Americans celebrating after the announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death.

I can’t be the only one who finds this disturbing.

The first video is just an example of what I remember seeing in 2001. I remember how appalled I was to see people celebrating such an abhorrent act of violence.

To see Americans celebrating the death of bin Laden in this way is in turns understandable, and frightening.

The death of a man who so represents that loss of innocence on September 11, 2001 must, in some ways be a catharsis for a country whose character has changed so much in the last ten years. For every inconvenience to an international traveler, for every government intrusion justified as “necessary” for homeland security, and for every person who died because of the plans masterminded by this man, this must feel like a moment of justification.

Then there’s the sense of America having achieved a goal set a decade ago, and this must feel like vindication. Like vengeance. And there’s the rub. At what cost will this vengeance come?

To a Muslim seeing the videos of Americans chanting in the streets, I’m not sure they’ll see the catharsis of a country that’s been held hostage by the schemes of a fundamentalist extremist.

They’ll see Americans celebrating the death of a Muslim, fulfilling the stereotypes promoted by the fundamentalist extremists like bin Laden and al Qaeda. Just as a few weeks ago, when a fundamentalist “pastor” burned a Qu’ran, they didn’t didn’t see an extremist, they saw an American burning their holy book, an act that cost 22 people their lives in violent retribution.

I fear for the effect that this could have on American aid workers and missionaries in predominantly Muslim countries – and what the news reports will bring over the coming weeks.

Late last year, our son (E) was formally diagnosed as high-functioning autistic/borderline Asperger’s Syndrome (There’s some debate over where the line is drawn between a high-functioning autistic and Asperger’s Syndrome). We’ve known he was a little “different” for several years. He had certain obsessive behaviours. There were major communication issues. Refusal to wear particular items of clothing, or eat particular foods. Overreactions to loud noises. Overreactions to everything. Regular emotional meltdowns.

When he was five, we saw a child psychologist who ran him through a raft of tests and then officiously told us “He has autistic traits, but we don’t want to label him”. We didn’t want a label either. What we wanted to know what how to deal with him on a day-to-day basis, because the things that worked for our oldest son most definitely weren’t working with E. We walked away from that encounter discouraged and frustrated. We continued to struggle with the behavioural issues for another couple of years until new friends with two kids on the spectrum were able to put us in touch with a paediatrician, and a child psychologist who were able to help us, and ultimately gave us the diagnosis we’d long suspected.

The fun didn’t stop there, however. Our youngest shows a lot of the same behaviours. I’ve been holding out hope that she was just imitating her brother, but as time as gone by it’s seeming apparent that the behaviours are all her. Life with two kids on the spectrum can be complicated at times, but there’s yet another factor in play.

Early this year, the same friends who connected us with the people who could help lent us “The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome” by Tony Attwood. A two-inch thick tome about life with Asperger’s. It was a painful, enlightening read. Not because it showed me what E would have to go through as he grew, but because in reading through the book I understood what he was going to go through. It wasn’t just describing him.

It was describing me.

It was as if somebody had followed me around throughout my childhood, and written down all of the things that had happened to me. It was like somebody could read my mind, and had written down the way I think, my experiences with relationships, my internal dialogues. I read passages of it out to my wife, who responded “That’s you. That’s you. That’s you AND E. That’s E. That’s you.” For the first time in my life, I felt like I had a handle on who “I” was. Who I am.

I’ve had more than one person since then say “You don’t seem like an Aspie”. I look people in the eye. I normally respond appropriately to questions and in conversation.

In part, I have my father and a pastor to thank for that. When I went to work for my father in my early teens, he pushed me into dealing with the customers over the counter. I hated it, but I did learn to talk to people, and look them in the eye. I also bought a book by Allan Pease on body language which helped me learn to “read” people. In my late teens, a pastor took me under his wing and spent time with me just being my friend. He later remarked to me that when he met me, I talked about three things – God, computers, or Star Trek – and if the conversation wasn’t about one of those things, I would very quickly turn it into one of those things. He spent time “teaching” me to communicate like a normal person.

I find social interaction extremely exhausting. I crave having close friends, and being part of a community, but the amount of energy that takes is enormous. I don’t “get” relationships. I’ve never been good at making or keeping friends. I’m mystified by the apparent ease at which people relate to each other.

