The Weekly Cybers #15
Elon Musk versus the eSafety Commissioner, ASIO and the AFP versus online platforms, and more.
Welcome
When I mentioned last week that politicians had expressed concerns over videos of the Wakeley church stabbing being posted online, I had no idea it was going to turn into an international snipefest between X’s Elon Musk and Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, supported by a gaggle of politicians on both sides.
The carry-on has dominated the news this week, and it dominates this newsletter today. I’ve also added my own opinion.
We also have speeches from the heads of both ASIO and the AFP on social media, AI, and end to end encryption, plus the usual range of smaller items.
Musk fights for the right to post stabbing videos
On 15 April, during a service at Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley, Sydney, an attacker stabbed bishop Mari Emmanuel and a priest before injuring another churchgoer. The who and why and how is not important here. You can read about that for yourself.
What is important is that the service was being livestreamed and the video of the attack was soon posted on social media, including the platform formerly known as Twitter.
The next day Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant issued takedown notices to Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) and X, giving them 24 hours to remove material which depicted “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact or detail”.
“While the majority of mainstream social media platforms have engaged with us, I am not satisfied enough is being done to protect Australians from this most extreme and gratuitous violent material circulating online,” Inman Grant said.
Meta complied. X didn’t.
X did geoblock the relevant posts for Australian users, but such a block is easy to bypass with a VPN, so for Inman Grant that wasn’t enough.
Elon Musk pushed back, referring to her as the “censorship commissar [sic]” and saying she was calling for “global content bans”. Which she was.
SEE YOU IN COURT
X would “robustly challenge this unlawful and dangerous approach in court”, the company said, but the eSafety Commissioner got there first.
On Monday the Federal Court issued an interim injunction, ordering the content be put behind a notice globally. On Wednesday the injunction was extended to 5pm on 10 May, when the court will hold an injunction hearing.
As the Guardian reported:
The current order is not a rolling order for the removal of every tweet containing the video, but refers only to the 65 tweets identified by eSafety. This means future tweets containing the video are not covered by the order. X has said it has geo-blocked access to the 65 tweets in question, making them unavailable within Australia, with the intention of challenging the removal notice in court.
Tests on some of the URLs submitted to X by eSafety detailed in the court documents using a virtual private network connection suggest many are still accessible from other countries, not hidden behind a notice as the court had ordered.
Amusingly, even as X says it’s complying with the interim order, and has “restricted all the relevant content in Australia and is removing any content that praises or celebrates the attacks,” guess what’s happening?
A X user, on a blue-tick verified account apparently based in New Hampshire in the US, posted a reply to the company’s statement soon afterwards, in which they embedded the footage of the attack.
The post appeared directly below X’s official post and was both viewable and playable to Australian users.
Indeed, communications minister Michelle Rowland had admitted that the notices couldn’t capture every upload, so one wonders how many rounds of Whac-A-Mole we’re going to see here.
And as for the court case, stay tuned.
IN OTHER PLOT TWISTS:
- Musk has branded Senator Jacqui Lambie “an enemy of the people” after she deleted her X account and called on people to do the same.
- Opposition leader Peter Dutton backs Musk, calling the removal demands “silly”. “We can’t be the internet police of the world,” he said.
- The bishop who was stabbed wants the video to remain visible, and will be filing an affidavit to that effect.
- Meanwhile United Australia’s Senator Ralph Babet managed to upload the video to Facebook, twice, because of course he did — although they were removed a few hours later.
- In the wake of the stabbing, seven “juveniles” have been arrested in a series of 13 raids across south-western Sydney involving more than 400 police, and another five are assisting police with their inquiries. Police allege they adhere to a “religiously motivated violent extremist ideology”.
I’ve mostly linked to stories in the Guardian here, because their coverage has been both extensive and level-headed.
Musk is annoying, but he’s got a point
“The Australian people want the truth. X is the only one standing up for their rights,” Musk posted.
I won’t link to it, because he’s just grandstanding for the attention. His “free speech absolutist” rhetoric has always been bullshit. Criticise him and you’ll soon see the block-happy sook at work.
Because Musk is such an arsehole, there’s been plenty of people wanting him to be slapped down. But in my view the eSafety Commissioner is overreaching quite a bit here.
