Guest Editorial courtesy of Cathy Wilcox and WikiLeaks

We're arresting you for speeding.
What's the speed limit officer?
The speed limit is secret.

Shortly after 9pm on Tuesday March 24, Wikileaks related buildings in Dresden and Jena, were raided by 11 plain clothes German police.

Why?

Over the last two years, Wikileaks has exposed detailed secret government censorship lists or plans for over eight countries, including Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, and Germany.

Although Wikileaks’ main site has been censored by the Chinese Public Security Bureau since early 2007, last week saw the site placed onto a secret list of sites "forbidden" by the Australian Media and Communications Authority, or ACMA.

The pro-censorship governments exposed by Wikileaks can be divided into three broad categories:

1. Countries with a mandatory censorship system in place: Thailand, the UAE, and Lebanon (films).
2. Countries proposing a mandatory censorship system: Australia and Germany.
3. Countries in which the internet censorship system is an unregulated agreement between several large ISPs and the police: Norway, Denmark and Finland.

Australia and Germany are the only liberal democracies proposing a mandatory internet censorship regime.

All of the schemes operate, or are proposed to operate, through multi-million dollar national networks of censorship machines.

The machines spy on the nation as each citizen attempts to read on the internet, and compares requested pages to those listed on a secret government "blacklist".

If the page is on the blacklist, the government forcibly prevents the citizen from viewing the information by intercepting his or her internet communication and diverting it to a machine controlled by the censorship system. This machine is often configured to record the identity of the person attempting to access the forbidden information. If the page is not on the blacklist, the government grants permission for the citizen to view the page.

Although originally marketed, in all countries, as a way of combating child pornography, the blacklists obtained by Wikileaks show that the systems have already been corrupted into censoring other content, including political content.

For instance, the secret blacklist for Thailand censors thousands of sites per year deemed to be critical of the Thai Monarchy, from academic books and YouTube to the Economist magazine and Wikileaks itself.

Similarly, the blacklist for Australia contains an anti-abortion site, fringe religions, a dentist clinic, gay sites, gambling sites, islamist sites, euthanasia activist sites, an astrologer’s blog, misclassified material, and, like Thailand, Wikileaks itself. Even the Australian government’s "Minister for censorship", Senator Stephen Conroy, has admitted that fully half of the sites on the secret list are unrelated to child pornography.

As newspapers and other publications migrate to an exclusive life on the internet, such totalizing censorship systems are able to instantly snatch "pages" from the laps of citizens across an entire nation, interdicting communications between publisher and reader, and the new civil discourse between readers and each other. The scale, speed and potential impact of this centralized intervention has no historical precedent.

Secret national censorship systems are dangerous and unaccountable. They are an afront to natural justice, due process and the balancing power of the fourth estate. They must be, and will be, stopped.

The Australian Government has stated it plans to increase the size of its blacklist list by 10 fold, from roughly 1,200 blocked pages to over 10,000, although the plan is now seems unlikely to pass the Australian Senate after the revelations of the last month.

To make what has happened clear to those who understand traditional book censorship, we provide the following simple analogy:

Within the libraries and book catalogues of Germany and Australia there are books (web pages) forbidden by the state.

The government of Australia has compiled a secret list of books it forbids. About 1,200 books are on the list.

Not even authors or publishers whose books are placed on the list are told their book has been banned.

Germany plans to adopt and expand a version of the Australian scheme.

Under the plans of the German and Australian governments, every attempt to borrow a book (read a web page) will be checked against the secret "forbidden books" (forbidden web pages) list.

If a book is on the list, the attempt to borrow it is noted down in another secret list and permission is refused. If the book is not on the blacklist, permission is granted.

The list of forbidden books (the blacklist) is a forbidden book.

The lists of books forbidden in other countries are also forbidden books.

Any book that mentions the title (URL) of a forbidden book is itself a forbidden book.

An international investigative newspaper (Wikileaks) reveals key internal documents on the censorship expansion plans for Germany, Australia and other countries. For Australia this expose includes the lists of forbidden books and the presence of clearly political books on the list. The newspaper warns that Australia is acting like a "democratic backwater" and risks following the censorship path of Thailand.

The article and lists, and then the entire newspaper secretly added to the list of publications banned by Australia.

The Australian "Minister for censorship", Senator Stephen Conroy, states "Any citizen who distributes [the blacklist] is at serious risk of criminal prosecution". The Minister threatens to refer the leak to the Australian Federal Police.

That same week, the newspaper releases three more articles on censorship and updates the lists of forbidden books.

Two buildings related to the newspaper in Germany are then raided by 11 plain clothed police. The police demand the keys (passwords) to a protected room (server) containing the newspaper’s printing press so they can disable it. The newspaper staff refuse to comply–both the keys and the press itself have been sent to Sweden, a country with stronger legal protections for journalists.

The German police then seize what they believe to be the newspaper’s archives (a hardrive) and a typewriter (laptop) "for evidence".

