Porn Storm Rains Down On Australian Government

Sit-ins are out.

Love-ins, passé.

Porn storms are the new way to protest.

It brought the Australian government to its knees (kinda).

Several Australian government websites were shut down on Wednesday when hackers bombarded the government with porn. The attacked was launched by a group calling itself “Anonymous.”

According to Ars Technica, the hackers’ denial of service attack, which targeted Parliament’s website and the main Australian government site, was followed by a “‘s***storm’ of porn-related e-mails, faxes, and prank cell phone calls to government officials, with a special focus on three types of content that has fallen under the ban: small-breasted porn, cartoon porn, and female ejaculation.

One email included the message: “The Australian government will learn that one does not mess with our porn [...] No one messes with our access to perfectly legal (or illegal) content for any reason.”

This is in response to a government plan to introduce a mandatory government filtering system by 2011 which will block websites deemed obscene.

Internet porn use undoubtedly has a lot of problems associated with it, including addiction and the accidental exposure of children to hard-core sex and violence. But is this the way to go about it?

Admittedly part of me thinks it a great idea to block the really nasty stuff, like child porn, that governments have long kept out of their borders. This is probably the only way the government can control content of this kind.

And then I think about banning small breasts and female ejaculation, which smacks of sexism. (Sometimes women with small breasts have sex. Sometimes women ejaculate during sex. Both are healthy and normal.)

And then I think of cartoon porn which harms no one in its production.

And then I think of all the times governments have been given an inch and have taken a mile. How can we trust them to make reasoned decisions about the standard of porn that must be kept out of the country?  Sure, we can all think of things so horrendous that any reasonable person would ban them, but this isn’t about that. It’s about the small-breasted ejaculating grey area.

There is a problem here which cries out for a solution. This is not it.

When it comes to porn, chances are we’re all Anonymous.

[Note: I live in a country with very restrictive internet bans. The result is that everyone has a VPN.]

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