Digital rights enthusiast Justin Warren provided a concise explanation in a message to The Weekly Cybers:
I get that people don’t like Musk, neither do I, but saying “this company must remove content globally because local Australian law means it can’t be seen here” is the same logic that would require Australian companies to remove things that, say, China or Iran find objectionable.
Like images of tank guy and Tiananmen Square, for example, or 1970s women being happy while wearing skirts outside.
As Bond University’s Professor Dan Jerker B Svantesson wrote in The Conversation:
In the end, we must recognise the internet is a shared resource. All countries, including Australia, should be very careful in how they apply their laws where it can have a “spill-over” effect impacting people in other countries.
Global take-down orders are justifiable in some situations, but cannot be the default position for all content that violates some law somewhere in the world. If we had to comply with all content laws worldwide, the internet would no longer be as valuable as it is today.
And more generally, maybe the Australian government should stop its constant knee-jerk pearl-clutching, “Oh no, there is a bad thing and it’s on the internet!”.
ASIO and AFP blast online platforms
ASIO director-general Mike Burgess and Australian Federal Police (AFP) commissioner Reece Kershaw both addressed the National Press Club on Wednesday, and both had things to say.
Kershaw blamed social media platforms for “pouring accelerant on the flames” of misinformation and extremism, and hit out at their “indifference and defiance”.
Some of our children and other vulnerable people are being bewitched online by a cauldron of extremist poison on the open and dark web...
Instead of putting out the embers that start on their platforms, their indifference and defiance is pouring accelerant on the flames.
For his part, Burgess reiterated the problems that agencies such as his face with end-to-end encryption.
Encryption is clearly a good thing, a positive for our democracy and our economy. It protects privacy, it enables communications and transactions. But at the same time it also protects terrorists, spies, saboteurs and [...] abhorrent criminals.
Repeating the truism that privacy is not absolute, he had a message for tech companies.
Today I am asking – urging – the tech companies to work with us to resolve this challenge.
Let me be absolutely clear. I am not calling for an end to end-to-end encryption. I am not asking for new laws. I am not asking for new powers. I am not asking for more resources. I am not asking the government to do anything.
I am asking the tech companies to do more. I’m asking them to give effect to the existing powers and to uphold existing laws.
This newsletter is already quite long, so for all the nuances I recommend reading Mike Burgess’s full speech and Reece Kershaw’s full speech, or watching the ABC’s video which includes the subsequent Q&A.
Why not forward this email to a friend?
Well, why not? The more people this reaches, the more inspired I am to keep doing it.
Also in the news
- Peter Dutton supports giving the eSafety Commissioner more powers to fight misinformation, calling social media companies “above the law”, but conservative Coalition senators oppose them.
- The Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) has started salvaging investments in the failed GovERP project, reports InnovationAus ($), which chewed up $345 million before being abandoned.
- I wrote last week about the problems facing the evidence collected via the AFP’s AN0M messaging app. Well here’s some analysis by an actual lawyer. The argument centres on when a message enters the “telecommunications system” and can therefore legitimately be sent to the cops under a telecommunications intercept warrant. You’d better read it for yourself.
- The AFP is looking for a new chief information security officer following the departure of Tim Spiteri. So is La Trobe University.
Inquiries of note
Nothing new this week.
Elsewhere
- Former Victorian chief health officer Brett Sutton says Australia must do more to address health misinformation before AI makes it harder to call out.
- Finally, one I missed last week. Back in November the online safety research group Reset.Tech Australia filed a complaint against Meta over “potentially misleading” mis- and disinformation reporting in Australia. The complaint was dismissed by Digital Industry Group Inc (DIGI), the industry’s self-regulation body — of which Meta is a member. The voluntary Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation (PDF) works as designed!
What’s next?
Parliament is currently on break until Budget Night on Tuesday 14 May, unless of course something dramatic happens.
Any questions or comments? Just reply to this email. Cheers.
The Weekly Cybers is a personal look at what the Australian government has been saying and doing in the digital and cyber realms, on various adjacent topics, and whatever else interests me, Stilgherrian, published every Friday afternoon (nearly).
If I’ve missed anything, or if there’s any specific items you’d like me to follow, please let me know.
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This is not specifically a cyber *security* newsletter. For that that I recommend Risky Biz News and Cyber Daily, among others.