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Australia's Vast, Scattershot Censorship Blacklist Revealed
mask.of.sanity writes "Australia's secretive Internet filter blacklist held by its communications watchdog has been leaked, revealing the government has understated the amount of banned Web pages by more than 1000.
Multiple legitimate businesses and Web sites have been banned including two bus companies, online poker sites, multiple Wikipedia entries, Google and Yahoo group pages, a dental surgery and a tour operator.
Andrew Twaits, CEO of Betfair, a billion-dollar business blocked by the blacklist, was furious the government has potentially annexed tens of millions of dollars in revenue after the Betfair.com gambling site was blacklisted.
The blacklists were reportedly leaked by a Web filter operator to wikileaks which has published the full list of banned URLs.
Outraged privacy advocates say the government has effectively lied about the amount of URLs included in the blacklists, totaling more than 2300, and the type of content which it would ban.
The leak follows a series of attacks on the watchdog in which irate users successfully lobbied for web sites to be banned, only to be threatened with an $11,000 fine for publishing the link contained in the PR response. It was also revealed the watchdog can ban Web sites at a whim, with no accountability."
The www.techworld.com.au blog link in the summary is broken. It is missing couple of "s" letters.
Here is a working link:
http://www.techworld.com.au/blog/broadbandvoice/2009/03/acmas_blacklist_a_bigots_battleground
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
My favourite from the list: files.kavefish.com/pictures/collections/funny_cat_pictures/_index-list.html
It's just funny cat pictures and nothing suggets there's ever been anything else.
Also, the list (although a month older than one on Wikileaks) can be obtained from Integard filter software. Hex edit the integard.exe and change first occurence of "datetimepicker.js" to websites_ACMA.txt, then login to integard's webUI and request that file. Apparently there's a whitelist of files the webUI server can give to the user. I've confirmed myself that the lolcats URL is indeed in that ACMA file from the filter software...
-- Matti Nikki
I just loaded up the wikileaks page and I hope I didn't make a mistake I'm going to regret.
Some of those links at are perfectly normal, the gambling ones, the wikipedia ones, nothing unusual.
Some of those links at are icky. Things that the extreme pro-lifers like to use in their pamphlets while I'm eating lunch icky.
Some of those links are actually very nasty and abhorrent. Worse than goatse.
Don't go randomly clicking.
Don't go randomly clicking!!
Conroy is going to be on the ABC's QandA next Thursday evening at 9.30pm.
That should be good viewing :)
.
It should be noted that this isn't actually the ACMA blacklist. It's actually a list derived from the ACMA blacklist as stated on the wikileaks article in the summary.
Not a hoax. I've confirmed it myself by ripping websites_ACMA.txt out of Integard filtering software. Even if it's not identical to ACMA's own list, it damn well is identical to Integard's version of ACMA's list.
The list is real.
-- Matti Nikki
In the US there is a lot of overlap between the Christian extremists and the Libertarians. The few christian extremists we have in Australia don't subscribe to libertarian views.
Another factor here is the role of minor parties in the upper house of parliament. The Christian senator pushing the filters got in with less than 1000 primary votes. Most likely he got a lot of preferences because of the number of worse sounding groups on the senate ballot paper.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Don't believe what the government or its contracted agents say about themselves. I mean really, how naive do you have to be?
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Actually they do help... A lot actually!
1) They make the world aware of the censorship taking place.
2) They make it obvious that a secret list might contain anything. We can't check.
3) They make it obvious that the list needs to be public because that would make it possible to avoid non-relevant censorship. Even if the list is publicly available, it cannot be used to find the blocked stuff because - well - the stuff is blocked.
4) They force the authorities to engage in debates about the censorship thus again making the world aware of what happening.
5) They show that such secrets can never be kept and thus shouldn't.
There's no reason to have such a blocklist to begin with except to engage in censorship. You don't protect anybody against anything with a blacklist. For every site listed there's 10 others just like it. List those and each has 10 alternatives... The odds of you hitting one is the same with or without the blacklist.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Up until the 1950s, there was a blacklist of books in Australia.
Because from a blocked ISP you can access the sites which are listed as blocked.
The internet censorship system is not yet in place. The leaked list is the sites provided to ISPs that have "family friendly" services and to the vendors of the PC filters supplied under the previous government's NetAlert scheme.
At the moment you should be able to get anywhere you like unless you chosen a PC based filter, a family friendly ISP or you use one of the ISPs testing the filters at the moment.
There are 6 ISPs in the trial. One is iPrimus that deals with retail customers. One is Webshield that is a Christadelphian not for profit family friendly ISP and the other 4 are business only ISPs. There are people on facebook with more friends than the 4 business ISPs have as customers.
You need to check your facts. The list isn't fake. It was pulled out of the definitions provided to one of the NetAlert filter providers. It also matches the dates and number of the published ACMA updates as downloaded from their site.
What you should be concerned about it that the blacklist was designed for PC "filters" for children and that the government intended to use that list to censor the activities of adult at the level of a child safe filter.
For the love of God, learn about your own civic structure. Australia is independent. The Queen rules Australia in right of Australia, completely separately from any other realm. The UK parliament has had zero authority over Australia since the statute of Westminster. The only reason that Australia has the same queen as the UK, Canada, etc... is because we all CHOSE to abide by the same succession criteria. Don't go crying to the rest of us if you don't like your laws. You only have your own selves to blame and we won't be your scapegoats.