Parliament must act
THE date: Wednesday, Sept 15, 2007.
The setting: Parliament House.
The occasion: PNG Development Forum.
Among the recommendations to the Government:
Public office holders found guilty by a leadership tribunal should be banned for life from holding public office.
The proposal, made on the eve of our 32nd Independence celebrations, was put forward because leaders consistently escaped appearing before the tribunal by resigning from Parliament. Many then stood again for re-election. Those who were successful again faced the leadership tribunal in an obvious travesty of justice.
The Development Forum made a number of other recommendations, all of which gained popular support and public approval. Among those put forward by the Law, Order and Justice group was an appeal to Parliament to give the Ombudsman Commission powers to prosecute.
Additionally, the group proposed that a leadership tribunal be given the powers to order restitution from guilty parties, enabling a tribunal to repossess property from those who had stolen public money.
A further call was made for sharply increased funding for the Ombudsman Commission so that it might better address corruption and weakness at leadership levels.
John Toguata, the group’s spokesman, noted that since 1995, two major constitutional amendments, the Organic Law on Provincial and Local Level Governments and the Integrity of Political Parties and Candidates had brought an additional 5,000 leaders under the Commission’s jurisdiction.
Mr Toguata added that “this is an administrative nightmare for the Commission”.
It appears that the Government has chosen to ignore most of those recommendations and a number of others made at the Forum. The situation where an MP can be found guilty of the most heinous level of corruption and simply be fined and lose his job for three years has probably done more to bring our elected leaders into disrepute than any other factor.
And we have seen a provincial governor jailed for a most serious offence, the rape of a minor, yet be allowed to stand for re-election to Parliament.
Just how little clout our laws can have was amply demonstrated when the former Member easily “won” the election and was only forestalled from creating a major judicial and even constitutional crisis by a decision that his “victory” was illegal.
The intentions of our Constitution are perfectly clear.
Leaders are expected to perform their duties with transparency. None of those who drafted our Constitution could ever have envisaged a situation such as that involving the provincial governor.
Nor could they have foreseen that members of the House would display such levels of irresponsibility that they would resign rather than face a legal examination of their performance.
If the State is ever to help our people to understand our system of government, it must attend to these matters.
The National believes that any leader who is found to have breached our leadership laws should be treated with the utmost severity – and that means a mandatory life-long ban on assuming any further leadership role.
It is immaterial whether they are elected MPs , or if they head a public service department or statutory authority. Such people have for decades held the State to ransom and defrauded the people who have either elected them or placed their trust in them.
Too often they have escaped any meaningful penalty.
Government after government has ignored or diluted a host of recommendations that have been put forward by reputable leaders. The result is clear – a deep-rooted contempt for our system of government, for the laws of our country and for the very concept of leadership.
Leaders are increasingly shown little respect apart from a kind of fawning subservience from those who believe they have something to gain from a façade of humility and false praise. That is not the type of society our founding fathers sought to create.
As Sir Michael Somare said at the dawn of the new millennium, “sometimes we forget what we are and who we are … the foundation laid to build this nation was rooted in the eight-point plan”.
That plan envisaged an honest, equal and transparent society.
Few honest Papua New Guineans will fault that philosophy and we urge the Government to follow the vision of its leader.
 
China’s battle to police the web
By Darren Waters
BEIJING: Web users in China are able to view the BBC News website for the first time in years. So how does the so-called great firewall of China work?
It is not clear why China’s net population, the world’s largest, is suddenly able to view the BBC News website after years of being blocked. Nor is it clear how long the access will continue.
But what is certain is that China’s authorities have dynamic control of what their citizens can and cannot access.
Most countries that block or filter the internet do so on a site-by-site basis. For example, Pakistan blocked YouTube recently by telling internet service providers (ISPs) in the country to redirect traffic whenever someone typed in the address for the popular video sharing site.
By deliberately rewriting the net address books inside Pakistan, authorities were able to redirect traffic.
But this is a blunt method of filtering and relies on authorities to actively track websites it wants to ban.
China does not block content or web pages in this way. Instead the technology deployed by the Chinese government, called Golden Shield, scans data flowing across its section of the net for banned words or web addresses.
There are five gateways which connect China to the internet and the filtering happens as data is passed through those ports.
When the filtering system spots a banned term, it sends instructions to the source server and destination PC to stop the flow of data.
Amnesty International has accused net giant Cisco and Sun Microsystems of actively assisting with the development of censorship and surveillance systems in the country. Both firms have rejected the accusation and have said the equipment they sell to China was no different from products sold in other countries.
The dynamic nature of filtering in China gives the government more control over content and means the authorities can react to news events.
It has been called “just-in-time filtering” and is being employed more widely around the world in oppressive regimes. It allows authorities to block access to information around key events like elections, demonstrations, etc.
Security researchers believe this form of filtering was employed on YouTube in China during the recent unrest in Tibet.
In January last year, president Hu Jintao reportedly ordered officials to regulate the internet better and “purify the online environment” ensuring that online information is “healthy” and “ethically inspiring”.
This was followed by a new wave of censoring certain websites, blogs and online articles.
But there have been well-documented ways to by-pass China’s firewall. One method involves connecting to a friendly computer outside China and using it as a proxy, to access websites that are banned.
China cannot block every computer outside its borders so this method has proved popular with citizens wanting unfettered access to the net. The problem has been in informing users in China of the IP address, the unique number of every device online, of the machines willing to act as proxy servers.
E-mail has been one method to alert people; however, China is believed to have 30,000 people who routinely scan e-mails for this kind of information. Organisations in the US and elsewhere have been working on technology to make this process of finding friendly computers more easily.
The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab has developed software called psiphon which acts as a tunnel through the firewall. Psiphon works through social networks. A net user in an uncensored country can download the program to their computer, which transforms it into an access point.
They can then give contacts in censored countries a unique web address, login and password, which enables the restricted users to browse the web freely through an encrypted connection to the proxy server.
Its creators say the system provides strong protection against “electronic eavesdropping” because censors or ISPs can see only that end users are connected to another computer and not view the sites that are being visited.
But even without specialised software, some China net users are able to crack the firewall. – BBC
Editorial