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."

Comments

Broken link in summary...

[denzacar]

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

lolcats being censored

[muzzy]

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...

Re:lolcats being censored

[muzzy]

Before anyone mentiones about it, yes, I did check the commented out images too. They're funny cats as well, probably commented out to ease the load of the page.

Other gems from the list:
www.kids.net.au/forward.php?url=www.energizingbuddies.cc/ ... apparently the domain expired, and the ACMA decided to censor the redirect link instead of telling kids.net.au to remove the link!
The whole forward.php has disappeared since, as well as that entry, the energizingbuddies.cc existed back in 2002...

The happysong.com.tw url ... which has phpBB2 url with a sid in it. A session ID! So, nobody browsing the forum would actually get their access censored, only the guy with that specific session ID and the people that link to that specific URL.

Ofcourse, 4chan's /b/ and encyclopedia dramatica are on the list, too. Since they censor stuff like animal cruelty as well I can understand that, because there probably is plenty of risque material on the sites.

Also spotted sam hocevar's (VLC developer) site on the list, with two urls. Apparently he saved an animal abuse image from 4chan and somehow got it on the ACMA blacklist.

There are also plenty of porn sites with a referrer in the url, a lot of TGP's like that on the list. Shows that whoever submitted them for review was browsing porn and actively clicking around. Some of the sites are listed multiple times with different referrer IDs in the URLs too, egrep '/\?(id=)?[a-z.]*.?$' for a list. One site is listed 3 times with different referrer in the URL :)

A bunch of newsgroups have been censored at either myusenet.net, free-usenet.net, groups.google.com, groups.google.com.au or usenet-replayer.com. Only single groups, pages or messages. And ofcourse, the same content is still available at the other usenet archive sites.

Well, that's some gems to begin with. Haven't bothered doing a full analysis of the content, kinda lacking the willpower to do more than just random dabbling.

Not a hoax

[muzzy]

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.

Re:UK and Australia

[MichaelSmith]

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.

Re:*This is fake*

[ElectricTurtle]

Don't believe what the government or its contracted agents say about themselves. I mean really, how naive do you have to be?

Re:*This is fake*

[xenobyte]

But I don't think stunts like this help :-(

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.