisations such as Mozilla, Google, the Free Software Foundation and Reddit. Organisations such as Facebook and Twitter have also expressed concerns over the legislation.

SOPA was introduced into the US House of Representatives in late October. The legislation would allow the US Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders such as film and TV studios, to seek extensive court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement, potentially impacting their commercial operations and protecting ISPs. PIPA is an associated piece of legislation which would give the US Government and copyright holders additional powers to target websites allegedly infringing copyright regulations.

In a statement issued this afternoon, the Greens called on the Australian Government to “take a stand” in defence of Australian Internet users and protect the viability of the Internet as a medium, highlighting Wikipedia’s stance as “an example of the depth of the campaign to prevent the bill from becoming law”.

“Has the Australian Government made any representation whatsoever to the US Government on this issue?” asked Greens Communications Spokesperson Scott Ludlam (pictured) in the statement. “Do they recognise that there will be little purpose in investing tens of billions of dollars in the NBN if the US copyright industry cripples the medium itself?”

“As an example of breathtaking overreach by US copyright interests, the SOPA proposal and its cousin PIPA are hard to beat. The bills will institutionalise far-reaching, unaccountable censorship in order to protect the commercial interests of a handful of powerful media companies. The bills risk the broad-scale criminalisation of filesharing, the decimation of the open source community and tactical use of financial blockades against commercial competitors or non-commercial sites.

Ludlam pointed out that under the legislation, US courts could bar online advertising networks and payment companies from doing business with websites which were allegedly infringing copyright law, bar search engines from linking to such sites, and require ISPs to block access to such sites. The legislation would also introduce what Ludlam said were “extreme penalties” for the unauthorised streaming of copyrighted content — such as maximum penalties of five years in prison for ten infringements within six months — and making infringements a criminal offence.

“SOPA would block entire non-US websites in the United States as a response to select infringing material,” he said. “This includes Australian sites, and the online operations of Australian businesses.”

The Greens’ comments follow similar sentiments expressed by the Australian Sex Party in late November.

At the time, the Sex Party’s President Fiona Patten said the enforcement of copyright laws must be balanced with the right to privacy, and the due process of Australia’s legal system was paramount — “to erode it is to ignore the foundation of fairness in our country,” she said.

Referring to controversial meetings held by the Federal Attorney-General’s Department on the issue of online piracy, the Sex Party said the Australian Government had already begun to remove due process from the prosecution of copyright infringement. “This new legislation being considered in the US could signal an expansion of the surveillance and dubious legal tactics already being employed in Australia,” the party’s statement said.

In addition, today the Australian Pirate Party blacked out its web site to join the protest, and issued a statement damning the US legislation.

“Regardless of whether its purpose is legitimate or whether it will work; the legislation is not compatible with democratic values,” the Pirate Party Australia said in a statement. “It promotes censorship by giving the US Government and corporations the power to block access to – and take down – websites that they consider to be infringing on their copyright monopoly, including search engines or blogs which link to such sites.”

“A link placed by a user in the comment section of an article in a regular Internet magazine could result in the magazine going bankrupt and the owners being charged with a crime. This would not only cripple innovation and entrepreneurship, it would be a flagrant violation of the fundamental human right to free speech.”

Image credit: David Howe, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence

news Jacob Appelbaum (pictured, above), independent computer security researcher and hacker, will be visiting Australia soon, with one item on his schedule being a ‘War on the Internet’ event, scheduled for 21 January, 2012 at Trades Hall, Melbourne between 3pm and 5pm. Supported by the Australian Greens Party and Electronic Frontiers Australia, the event will have speakers “challenging gatekeepers and proposing alternatives to the weaponisation of cyberspace.”

Other speakers at the event include author and researcher Bernard Keane, author and researcher on whistleblowing Suelette Dreyfuss, and Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlam.