The story might end there, but 12 hours after the police raid, on Wednesday the 25th of March, the German Cabinet announced the completion of a proposed law for a nationwide, mandatory censorship system–to be pushed through before national elections in September, 2009.

For every noble human desire, in this case, the strong protective feelings most adults have towards children, opportunists such as Senator Conroy and his German equivalent, CDU Minister Ursula von der Leyen, stand ready to exploit these feelings for their own power and position.

Von der Leyen apparently hopes to raise her profile before a national election by promoting a national censorship "solution" to child pornography.

But forcibly preventing the average parent from seeing evidence of what may be an abuse against a child is not the same as stopping abuses against children. Absense of evidence is not evidence of absense.

Censoring the evidence promotes abuses by driving them underground, where they are difficult to track. Such schemes divert resources and political will away from proven policing solutions which target producers and consumers.

Children depend, even more than their parents, on the quality and viability of government. An assault against those systems and ideals which keep government honest and accountable – public oversight, natural justice, and protection from state censorship – is not just an affront to Enlightment ideals, but an assult on the long term interests of children and adults alike.

The March 24th raid is not the first time the German state has attempted to censor Wikileaks; back in December 2008, Ernst Uhrlau, former police chief and current head of the BND, Germany’s equivalent to the CIA, threatened to prosecute the site unless it removed a BND dossier on corrupt officials in Kosovo and other information. The dossier was not removed. There is no evidence that the police action and the BND incident are related, but the situation, together with a recent Bundestag inquiry documenting illegal BND spying on the German press, does not paint a flattering picture of the state of German government.

OK, this is it. When I first read this article, I thought it was a sick joke, or The Onion. But then the full horror of it dawned on me.

For six months, I’ve tried to calm down. I haven’t been getting myself riled up by some of the insane things that have been going on. Well, OK, I have, but I’ve been mostly talking to the cats about it, rather than blogging about it and going public.

I’ve kept quiet about some of the insane things that have been going on in this state and this country (the world is too big even for me to take on :-). But maybe I’ve been fooling myself. Maybe it’s actually better for me to express my outrage. Maybe someone will read this and it will do some good.

But I’m starting to wonder if maybe it’s too late…that maybe things are too far gone, and too many people are just too stupid or too ignorant or too complacent to understand what’s going on and how bad it is and how it must be fixed. Hopefully not. Anyway, that slim hope is what got me back up here today, because perhaps this blog, and others like it, can educated, elucidate, and shake loose enough people to get things going properly again.

So here we go. I’m going to quote liberally from this article in the San Francisco Chronicle so you can understand exactly how bad the problem is. My comments are in bold.

(03-25) 20:36 PDT Oakland — About 60 people marched and rallied in Oakland on Wednesday to condemn the police and honor Lovelle Mixon, who was killed by Oakland police after he fatally shot four officers Saturday.

To condemn the police? The dead ones, who died trying to keep the mean streets of Oakland safe, or the ones who were left alive after the maniac Mixon starting his “killing spree”? To honor Lovelle Mixon? For what? For being a conviicted felon and a child rapist and a cop-killer?

“OPD you can’t hide – we charge you with genocide,” chanted the demonstrators as they marched along MacArthur Boulevard, near the intersection with 74th Avenue where Mixon, 26, a fugitive parolee, gunned down two motorcycle officers who had pulled him over in a traffic stop. He killed two more officers who tried to capture him where he was hiding in his sister’s apartment nearby.

Yeah, the Oakland Police Department is genocidal. They only go after black people, not criminals. /sarcasm

The protest was organized by the Oakland branch of the Uhuru Movement, whose flyers for the march declared, “Stop Police Terror.”

OK, here was a convicted felon in possession of a pistol (totally illegal under both state and Federal law) and (reportedly) an AK-47, which is the favorite firearm of terrorists worldwide and so illegal in California that even Arnold Schwarzenegger himself couldn’t purchase one legally. And the marchers call the police terrorists?

Lolo Darnell, one of Mixon’s cousins at the demonstration, said, “He needs sympathy too. If he’s a criminal, everybody’s a criminal.”

Lolo Darnell may well have a very valid point here.

Asked about police allegations that Mixon was suspected in several rapes, including that of a 12-year-old girl, marcher Mandingo Hayes said, “He wasn’t a rapist. I don’t believe that.”

Three words. Dee Enn Ay.

Bystanders had mixed reactions. Nicole Brown said that she can’t condone murder but that police don’t respect residents of the area. Daria Belt said she had no sympathy for the protesters but sympathized for Mixon’s family.

Yes, well, I realize Mixon’s family lost a family member, but when Mixon ran to his sister’s apartment, he didn’t have that AK-47 until he got there. So was she complicit in storing it for him? Or maybe it was hers in the first place?

Anyone who can support a POS like Lovell “good riddance” Mixon has, in my opinion, failed to meet the basic criteria of “human being” and must now be regarded as simple, vile scum of the earth. No matter what color their skin is. This isn’t about race…it’s about the survival of our civilization…assuming we still have one.

Also on the case: ScoopThis.org