Wikileaks Pages Added To Australian Internet Blacklist 437
cpudney writes "The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has added several Wikileaks pages to its controversial blacklist. The blacklisted pages contain Denmark's list of banned websites. Simply linking to addresses in ACMA's blacklist attracts an $11,000 per-day fine as the hosts of the popular Australian broadband forum, Whirlpool, discovered last week when they published a forum post that linked to an anti-abortion web-site recently added to ACMA's blacklist. The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian government's proposed mandatory ISP-level Internet censorship legislation. Wikileaks' response to notification of the blacklisting states: 'The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship.'" So Australians aren't allowed to see what it is that the Danes aren't allowed to see?
And it sucks more for Australians (Score:4, Interesting)
At least in Denmark, you can drive a little ways and get your Internet uncensored.
For those unlucky souls in Australia who can't access their favorite aberrent websites don't really have any good recourse.
Australia going fascist?! (Score:2, Interesting)
Looks like Australia is going fascist *instead* of the USA.
Dick Cheney must be drooling at this.
This is probably one of the things he always wanted.
Actually... (Score:5, Interesting)
The anti-abortion website was purposely reported to ACMA (the gov dept looking after the censorship) to test the waters in reporting websites.
All it took was one email.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
This makes me angry and sad (Score:2, Interesting)
I am watching my country turn into a fascist police state before my eyes.
Government Knows What's Best For You. Shutup, do your shitty little job, pay your taxes, and be thankful we haven't shipped you off to gitmo yet. Sit back and enjoy the pre-approved content and advertising.
I honestly don't know what to do anymore. These fuckwits are ruining the planet and there's nobody to stop them.
If you stand up against them, you're a child pornographer or a terrorist. Not that that even matters anyway, since they have billions and billions of dollars with which you can never compete, and an army that makes the idea of uprising or revolt laughable, especially given the fact that most of the population is not armed.
200 years ago, some american dudes got pissed at the way the Brits were doing things. Good for them, they just moved to another country and started over.
What the fuck can we do? That option is off the table. We can move to a different country, but all countries are heading in the same direction pretty much. We are stuck here under an oppressive government with no hope for improvement, no possibility of living somewhere that truly values freedom.
If the bill gets voted down this time, it's only a matter of horse trading or another election cycle until some other knows-whats-best-for-you little bitch comes in and puts it up for another vote. Eventually, it will get through.
I'm looking for options. I want to know what we can do to crush these corrupt fucking assholes before they destroy us all.
The F word is not helpful (Score:4, Interesting)
This has nothing to do with fascism. The problem with fascism wasn't censorship. Censorship is bad, fascism included censorship as a matter of course, but it's not what was particularly bad about fascism. Soviet Russia wasn't fascist. It was bad too, just not in the same way.
Today the United States are much closer to fascism than Australia, yet they enjoy incomparable freedom of speech.
Militarization of the economy, dubious appeals to patriotism, booming prison population, the collusion between corporate interests and government, that's fascist-ish.
Censorship, that's what you find in China, which is not nearly as bad as the US in the areas I just listed (but by no means any better overall, don't get me wrong.)
Re:It's all child pornography. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm an American too, but I say: come up with some better ideas. Starting with doing away with the taboos about sex in general might be a step in the right decision. The American idea that violence is pretty much OK, but sex is not to be talked about, and naked bodies should be considered racy or disturbing is such a perversion. A natural relationship towards sex could start with breaking down the structural homophobia that is still widely accepted.
Re:Good luck with that... (Score:4, Interesting)
Given the choice between dealing with government bureaucracy or using a technical end-run around the same, I'll take the technical approach every time. At least it will deterministically give the desired results.
And as I mentioned, you don't need to get the whole page, just check the headers. This task would also parallelize perfectly... A few dozen people splitting the task between them could probably do it in under an hour. You could further optimize it by only checking the list of possible positives in the noncensoring-country phase.
But by all means, feel free to complain to the politicians, and see which of us gets an answer first... And which of us trusts the answer we get (if any).
Personally, I think this would make an interesting exercise for a potential link aggregation site... Run the same experiment daily from various known-censoring countries, and post them to the FP so everyone can instantly see the day's new "Big Brother disapproves of this" content. Sort of an automated Streisand effect.
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course the prisoner's were sent over with loyalist guards who became the power structure of australia. The Puritans were not sent with guards and the powerful folks opposed english rule.
The reason sex is taboo... (Score:3, Interesting)
Is because it is self indulgence and traditionally our culture is against self indulgence. When people are focused on their bodies, they aren't doing anything productive, and more importantly, are fixated firmly on themselves and not the world around them. That's a good value and to some extent gay activism will always bump into the charge that identifying oneself so strongly with one's sexuality is to accept a narcissistic lifestyle that is sorely at odds with the values that actually worked to make the country prosper.
Violence, on the other hand, can actually be useful. Violence is about a life not centered around self. Indeed, depersonalization is required to a degree to accept violence, and depersonalization is often useful. There is a bad guy, go get them. There is an animal attacking, go get them. The earth is doing something, so we engage in some act to right it. IT cements the idea that we can alter the world around us, whereas, sexuality only seeks to see that we are pleasured within whatever world we are in.