The flyer for the event terms the response of governments and corporations to Wikileaks, Anonymous, the occupy movement and the Arab Spring, as “defensive and warlike.” The flyer states, “The internet and social media were declared tools of agitation. Behaviour that sought peaceful democratic reform was characterised as treasonous or even terrorist.”

“Governments asserted the right to flick the internet off-switch. And law enforcement, Internet Service Providers, telcos and the judiciary were enlisted to harass activists via subpoenas, takedown notices, mercenary denial of service attacks, and direct denial of services based on unexplained breaches of hard to find user licences,” the advertisement continues.

Referring to the sort of ritual harassment activists like Appelbaum face, the flyer terms the far corners of international airports as “dark places reserved for unlawful arrivals and criminal suspects”. The US Department of Justice had obtained a court order in December 2010 to obtain data from Appelbaum’s Twitter account (under the name @ioerror). US Customs agents have detained him 12 times at the American border on his return from the Netherlands, Siberia and Iceland, and seized his laptop and mobile phones.

A core member of the Tor project for online anonymity, Jacob Appelbaum is currently employed by the University of Washington. He represented Wikileaks at the 2010 Hope conference. His association with Wikileaks has resulted in his repeated detainment and questioning by US law enforcement authorities. Appelbaum is a member of the hacker organisation, Cult of the Dead Cow, since 2008, and has co-founded the San Francisco hackerspace, Noisebridge, with Mitch Altman. He has worked with Greenpeace and volunteered for the Ruckus Society and the Rainforest Action Network. Applebaum is also a photographer and ambassador for the art-technology-philosophy group, monochrom. He tweets as @ioerror.

Senator Scott Ludlam is the Greens Senator from Western Australia since 1 July 2008, and holds responsibility for the communications portfolio. He holds a position on the National Broadband Network (NBN) Senate Select Committee since February 2009, and was appointed to the Joint Select Committee on Cyber-Safety in March 2010. Ludlam’s interest in technology focuses on sustainability challenges in Australia and their impact on human rights, social justice and pro-democracy movements in other countries. He has been in the spotlight for his opposition to the internet filter plan, mainly for the possibility that small special interest groups could pressurise the Government to blacklist certain websites. Ludlam twitters as @SenatorLudlam.

Ludlam has expressed his viewpoint in an editorial published by ABC in February 2009, that the filter was not the way to protect people from objectionable material online. Talking about both the potential for positive change and the dark side of the internet being a reflection of human society, Ludlam said, “It reflects the best of us and the worst of us. It reflects the pro-democracy aspirations of people taking enormous risks, in service to their community, and it also exposes the epidemic of sexualised violence in society – violence against children, violence against women.” He opined that the internet filter debate is only a superficial debate about a particular technology, which does not address the need for a deeper conversation about violence in society.

Image credit: Kate Young, Creative Commons

blog The personal blog of Greens Communications Spokesperson Scott Ludlam continues to be excellent value. Last week the Western Australian Senator took some time out to pen more than 1,300 thoughtful words on the potential future of maverick WikiLeaks activist Julian Assange, whose fate is very much in the hands of several global legal systems.

And unlike most of those who comment on the ever-controversial Assange, Ludlam very much knows what he is talking about here. The Senator actually travelled to both London and Sweden to observe the recent court proceedings of Assange’s case, and he is well-versed in the specific details of the laws which may see Assange end up in the hands of a vengeful US Government — and how Australia’s Government can prevent that from happening. Some of our favourite paragraphs from his rumination:

“The Australian Government has been slow to react to the possibility of the publishing organisation known as WikiLeaks being crushed by a wounded superpower, it still doesn’t appear to understand the threat of Mr Assange’s rendition to the US, and our Prime Minister appears mainly concerned with keeping her head down in the hope this will all go away.

The thing is, it won’t. Time is now very short. If Mr Assange ends up jailed in Sweden, Australia has the ability to repatriate him under the International Transfer of Prisoners (ITP) scheme. Australia must strongly insist that there will be no rendition to the US under the ‘temporary surrender’ mechanism.”