See, when I’m conversing with someone, I’m constantly assessing what they say. Trying all the options to interpret what they might mean. I’m glancing at the way they stand, what they’re doing with their hands and feet, where they’re looking. I’m calculating if I’m holding their gaze long enough, or for too long. I can talk, but two-way communication doesn’t come naturally. If you talk to me for any length of time, I’ll say something… inappropriate. Not in a crude sense, but I’ll overshare. I’ll tend to stick to one of a few topics of conversation, even now.

When I go out socially, which is pretty rare, I spend the trip home rehashing everything that happened. Every conversation, trying to work out if I said the wrong thing, if I overtalked. Inside my head, I have a library of responses for social situations. Most of the time, I feel like I can pull the right one out in the right circumstances.

I don’t understand how to make a lasting friendship. I have a string of ‘failed’ friendships behind me – people who I thought were my friends who just stopped. In the majority of those cases, I was the one who always initiated contact, and when I stopped, so did the ‘friendship’. If that’s what it was. I don’t really know. I do have a couple of good friends now, although I still don’t understand quite how or why.

Communication isn’t the only issue that people on the spectrum have to deal with. I share many traits with my son. There are particular clothes that I own that I can’t wear. I can’t explain it other than to say they just feel wrong. If something catches my interest I can become obsessed with it (most recently I watched all three seasons of Chuck in every spare moment I had over an eight-day period). In a loud and noisy or busy environment I become overstimulated; spending more than a couple of hours in a busy shopping mall leaves me on the verge of a meltdown (and has pushed me over the edge on more than one occasion). All the people and the visual noise just become too much. Forget something like a stadium concert or a Big Day Out.

My wife gets to live with someone who can disappear into an obsession for days or weeks. I miss subtle (and not-so-subtle) hints. I can’t read her emotions, and am often emotionally unavailable. Not because I don’t want to be, but because I don’t know how to respond. Things get left undone around the house, not because I’m lazy (although I often am), but because they just don’t occur to me until they’re pointed out. All the nice and wonderful spontaneous things that a husband should do for a wife, I have to try and think of, and then plan out. Kind of takes the edge off the idea of “spontaneous”.

The thing is, unlike my son I don’t have a formal diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome (AS). 74% of children on the autism spectrum have a first degree relative who is also on the spectrum – that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m it. It’s also expensive and difficult for an adult to get a diagnosis. One of these difficulties is that most adults with AS have learnt so many of the necessary coping mechanisms to disguise their AS and fit in, they seem pretty normal on the outside. On the inside though, I feel like I’m on the wrong planet. I was seeing a psychologist who agrees that AS is a good fit. For me the most telling part is that even if I’m not AS, the strategies that work for adults with AS dealing with the world around them work for me.

Twitter, and Facebook to a lesser extent, make me feel like I’m connected. Like I’m “normal”. Sometimes they magnify my sense of disconnectedness, like everyone’s in on the joke except for me. I see people talking about other twitterers and relating their shared experiences, and I want to be a part of that world, even for a moment. To feel like I belong. Even when I am part of an experience though (MTUB meetups, for example), I still feel like I was on the outside looking in. I’ll twitter from the event because that’s what everyone else does.

I honestly don’t know if the Communication Shutdown is a good or bad thing. I’m not quite sure what difference it makes. Yet another social media awareness campaign amongst every other social media awareness campaign. It feels like the 21st century version of the AIDS awareness ribbon. At some point they all start to blend together, and I think people become jaded.

For me, I don’t need to disconnect from Twitter and Facebook to understand what it’s like on the autism spectrum.

I already feel disconnected.

I currently have my brother staying with me, which is great. I’m really enjoying that. However, it does mean that I’m talking a lot more than normal.

In addition, I went to church today, and made a conscious decision to actually interact with others, and not just keep my head down or make a run for the door after the service ended.

Then we went to the local shopping mall so he could find some post-Christmas bargains and our boys could spend their Christmas money.

None of these things are particularly taxing, but it seems that the combination of all of the above has left me worn out, and somewhat melancholy.

And really desperate to withdraw. this worries me, because achieving my list of goals requires small daily changes, consistently. When I’m in a mood like this, my tendency is to just skip the little things that day; sometimes that becomes a week, then suddenly two or three months have passed.