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:3, Interesting)
And you used America to get rid of your puritans ;) Seems pretty ironic that your convicted criminals were more loyal to the Empire than your religious zealots.
Dead people don't pay protection money. While organized crime sometimes need to "set an example" or start gang wars, what they really want to do is business. For real willingness to kill including genocide, blowing yourself up and absurd dedication to the cause, always go with the religious zealots. Really, an absentee government half the world away should be almost ideal for organized crime, why revolt and make one right there that could really create problems?
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:2, Interesting)
Australia is not merely marching down that path, it has been running headlong down it for over a decade. The fact that the major political parties swapped the reins of government in 2007 has made no difference, since the Labor party is still stirring up the same narrow-minded xenophobic nastiness that Howard fostered so insidiously. Historically, the Labor party's main agenda used to be centred on social justice, but it seems that has gone the way of last year's management theories.
Re:I'm sorry, I must be new here... (Score:2, Interesting)
Mod parent up. Note how Orwellian Orwell's home country has also gotten after the effective banning of all firearms and how they're on the verge of banning knives, now, too, in a desperate attempt to legislate civility.
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair, the fine is for ignoring a request for deleting links to prohibited content. It would be stupid to significantly penalise someone for breaking a law they aren't allowed to know about... but if I had a dollar for every time I thought "That would be stupid, there's no way the ALP will possibly incorporate that into the net censorship plan", I'd be able to forget about this whole financial crisis and retire at 26.
What's just as concerning is the apparent recursive nature of the blacklist. Link to prohibited content, and your website becomes prohibited content. Therefore, any links to your website become prohibited content. Given the nature of hyperlinking and the internet, the whole web is probably only a few steps away from being banned. At this stage, I'm not even sure that's not what Labor wants.
It's actually worse than this - the blacklist doesn't just deal with "prohibited content", it deals with "potential prohibited content". In other words, material that has not been found to be prohibited, but which a single bureaucrat thinks has the potential to be prohibited if it was investigated. Given that even MA15+ (i.e. material that is legal for a 15-year-old to view) content can be prohibited, and a significant proportion of the blacklist is legal for 18-year-olds to view (i.e. R18+ and X18+), that's an extremely low threshold for something to be considered off-limits to Australian web users by our government.
Ugh... the whole thing sickens me. I was hoping it would have been dropped like a hot potato for now, but it's obvious they aren't backing down. Our only hope is if it goes to a vote in the senate and fails.
Re:The reason sex is taboo... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sex is traditionally connected with the biological urge to procreate....So, I plainly think you're wrong
Well, I'm not. The taboos against sexuality are driven by those who have some serious misgivings about the animal nature of man. A lot of people say that sexual taboos stem from procreation so that they can say that those taboos should be removed, rather than try and attack the idea that humans should not be so body focused head on.
Other people do say that though, and have said it. The whole "if it feels good, it must be right" mentality of the sixties generation comes from that line of thinking. It's body-centricity, placing one's body ahead of the world around you.
Re:Happiness is Mandatory! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Oh great, there goes slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oh great, there goes slashdot (Score:2, Interesting)
If this were happening in Canada, I'd start publishing every link I could on every website I could, and ask (no, beg) for trial date, and with a jury.
I think we have some daft politicians in the Conservative Party here, but looking at Australia ... maybe we aren't as bad off as I though? Yet ......
In fact, it's the Conservative Party which is starting to rein in the excesses of the "human rights commision" Star Chambers which have been working hard at eliminating freedom of speech in Canada.
Staff at the "human rights commissions" have been caught breaking into websites, spreading hate themselves, outright lying, and even worse. One of their "prosecutors" even admitted it [nationalpost.com]
Read the "human rights" stories on Ezra Levant's blog: http://ezralevant.com/ [ezralevant.com]
I like the one where a "prosecutor" refuses to do his job because he wasn't in a "serene state of mind" [ezralevant.com].
Re:Oh great, there goes slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
I know I'd just love to go away for a week, and return to fines up the wazoo because an AC has posted the entire list of banned sites in my comments.
What if someone posts these links to my FB page? Or someone that I follow on Twitter posts them?
This whole plan just goes to show how little our legislators in this country know about technology and the internet.
Dear Mr Conroy;
You're a dumbass. No, I really mean it. You have no idea how the internet works, do you?
As a moderately trained network admin, I can come up with a number of ways to defeat your precious firewall that would take between 2 minutes and 2 days to implement, and be completely untraceable. Anyone who is sufficiently motivated can work out how to do it in a similar time-frame.
Given that your blocked site list now contains material that is not illegal in Australia (such as sites rated at R18+ - seriously, I can go into any video store and rent R18+ films, and they aren't even in a special closed-off section), you have given me the required motivation, even though I'd probably never want to look at the sites anyway.
The effects your filter WILL have are:
Your blocking solution, and the secrecy surrounding it, is entirely unacceptable in a democracy such as ours. If you want the filter to be an acceptable solution, the list of filtered sites and the reason for filtering must be open, and must have provisions allowing opt-out.
Mr Conroy, you have made it absolutely clear that we cannot trust elected government officials to make sensible, well informed decisions regarding technology in Australia.
Implement this filter and you won't see another term.
-beav007
Re:Oh great, there goes slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)