At this stage, Ludlam seems to be implying, we should be asking ourselves why the Federal Government hasn’t stirred itself to assist Assange, who is, after all, an Australian citizen. Clearly it has done so in other cases, such as the teeenager who was arrested in Malaysia with a small quantity of marijuana. Of course, the reason is probably fairly simple: Most Australians in difficulty overseas haven’t threatened the foundations of the modern state in the same way which Assange has. But then, perhaps that’s the kind of free thinking which we need more of in Australia’s fairly stolid (if highly stable) democracy.

Image credit: New Media Days, Creative Commons

news Prime Minister Julia Gillard has shifted Federal parliamentarians Kim Carr and Robert McLelland out of their respective industry and attorney-general ministerial portfolios, in shifts that will have a dramatic effect upon how the nation’s technology sector will deal with the top levels of government over at least the next year.

A cabinet reshuffle announced by Gillard this afternoon will see current Health Minister Nicola Roxon take on McLelland’s responsibilities as Federal Attorney-General, while current Climate Change and Energy Efficiency Minister Greg Combet will take on the industry and innovation portfolio, replacing Carr.

Along with Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and Special Minister of State Gary Gray, who will retain their existing roles, McLelland and Carr have been key contact points for the technology sector in dealing with the Government during the Gillard and Rudd administrations.

McLelland has featured regularly in the technology press over the past several years due to the focus which his Attorney-General’s Department has had on law enforcement issues in the telecommunications sector.

The department is currently holding closed door talks between the ISP and content industries over the issue of online copyright infringement (Internet piracy). McLelland has repeatedly stated that he would prefer an industry solution to come about with respect to the issue, and has declined a number of questions about what the Federal Government’s own policy is on the issue. In addition, the Attorney-General’s Department has also been in the press over the past year regarding a controversial and secretive proposal by the department to force Internet service providers to store a wealth of information pertaining to Australians’ emails and telephone calls.

The proposal — known popularly as ‘OzLog’ — first came to light in June this year, when AGD confirmed it had been examining the European Directive on Data Retention (PDF) to consider whether it would be beneficial for Australia to adopt a similar regime. The directive requires telcos to record data such as the source, destination and timing of all emails and telephone calls – even including internet telephony. In a wider sense, McLelland has also been instrumental personally in pushing for Australia’s cybercrime laws to be harmonised with international regulations on the issue.

With respect to Carr, the Minister has worked with the technology industry over a number of issues, releasing a report last week on the issue of cloud computing. It was unclear when Carr was appointed to what extent he had responsibility for the technology industry, but Conroy has stipulated in public that his responsibilities purely extend to communications — naming Carr as the responsible minister for ICT.

However, since that time, Conroy has also been appointed to an additional role assisting the Prime Minister on the development of the digital economy, further muddying the waters in terms of ministerial responsibility for technology.

Carr has been appointed Minister for Manufacturing, while McLelland will take on a role focusing on emergencies such as the Queensland floods.

Roxon is a lawyer by background and appears to have had little experience dealing with the technology sector, aside from her ongoing efforts over the past several years to push through electronic health records legislation and projects in the health portfolio. Roxon was briefly Shadow Attorney-General under Mark Latham’s opposition.

opinion/analysis
Kim Carr’s exit from the industry and innovation portfolio will have little impact on Australia’s technology sector; as Minister in the portfolio Carr has paid virtually no attention to the sector and has at times appeared to have very little knowledge of what it is and how it functions.

However, Nicola Roxon’s ascension to the position of Attorney-General is probably bad news for those hoping that McLelland’s exit would bring about a more transparent and accountable Attorney-General’s Department.

McLelland’s department has become known over the past several years for its hard-line approach to regulating the law enforcement aspects of Australia’s telecommunications, Internet and content industries. From monitoring Australians’ online activities to building industry consensus on cracking down on Internet piracy, under McLelland the department has consistently backed law enforcement interests against consumer rights, content industry interests against consumer rights and backed public servants’ rights to keep information from the public over the public’s right to know.