In spite of my enthusiasm to change my life over the next year, I fear the biggest obstacle may be … me.

Why the government wants to filter the internet.

We don’t let kids play with explosives, we don’t want people giving drugs to our kids, we make people get a driver’s licence before letting people out on the road, we get cranky with people for breaking into our houses and stealing stuff, and we get very upset with people who make other people dead.

If you give explosives to children, illegal drugs to anybody, drive without a licence, steal stuff, or deadify other people, and you get caught, you get into lots of trouble and possibly go to jail. No $200 for you. We have people to do this job: the police.

We also have rules about what we let into the country. You’re not allowed to bring in illegal porn, drugs, objects that might contain bugs that will destroy our crops and trees. We have people to do this: Australian Customs.

Out there on the internet, it’s a big free-for-all. If you want it, you can find it; or to invoke Rule 34 – “If it exists, there is porn of it”. But the policing the internet isn’t quite as simple as policing the physical world, or stopping illegal stuff from coming across our physical borders.

So the government has decided that we need to be stopped from seeing the illegal stuff. And that’s one of the things we elected them to do. No, really.

See, most people want the government to make sure that there are systems in place to stop drug dealers, smugglers, thieves and murderers (and other “bad people”). We want laws that say “this is wrong, and if we catch you doing it (and we will try), these are the consequences”. Now, the government has said “Well, there’s all this stuff on the internet that’s illegal, and it’s our job to stop it. We said we would stop it, and now we will. Because we need to protect the children.”

The government’s proposed solution is a two-tiered filtering system. There’s an opt-out “Clean-feed” filter that blacklists adult material from your internet connection, stuff you don’t want your kids seeing. You don’t want to be filtered, you can opt out.

It’s the other mandatory tier that’s considered to be “the problem”.

Why We Don’t Want the Government to Filter the Internet.

There are several problems with the proposed filtering solution from the government.

• It will slow down your internet connection.
• It will incorrectly block websites that aren’t illegal.
• It will only block web traffic, and not all the other different ways of getting illegal material from one person to another.
• It will be reasonably easy for anyone vaguely technical to circumvent – like your teenager, or his technically savvy friend.
• It’s a technical boondoggle that will consume millions of dollars better spent elsewhere.
• It’s a technical solution to what is arguably a social problem
• The blacklist will get out – and into the hands of the people you don’t want having a list of paedophilia websites.

Since this post isn’t about rehashing other people’s work, NoCleanFeed.com has one of the best resources for explaining these downsides of the filter, and other informative links.

I do want to draw your attention to that last point. One of the points that the opponents to the filter have focused on is that the blacklist will not be open to public scrutiny. Now, it should be obvious why that is – you don’t want certain people getting a hold of a list of pedophilia websites.

But what’s to stop the government from adding website addresses for sites that AREN’T illegal?

On the 18th of March, 2009 a supposed copy of the current ACMA blacklist was released to wikileaks.org. Senator Conroy’s press release blasted the irresponsibility of the individual(s) responsible for leaking the list, denied that it IS the ACMA blacklist, but admitted that there were sites in common between the two lists.

The blacklist contained links to “satanic”/”fringe” religious websites, euthanasia websites and hardcore porn websites. However, it ALSO had links to Christian websites, an anti-abortion website, a travel operator, and a dentist! Sucks if you’re the dentist who spent thousands of dollars on a website which no-one can see, and you have no idea why.

So what’s the problem?

There are whole bunch of good reasons why the filter is a “Bad Thing”. Unfortunately, many of those reasons range from technical to REALLY technical. And Senator Conroy is on the warpath, supposedly accusing opponents of the mandatory filter of being “supporters of child pornography” and spreading hysteria. There are people like Clive Hamilton (Professor of Public Ethics at the Australian National University) and Jim Wallace (Australian Christian Lobby) and numerous others who are backing up Senator Conroy and attacking the anti-filter opponents.

Unfortunately, the leaking of the blacklist plays right into their hands.

After being out most of the day, I jumped on Twitter this afternoon to find multiple people linking to copies of the blacklist. From wikileaks.org, copies were re-posted in multiple locations. I have no doubt that many anti-filter opponents have a copy that they can put up if the list disappears.

