Australia's Censored URL List Remains Hidden

kinsalis writes: "There is an article about the Electronic Frontiers Australia's failed attempt to have access to a list of sites which where deemed worth of censorship under Australian Internet censorship law. While it stands to reason that most of the sites would be child pornography, what is to stop someone slipping in any old url if no one can check the list?"

Comments

Re:How does the censorship work?

[jquirke]

Honestly, it has not affected us at all.

Basically the Government here does whatever it needs to keep itself elected.

In this case, in order to please the targetted demographics, typical families, it proposed to censor the Internet from "nasty" things.

Now, the thing is, noone has noticed a difference. No one talks about the censorship, no one even thinks about it. Because it doesn't seem to affect us.

Now the truth is, children are unprotected as ever on the Net, but the Government/parents/schools don't know that. They just trust that the millions of extra dollars they feed the ABA are working, just like we 'trust' the Government with the rest of our tax dollars...

The truth is it is clearly a waste of money attempting an impossible task, but hey, they don't know that. So the Government is happy, the parents and families are happy, the only people who are pissed off are the civil liberties people, and they're always pissed off anyway.

I of course still want this censorship removed as [a] I know it is a waste of money, and [b] The Government is not my parent, it is not responsible for deciding the material I am or am not allowed to view (I am under 18).

Re:How does the censorship work?

[Bronster]

Are IP's blocked? Are DNS lookups merely prohibited?

Some people's slashdot memory is obviously rather short, since I'm sure the Australian law has been posted about before. Specifically, basically the same story as this, New South Wales law on end users, Censorship law passed, Even older article on the same thing.

Ok, that's just 4 of them.

There are two types of internet censorship, the more recent "ISPs must block bad stuff out there", and the "ISPs must not host bad stuff".

For the not host bad stuff, it works by issuing legal LARTs against anyone hosting anything the censors don't like.

I presume this is the list that we're discussing here, since the list of "ISPS must block bad stuff out there" would be almost impossible to hide unless every ISP must run a closed source/black box URL checker.

I don't think there's much point in having a list of sites that have been taken down anyway, of course there's nothing there, and the URL may or may not actually say something useful by itself (just knowing that http://users.bigpond.com/~foobar/ was blocked isn't going to tell you a whole lot about the subversive pictures of a naked Brian Harradine that were posted there).

On the other hand, a list of the _reasons_ that sites were issued with takedown notices (similar to a public court record) would be good. Unlikely though.

A perfect example of government meddling

[Vicegrip]

Here in Canada quite a commotion has erupted over the firing of an editor of the Ottawa Citizen for having written an editorial calling for the resignation of our Prime Minister.
In question are the close ties the owner of the media chain has with the Prime Minister due to the fact that it was his very government that allowed the media chain to persue a number of controversial acquisitions that had been previously disallowed by canadian law.
What is clear here, is that politicians will meddle with the media and what they report when given the chance to do so. What is to stop, in this case, an australian Prime Minister from blocking a website whose constant criticism of his policies has aggravated him? Since the list cannot be checked the answer is probably nothing.
This government sponsored censorship raises a serious issue of precedent. The precedent of the governement having the power to block access to information, otherwise publically accessible to the citizen, for unverifiable purposes and results. It is the governement giving itself the right to restrict what a citizen could normally view without restriction in any other country-- without appeal or public review.
In my view, there is a careful balance of power that is being toyed with, both in Australia and in Canada, that needs to be stopped. I hope the Australian courts see the danger here and reverse the decision and I hope justice prevails in the case of this editor who has been wrongfully fired-- in fact it is my wish now that this media group be broken up.
See Citizen story here and here

Re:The Facts

[justin.warren]

Firstly, disclosure: I am a member of EFA.

That said, I'm disappointed in the quality of responses to this article here on slashdot. Had I known, I'd have posted a link to EFA's press release on this issue earlier:
http://www.efa.org.au/Publish/PR020613.html

Now, the problem here is that EFA attempted to get access to the blocklist being implemented by the ABA by using the Freedom of Information Act. Not the content, just the blocklist. In much the same way that censorware publishers won't allow anyone to view their blocklists, the AAT refused, but cites highly suspects reasons, to wit:

The Administrative Appeals Tribunal yesterday ruled that the Commonwealth Government's Internet censorship regime would be ineffective if it did not operate under a veil of secrecy, unlike offline censorship laws.

[...]

Therefore, the AAT ruled that the information requested by EFA was exempt from disclosure on the ground that "disclosure would, or could reasonably be expected to, have a substantial adverse effect on the proper and efficient conduct" of the ABA's operations (s.40(1)(d) of the FOI Act) and that the public interest in disclosure (s.40(2)) was outweighed by the adverse effect on the ABA's operations they considered would result from disclosure.

So, basically, they were saying that if people were able to see what was being blocked, the system wouldn't work. Excuse me? What sort of dodgy system is that? If it can't work with disclosure of the blocklist, then I would say the system is fundamentally flawed. Indeed, that's what EFA and numerous others were saying when this system was first proposed. Now that those concerns have been borne out, will the system be scrapped? No, it will continue to operate under a veil of secrecy, wasting my tax dollars on something that is inherently broken.

That is the problem the EFA, and I, have with this thing. That is the reason we're unimpressed with this decision.