Anyone who watched a number of fraught encounters between departmental officials and politicians like Greens Senator Scott Ludlam over the past year cannot have walked away with the impression that McLelland’s Department wanted the public to know all that it is up to. I would say Roxon’s appointment will exacerbate this situation.

Over the past several years I’ve found it almost impossible to get any information from Roxon’s office about the government’s electronic records scheme, and the MP has a similar reputation to McLelland inside the government — she’s seen as a hard liner, and she’s never been afraid to push back on the press or the Opposition in pushing her views.

There is also evidence that Roxon also doesn’t know that much about technology. I had the chance to question Roxon in person in June 2010 about the Government’s electronic records scheme, and it was apparent at the time that while the MP had a high-level understanding of the initiative, it was also clear that she did not have an in-depth understanding of the details surrounding the system. How would it function? How would it be built? What technology would underpin it? Roxon didn’t appear clear on those details at the time.

With all of this in mind, my prediction for Australia’s technology sector from today’s appointments is more of the same. Combet will, no doubt, ignore the ICT industry, as Carr did before him, and Roxon will continue efforts to crack down on perceived Internet nasties, as McLelland did before her.

Joy.

Update: A statement on Gillard’s website reveals an additional change today: Responsibility for cybersecurity will move from the Attorney-General’s Department to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. I would analyse this as relating to the centralisation of control over the government’s cyber-security defence.

Image credit: Jeremy Tarling, Creative Commons

news Senior figures from the Opposition and the Greens have declined to respond to repeated requests for comment over a period of several weeks on recent Federal Government moves to firm up its policy on Internet content piracy, as the future of Australia’s response to the issue continues to be in doubt.

Over the past few months, a number of events have taken place which appear to be signalling the potential for a long-term resolution to the issue of Internet piracy in Australia. For starters, iiNet’s long-running court battle with the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft has finally hit the High Court and the Federal Department of the Attorney-General has kicked off talks between the ISP industry and content holders on a joint industry approach to the issue.

Amidst these moves, a new player — Movie Rights Group — has arisen and is planning to target thousands of Australians who have allegedly downloaded its clients’ films, using a legal process which both the ISP and content industries appear to approve of, and which the Government has proposed strengthening.

Despite the recent moves, however, the Opposition and the Greens have ignored requests for comment on the issue.

On 25 October Delimiter approached the offices of Shadow Attorney-General George Brandis and Greens Communications Spokesperson Scott Ludlam for a response to the issues — seeking to clarify what the policies of the two organisations are on online copyright infringement.

Ludlam’s office signalled he was the right spokesperson on the matter, but did not respond with a comment, despite repeated requests over several weeks. The office of Senator Brandis noted the approach but has not responded.

The responses are not dissimilar from the Government’s own approach to the issue.

Although the Attorney-General’s Department is holding talks between the content and ISP industries on the matter, the talks are being held behind closed doors, with the department having refrained from giving out any detailed information so far on what has been discussed. In late October, Attorney-General Robert McLelland declined and deflected a number of core questions regarding the Government’s own policy on online copyright infringement.

The only party to have commented publicly on the issue of Internet piracy in any depth is the Australian leg of the Pirate Party, which has been successful electorally in Europe but holds no parliamentary office in Australia. “We have been highly critical of the process by which the Attorney General’s Department has conducted its consultations, which have largely excluded civil society and consumers,” said the party’s then-president, Rodney Serkowski, in mid-October. “The most important stakeholders have not been able to participate.”