So I asked the question “Do people actually want to be providing a list of sites that almost definitely contain URLs linking to child porn?” Mark Pesce pointed out that attempting to stop it from happening is subject to the Streisand Effect – “attempting to censor a piece of information causes the information to be widely publicised”.

So, here we have a group of people on Twitter linking to, re-posting and discussing the blacklist. It doesn’t make Twitter bad, doesn’t make those people bad, doesn’t make the discussion wrong. However, it does give the pro-filter ammunition to “prove” their arguments about those opposed to the filter.

Expect to hear something like this from the pro-filter lobby in the next few days. “See, we were right! As soon as they got their hands on it, they spread it around! They couldn’t help but talk about it! They reposted it everywhere making it easy for the pedophiles and perverts to find! They’re pro-child pornography! They can’t be trusted!”

And how will we deny it? We can’t deny the actions. We did talk about. Some people did re-post it. And although we can state our motives were not those we’re accused of, how do we prove it?

I think the one of the biggest problems is that most of the push in the anti-filter opposition is technical. Mark Newton has written a great amount of excellent information as to what’s wrong with the filter, and has met with government representatives. People like Stilgherrian and Mark Pesce have demolished the arguments of Clive Hamilton, on more than one occasion. Mark Newton went head-to-head with Jim Wallace on ABC Radio National debating the filter. There are lots of very intelligent, thoughtful people repeatedly explaining why the filter won’t work.

Thousands of #nocleanfeed tagged Tweets have scrolled up people’s screens explaining why the filter is a very bad thing, and picking apart every piece of information related to the filter.

The fundamental problem is that we’re treating this like a debate, and the anti-filter opponents are playing the role of the negative team. In debating, the only job of the negative team is to demolish the argument of the affirmative team.

This is not a debate. This is not a referendum. The government is going ahead with trials, and are rumoured to be planning to institute the filter however they can. Those of us opposing the filter need to stop focusing on just demolishing the government’s arguments - we need to present a better solution than the one proposed.

There’s no good reason why the are thousands of highly intelligent individuals sitting behind computers screens shouldn’t be able to work together to create a detailed, workable alternative to the government’s so-called “solution”.

What do we do now?

A large part of the answer is education. But it’s NOT ENOUGH to just respond with “education” when asked what the answer is.

“We” understand this stuff. We understand why the filter won’t work. We understand that there are better ways of doing things.

But “they” don’t. The great “unwashed masses” who bought a computer from Harvey Norman on Flexirent, or saw a TV ad and called Dell so that their kids don’t get left behind. The parents who are literally scared of their PC. The users who can’t understand why the machine they bought a couple of months ago is completely clagged because it’s now riddled with spyware “…and what the hell IS spyware anyway?”

We can explain that the filter will slow down their internet – a lot of them won’t notice. We’ll tell them that some websites will get blocked incorrectly – they won’t care, as long as they can’t get to the websites they want, and after all, 1 in 10,000 isn’t that much of a worry.

Parents want to protect their kids, and that’s the line the government is pushing. The government is telling them “the filter will protect your kids. The people against it support child porn.” We know the government is twisting the facts, and lying outright where necessary.

What positive alternative solution are WE offering??

“Education.” How? Who? What? Are we just going to throw that one-word answer back, and leave it in the lap of the government? They don’t care! The Great Australian Child-proof Fence is WHAT WE GOT when we left it to the government to provide a solution.

“We” need to work out how we can educate the non-tech savvy. And it MUST be part of our anti-censorship strategy going forwards. We need to be able to say to the parents that are worried about what their kids are looking at “This is how you can monitor it. This is why you don’t need to be afraid of the computer.”

(And stop snickering at the “computer illiterate”, and snarking about how if they could afford to buy a computer, they should learn how to use it. There’s a long distance between the way we wish things were and the way they are. It doesn’t get any shorter by standing back and waxing lyrical over the fact that it’s there. Get out there and talk to some non-technical people. In the echo chamber of Twitter, it’s easy for us to all reinforce our arguments, but what are the non IT people thinking? How do they feel about it? Are they even aware of the proposal?? Odds on, they’re not.)

We need to propose and provide a solution that counters the government’s claims about what they’re trying to achieve, but also works in layman’s terms. We need to work together to not only say “education is the key” but “here is how you educate someone who’s afraid of their computer”.

