VioTV : Kickstart 2009 has got a great selection of videos about the issue of Internet censorship and child pornography. A woman on whom I place great respect, Bernadette McMenamin, CEO of ChildWise, becomes caught in an increasingly heated debate, especially with Mark Newton, whom you know I also have great respect for.
It’s an issue I care much about, because I know the problem is greater than the media and our own common sense may tell us, and because I believe the solutions that the government are proposing will not lead us to a solution.
Love Mark as I do, I do find him a little dogmatic at times (he he he), and when he calls someone else’s idea “stupid” at a national conference, I can’t help but think “Oh man, that is so Mark”.
While studying through the piles of data in front of me, I’ve had triple j’s Hack podcasts going on in the background. It’s last Thursday’s show, so I’m not up to date in the world, but the show is about the government’s campaign to monitor and ban Internet sites, and make child pornography inaccessible.
Great arguments coming from both sides of the fence. On one side are the government and child protection groups, on the other are civil libertarians. I have to admit I sit on the fence. I fiercely defend our freedoms, where possible, to access to all information, and would by default defy attempts by the powerful to halt my access to it. On the other hand I loathe child pornography and by default support all attempts to reduce supply and demand of such products and projects.
Among the speakers on the civil libertarian side of the fence was a much wise man named Mark Newton. Newton works for an “unnamed” ISP and is becoming one of our country’s lead experts on topics such as Internet, censorship and politics in Australia and elsewhere.
Mark also was my best friend throughout high school. He and I were the supernerds. We normally got highest school scores in Maths and Sciences. Yet while my interests normally lay in the social sciences, he was deep in computers. He used to tell me that with my mind I could do whatever I wanted, and I would say with his skills he could literally jumpstart human evolution, eliminate world poverty and become the world’s richest man. I was amazed at how he could see the world, identify all the tiny building blocks that would construct it, and endeavour to capture and manipulate them into something new.
He hasn’t done that yet, but given he is first considered an expert, and second called an expert on the world’s greatest media outlet, triple j, he is now my hero.
Mark, when I grow up I want to be just like you.