The Attorney-General’s Department has previously declined a Freedom of Information request for the minutes of the last known meeting it hosted between the ISP and content industries on 23 September, stating no such document existed. For this reason, a new Freedom of Information request has been filed with the Department, seeking the following documents:

• A list of all attendees at the meeting
• Personal notes of any and all attendees at the meeting from any government agency
• Any and all email correspondence related to the calling and conduct of the meeting
• Any correspondence between the office of the Secretary of the Department and the Office of the Attorney-General discussing the meeting after it was held.

opinion/analysis
It appears that Internet piracy is a taboo issue in Australian politics — a subject which nobody wants to go near for fear of it tainting them. I am surprised that we have been unable to get the office of Scott Ludlam — perhaps the most technologically savvy politician operating in Federal Parliament at the moment — to comment on the issue. However, I’m not surprised that George Brandis won’t comment. I’ve been trying to get Brandis to comment on matters in the Attorney-General’s portfolio for years. He never has so far.

However, it’s high time that Australian politicians realised this issue is simply not going to go away. It shouldn’t be discussed behind closed doors and it needs to be dealt with in both a legislative sense (most likely, through the reform of copyright legislation) and a practical sense, in incentivising the content industry to make their content available online in an acceptable form.

Only then will Australians be able to stop feel like criminals in their own homes for consuming content via Internet piracy that simply is not available via any other reasonable means.

blog This morning we had a fair old go at the Herald Sun for attacking Greens Senator Scott Ludlam for his extensive government-funded reading habits. But what about the other side of the coin? What do other parlimentarians active in ICT-related portfolios claim as reading expenses?

Senator Ludlam helpfully directed us to this page, which contains a comprehensive register of what each parliamentarian spent on entitlements for their work in the six months to the end of 2010, as collated by the Department of Finance and Deregulation. What these documents disclosed about our nation’s techno-politicians was probably not that surprising.

According to the register, in that period, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy barely claimed anything at all. The Labor Senator — whose disclosures have previously shown us that he goes to the football a lot with corporate sponsors — claimed just a few newspaper subscriptions in the period.

And they’re mainly the big ones — News Ltd’s The Herald Sun and The Australian, as well as Fairfax’s The Age. Conroy also didn’t claim the publications for the whole six months — just a few weeks or months at a time. Innovation Minister Kim Carr had a similar reading list to Conroy — but with a few subscriptions to the Financial Review sprinkled in.

For his own part, Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull made about a similar amount of claims, also keeping The Australian on his reading list. However, the former merchant banker added subscriptions to the Financial Review and The Australian Jewish News, as well as perhaps giving a nod to his mainstream popularity in Sydney through the Financial Review.

What wasn’t mentioned in the Herald Sun article was that Ludlam’s register also contained not just books, but a wide variety of newspaper and even scholarly publications. The list was long from the Kalgoorlie Miner to the West Australian, The Monthly, Quarterly Essay, The Australian, WA Business News, Griffith Review, The Big Issue and even New Internationalist and a volume of Urban Policy and Research, Ludlam’s reading list was the longest and most varied we examined.

The only parliamentarian broadly in the technology portfolio who had a reading list as long as Ludlam was Kate Lundy, although the Labor Senator only listed newspapers. All the big ones — The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian Financial Review, the Sunday Telegraph and even the Canberra Times — were listed religiously, as well as the weekend editions.

Does this register tell us much about the politicians concerned? Yes and no. For starters, it is a certainty that much of what they all bought and read in the period would not have been claimed. Turnbull, for example, is known to read very widely, including scholarly publications. But — unlike the other parliamentarians — he is personally wealthy and unlikely to bother claiming most of his purchases through Parliament.

However, some conclusions can be drawn.

Firstly, Ludlam is a regular reader with interests ranging across the whole spectrum of human endeavour, but with a particular focus on his policy areas, as well as those of the Greens in general, and his electorate of Western Australia. He takes his role as a shaper of public policy seriously.

Lundy keeps up to date with current events. But — although she is not independently wealthy — she does not claim anything beyond newspaper subscriptions, indicating either that she feels it inappropriate to do so or simply does not read off-line products in enough volume. We wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the tech-savvy Senator does most of her reading on an iPad or through a laptop screen.

