Orders from prime minister’s department and police: web site shut down

On orders from prime minister’s department and police: Australian web site shut down

By Richard Phillips
23 March 2006

One week before the third anniversary of the criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Australian government forced the closure of a satirical web site that powerfully exposed several key lies told by Prime Minister John Howard to justify participation in the US-led war.

Authored by Richard Neville, former editor of Oz magazine—a well-known satirical publication that challenged British censorship laws in the 1960s—the site—johnhowardpm.org—was suspended after a high-level intervention by the prime minister’s department and the federal police.

The web site consisted of an “apology speech” from Howard in which the prime minister announces that he is reversing his support for the invasion of Iraq. It cites several Howard speeches, including an address to the Institute of Public Affairs in May 2004 when he claimed that hospitals, electricity, water, sewerage and other basic services were being restored to ordinary Iraqis. In the “speech”, the prime minister claims that he is now “a troubled citizen” and that all US-led forces should withdraw as soon as possible so that the Iraqi people can “regain control of their future”. Although the site remains blocked, the speech is now available as a pdf at “John Howard’s apology: reflections of the situation in Iraq”

Posted on March 13, the site received over 10,500 hits in a little over 24 hours before it encountered unexplained “technical difficulties”. Neville contacted Yahoo!, which maintained for several days that it was looking into “technical problems”. On March 16 he phoned Melbourne IT and one of its representatives admitted that Greg Williams from the People, Resources and Communication Division of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet had ordered the site’s domain name be suspended, effectively shutting down the site.

Williams falsely claimed that the site looked like the prime minister’s own web site and therefore violated its property rights. Melbourne IT also admitted that the company had received three phone calls from the Australian Federal Police, including from the AFP’s Australian Hi-Tech Crime Centre.

Not surprisingly, Yahoo! has not objected to this violation of the right to free speech. Last year it provided the Chinese government with information that led to a 10-year jail term for a Chinese journalist who provided information to western news services about growing inequality in China. The multi-billion dollar corporation responded to protests over this action by declaring that it regularly responded to requests from police agencies for information, not just in China but in other countries as well. Yahoo! also has a long-standing agreement to censor Chinese language search engine and other services, in line with Beijing’s dictates.

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There appears to be no immediate or clear legal framework through which Neville can appeal against what has occurred—an Australian government bureaucrat can simply phone the domain name registration body and demand that the domain name be cancelled, thereby dismantling the site.

What has happened to Neville sets a dangerous precedent for the future. Using these police-state methods any political cartoonist, filmmaker, artist, writer or actor satirising a government politician can now be accused of copyright infringements and censored and/or prosecuted.

more at http://wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/nevi-m23_prn.shtml