Mark Pesce uses the term “Digital Citizenship”.

Even if we manage to stop the Great Australian Child-proof Fence this time, if we don’t find a way to put our knowledge into layman’s terms, draw the non-computer savvy up to meet in the middle, and teach “digital citizenship”, then a solution will be imposed on us.

In summary: The pro-filter lobby are offering a solution to the “problem”. It’s not enough for the anti-censorship campaign to demolish their argument – if we don’t start offering an alternative workable solution as part of our strategy, we will ultimately fail.

Postscript: I got poked about not having an obvious link to my Twitter account.

The post in question was regarding Alister’s unintentional uncovering of a list of credit card numbers through Google. While I’m not terribly concerned about someone uncovering my credit card number (let’s face it, it’s hard to buy stuff on a card with no available credit), I did think about the advice he gave about searching Google for your own credit card number.

I think his suggestions are reasonable, if a little misguided. As several people have since commented (and I swear I thought of this before they left the comments!) punching your entire credit card number into Google might not be the wisest move. Apart from being transmitted in plain text, the search can be stored in your search history, and thus is stored in Google’s enormous database. Also, advising that the number is useless without a CVV2/CVC2 number is incorrect. You can still make a card-absent transaction without these numbers in many cases, but (as I understand it) it just means that if the card-holder disputes the transaction, there is a much better chance of the dispute going the card-holder’s way.

In addition, in my experience with dealing with client credit card information (I’ve had some interesting jobs), most credit cards have a two or three year expiry date. It brings the potential range of expiry dates down to 24-36 months at the outside. It’s just information I wouldn’t want to risk.

However, Alister’s advice is good, with some modifications. If you want to Google your credit card number, drop off the first four, and last four digits, enclosing the middle eight digits in quotation marks. The first four digits give away the card type (eg, 4564 is a Visa card). Removal of the last four digits renders the card number useless, even if some nefarious individual was able to guess your card type.

Thus, if your Visa card number was 4564 1234 5678 9012, you would search for “12345678″ and also “1234 5678″ (including the space). This logic would also hold for Alister’s advice about searching for your password – if it’s something unusual, but I don’t think I’ll be doing any password searches all the same.

The first thing that popped into my head when I saw that twitter was “check The Age“. The second was the parable spoken by Jesus in Luke 12:13-21. Not as a judgement of John Ilhan (I didn’t know him personally; by all accounts I’ve read he was a good & compassionate man), but as a reflection of the things that I sought to achieve for so long. John Ilhan seemed to have had all the good things most would aspire to; a wife and four kids, he reportedly had a personal fortune of $310 million dollars, a mansion in Brighton, was fit and healthy, exercised regularly. He had a heart attack while out walking in the early morning.

I’ve spent much of my life thus far reaching for more than I have. Caught up in the collective consumerist nightmare that most of us share. John Ilhan had already achieved that through determination and hard work. I wonder if he was happy? He seemed to be during his interview on Monday night. He spoke of spending nights sleeping on the floor of his shop while he was building his business; I didn’t sleep on the floor of either of my shops, but I came close. He succeeded where I chose to walk away. His hard work paid off for him, quite handsomely.

Now he’s gone, in the prime of his life (as they say). I guess that like any bereaved partner, his wife would give anything for just a few more minutes with him. If my life were suddenly over tomorrow, what would my legacy be? Could I look back and say that I lived a life worth living? Would my family be overjoyed at the time I spent with them, or regretful at the time I didn’t?

Sadly, I think that at this point in my life the answers would not be positive. Yesterday, I read an article in Newsweek that indicated that money “bought happiness” when moving some-one from “abject poverty” to “middle-class” but beyond that, there were diminishing returns on increasing wealth vs. happiness. Society is geared towards consumerism; making us unhappy with what we have and wanting something better. At this time in my life, I want for very little. I’m trying to learn to be thankful for, and satisfied with, the things I have; and to invest my time in the relationships I have with the people around me, for they are far more valuable than mere “stuff”.

The untimely death of John Ilhan reinforces this for me. At the end, whether you believe in an afterlife or not, the only things left behind for those who we love is the time and love we have given them. The stuff we had will rust and decay, but the time we invest in others can pay dividends far beyond our lifetime.