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Wikileaks Pages Added To Australian Internet Blacklist
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?
Any Australians fined yet for coming here?
Simply linking to addresses in ACMA's blacklist attracts an $11,000 per-day fine (snip) The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian (snip)
So you receive a letter on your mailbox saying that you were fined in AUD $11,000 , for linking to a site that you didn't know you could link, and if you knew that you couldn't link to it you would be even more penalized because that information is not for your security level?
Has someone on the Aussie's Government been playing Paranoia recently?
--- "When you gotta do something wrong. You gotta do it right. (Fighter)"
Eh, what?? A $11k fine for breaking a secret law? How are you supposed to stay clear of it if you can't read the list of things you can't do?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
Why don't we just block Australia from the internet altogether until they learn to use it properly?
The blacklist is secret
These guys just don't "get" it still, do they?
Step 1) Run a simple web spider that checks availability but never actually pulls content, from within Australia.
Step 2) Run the same spider in any non-censoring country.
Step 3) Compare the two lists.
Simple as that. Nothing more than a few hundred megs of shotgun-requests, and you can map the portions of the web that look dark but shouldn't.
...but when did Australia become the poster boy for blatant censorship and policies akin to fascism? I lived there for awhile back in the early 90s and it seemed like such a laid-back, friendly place where pretty much anything goes so long as it doesn't hurt anyone.
The irony of all this is I remember getting a "talking to" by a fellow in a bar who held up McCarthyism as one of America's saddest moments because it directly attacked free speech and free thought of individuals in the name of the "commie boogyman". With news like this coming out of Australia, I'm wondering if I'm going to see him again on TV in some show trial, being accused of thoughtcrime.
Actually, no, I won't, because unlike the McCarthy hearings, the ones in Australia would probably be censored.
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.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
If they block everyone, they reason, the sites will go out of business and the exploitation will stop. That's admirable.
And if we outlaw drugs, people still stop using them and drug abuse will stop. That's admirable.
But... since I'm an American.... I would rather let the people go to these sites, determine who is getting their jollies off looking at this stuff, and then let's round up all these sick f--- people and kill them.
That thought has occurred to me as well. Why block these sites when you could presumably get warrants to see who is going to them and actually investigate the people breaking the law instead of trying to impose a censorship scheme that will never work anyway?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
welcome to what it feels like being an american during the bush administration. pariah, object of scorn and derision. you do realize what a joke this makes your country look like right?
1. sites blocked not for pornography, but ideological reasons
2. harsh punitive financial punishments just for linking
3. secret lists you, as a common citizen, don't have the right to see
i now think of australia the way i do iran and china in terms of freedom of expression. you better clean this disgrace up, you blokes can't let this continue, it is an embarassment
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
By far the nastiest and most insidious threat to democracy in Australia is the Catholic far Right. Their home has traditionally been the "right" of the ALP, although some Catholic militants, like Tony Abbott have gone joined the opposition conservative parties.
In years past, they've played mostly a spoiling role in Australia politics. As fascists, they know only how to destroy, not build, so they formed a right-wing fringe political party (the Democratic Labour Party, which in Whitlam's immortal words, was neither democratic, nor liberal, nor a party) kept the ALP out of government for 25 years and the country stagnated for decades under a conservative government. After B. A. Santamaria died and after the fall of Communism, they went back to infiltrating mainstream political parties.
These days, their strongholds are right-wing unions (the SDA , of which I was a member -- if I had known my union dues were being siphoned off by Phalangists and militant anti-abortionists, I would've quit instantly...), and the right wings of the ALP and Liberal parties.
Democracy and rational debate has always been anathema for these fascists. Their malign and destructive influence has been out there for all to see, although there has been very few political forces organised enough to challenge them head on.
If there's a vicious anti-democratic force in Australian politics, chances are, militant right-wing Catholics are behind it.
> The vast majority of the list looks like kiddie porn sites
Please post ACMA's blacklist so we can verify.
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.)
Because it's not actually about stopping childporn, it's about imposing censorship. Whether childporn is weeded out is irrelevant, and these filters don't actually have be effective at stopping childporn to be effective at making people complacent.
The Finnish police have already censored the Wikileaks page on Finnish internet censorship; see my comment at the appropriate talk page.
Only if you have a willing HTTP proxy to actually connect to. Far too often the technical solution of "Lets just setup a VPN!" or "We'll just encrypt it and use a proxy!" gets thrown up without realizing that you have to have a working endpoint in a lax country to work with. If you're relying on the "free" ones that pop up here and there - good luck. While you MIGHT get the HTTP proxy setup with them (VPN ain't happening), they tend to flitter in and out of existence so quickly that you're playing a game of cat and mouse more than actually using the net. You're certainly not going to perform a few keystrokes and make the problem go away.
And without using them or finding some pay equivalent (that you can trust), you have to work in a data connection, server space, and power in some nonrestrictive country. When you start factoring in collocating a server in Mexico then we're beyond the "Just encrypt it!" stage.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
i herd you liek blacklists so we put a blacklist on our blacklist so you couldnt browse things while you couldnt browsing things.