We already knew Conroy isn’t an intellectual. His reading list — which notably does not include the Financial Review, perhaps Australia’s most intellectual newspaper and the publication of choice for many with his background in economics — is broadly limited to the sorts of newspapers he loves to deride in parliament. One wonders why he doesn’t simply cancel his subscriptions.

Carr’s reading list is similar to his personality and parliamentary history: Standard and non-exceptional. And as for Turnbull, his reading interests reflect both the populist basis of his support as a politician (see: The Daily Telegraph) as well as his interest in more intellectual debates (the AFR, for example).

Find any other gems in the Parliamentary entitlements register? List them below.

blog The Murdoch-owned Herald Sun newspaper has uncovered a shocking fact about Greens Communications spokesperson Scott Ludlam: He’s a reader.

Apparently, Ludlam has been buying books and reading them in order to learn things about the world, and then claiming the cost of the books through a parliamentary entitlement set up for the purpose. The article exposing this disturbing fact states:

“Senator Scott Ludlam slugged taxpayers more than $4500 in a year on books and publications including Pornography of Power: Why defence spending must be cut; How to Make Trouble and Influence People, a book celebrating disruptive protest; and The Bittersweet World of Chocolate, billed as a guide to socially responsible chocolate cooking.”

Frankly, we were reluctant to believe the rumours that Ludlam was a filthy book reader. Even though the Senator had previously professed a love of the literature of science fiction author William Gibson, we had thought Ludlam’s enthusiasm for Neuromancer must have been a casual sophomoric flirtation rather than an enduring interest — kind of an imbibe but don’t inhale thing in university.

To discover that the Senator is regularly reading actual books and educating himself about global events … this calls into question everything we thought we knew and believed to be true about politicians. Every rational Australian must call for an end to this shocking behaviour immediately. There is no doubt that Ludlam must take a long, hard look at himself and consider his future in politics. In fact, perhaps a broader, more final solution is needed to this insidious societal curse.

Image credit: David Howe, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence

blog Allow me to direct readers to the blog of Greens Communications Spokesperson and Senator Scott Ludlam, which has recently re-awoken into vivid life after a period of long dormancy. Yesterday the erudite Senator published a long rumination on all matters NBN, media and the Internet in general. I commend it to you.

Some sample paragraphs:

“In the second decade of the 21st century, the broadcast model may well have peaked, and the picture isn’t pretty. Media corporations have grown and swallowed each other like blobs of mercury, unconsciously narrowing public debate to an echo chamber of empty consumerism. Media oligarchs trade stakes in TV stations as though they were poker chips and the line between editorial and advertising has been obliterated everywhere except the ABC. Offshore proprietors use cross-media platforms as political weapons, deployed to devastating effect during contests between elected governments and powerful industry sectors, the mining tax debacle being one recent example.

This is the domain where child psychologists are employed to refine junk food messaging for maximum impact on three year olds, and where hyper-sexualised branding strategies monetise the carefully researched insecurities of teenagers. In this world we’re still meant to be passive consumers. Political debate seems at risk of being reduced to the same imperative; an undignified zero-sum contest of soundbites and confected polls over who is best placed to manage 3% annual growth in the consumer economy and protect us from people who look different to us.”

There is something of the poet in Ludlam; yea, and something of the dreamer. But above all, there is something of the futurist. It is through the guidance of politicians like Ludlam that our society will avoid slipping into the sort of discordant dystopias envisaged by hit video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Rather, I have a feeling that if Ludlam had his way (and that’s the beauty of our technological revolution, he eventually will), the globe might end up being closer to Iain M. Banks’ The Culture: Universal information begetting universal prosperity; with life’s hardships being mediated by the discreet supervision of a clutch of benevolent artificial intelligences.

A toast — to perhaps Australia’s only politician so far who has truly demonstrated an understanding of the future of the Internet and technology in general.

Image credit: Eidos Montreal