Australian Government Initiates Covert Internet Censorship

An anonymous reader writes "Remember how the Australian Government tried to enact a big bad Internet filter on the population? Well, that effort failed, but now there's a new initiative in place. At least one government agency, the country's financial regulator, has quietly started issuing legal notices to ISPs requesting them to block certain types of websites deemed illegal. There's no oversight or appeals process, and already a false positive event has resulted in some 1,200 innocent websites being blocked from Australians viewing them. Sounds ideal, right?"

Comments

Idiots...

[dwarfsoft]

Interestingly I can still access the blocked site, so looks like they've undone that (I'm on Telstra at the moment... Don't ask). Also interesting is that they just dismantled the filtering scheme in the budget overnight, so with any luck it goes away altogether. The ACL are not particularly happy about it though (but who cares about them).

As is linked in TFS, the filter list that some ISPs may have implemented is the Interpol one. Certainly not as broad-reaching as the original Conroy planned one.

You have consented to large government

[roman_mir]

Of-course Australian government will block your Internet access to materials it finds inappropriate, whatever that means, you have given your government enough power to do things like that. Gun control was implemented in the same way, taxing income on a graduated scale, telling people what they can and cannot do with their private property, same for people running businesses, all of this grows and emboldens the government and when governments grow and become emboldened people shrink and become scared little nothings.

Re:You have consented to large government

[Sarius64]

Sorry I'm out of mod points. How anyone cannot see this correlation is amazing to me. The Australian government is about to boot its people down more.

Re:You have consented to large government

[NeutronCowboy]

telling people what they can and cannot do with their private property, same for people running businesses,

Yep. I mean, a thousand dead or so is a fair price to pay so that businesses can thrive. Not to mention that it's better being a dead factory worker than some scared little suburbanite living in the US with two cars and a 5 bedroom house.

Totally. Especially if you're one of the rich business owners who can afford to not work in their own factory and hire a private army to guard your assets.

For those who are sarcasm impaired - yes, that was sarcasm. I normally write people like roman off as just crazy, but they seem to be proliferating like cockroaches.

Re:You have consented to large government

[roman_mir]

Confusing individual freedoms and criminal negligence on your part I can understand, but confusing Australia and Bangladesh is something new.

Re:You have consented to large government

[NeutronCowboy]

Roman's comment is a classic example of a black-and-white world. In his mind, it isn't possible to have a government do anything without it automatically becoming tyrannical. Furthermore, the slightest overreach by any apparatchik is immediately an indictment of the incompetence of all government, followed by cries to dismantle government in general. Because of the extremely low threshold that people like roman have for any sort of government activity at all, there is no way to have any sort of government regulation at all. What's more though, their threshold for what is appropriate for government allows absolutely no discussion - to paraphrase someone else, you're either with them, or against them. That's the worst aspect of their "solutions": there is no possibility for debate about it.

Furthermore, you're falling into the same logic trap that roman does: there are only two states, and if one advocates against one, one is forcibly for the other extreme. What I'm arguing is that their worldview has been tested, and it is utterly failing - and has always failed in the past as well.

Re:You have consented to large government

[Obfuscant]

People don't need government, especially central gov't to carry out justice for criminal acts.

Yeah, that vigilante justice system works so well and protects the innocent just fine.

They even named the courts after an Aussie mammal: kangaroos.

Re:You have consented to large government

[NeutronCowboy]

There is one simple fact that contradicts your argument: there hasn't been a single group of people operating without a central government (you still haven't defined where central government stops and local government starts, by the way) that has made a mark on history. The closest to them might have been the barbary coast pirates, and they were ultimately wiped out by the armed forces of a centralized government. In other words, when groups competed for resources, the ones with a larger or more effective central governments always won out. Always. Furthermore, the largest and most successful nations/organizations in history were marked by highly effective, pervasive and very large central governments.

Now, you can redefine crime and prosperity, but the more successful a nation or organization, the larger its government, and the better the average prosperity and crime rates.

Given that central gov't more often than not protects real criminals

Just for fun, show me nation-wide numbers.

Re:You have consented to large government

[sabri]

The Australian government is about to boot its people down more.

I'd say, let's get the entire Australian government and leave them on a deserted island somewhere in the middle of the ocean...

Re:You have consented to large government

[Anonymous Coward]

All nations rise and fall, history is clear on this. When they fall it is almost always with violent revolution against a tyrannical oppressive government.

At the same time, history is clear what happens before the revolution: some of the greatest empires in history. Hate the tyrants and murderers all you will, but they got to live as kings of their time.

Being ruthless, being violent, being amoral, and generally being the biggest asshole around works. Nice guys finish last, my fellow AC.

Your nation is no different and you sir are simply grease within the gears of oppression.

Better than being on the receiving end of those gears of oppression.

See, Saturday morning cartoons are not so far from reality. The villains get all the swag, the cool toys (doomsday devices, sharks with lazors on their heads, etc), lots of minions (including chicks with funny names and revealing clothing), secret lairs, etc. And oh yes, they always seem to get away from the heroes.

The difference is that in reality, there is no series/season finale where the villain is ultimately defeated and justice gets served. No, the heroes at best win battles, not the war. Cartoons make the heroes win and delivery justice to provide solace for the proles, and to brainwash them thinking that they have a chance.

Re:You have consented to large government

[roman_mir]

there hasn't been a single group of people operating without a central government that has made a mark on history.

- I see, so what you are looking for is an empire, you can't just have people living without being oppressed by an empire because you are looking for "historic marks". Well, that's your idea - there should be 'historic marks' and the human cost is irrelevant.

But we know of historic marks, Stalin was historically remarkable. So was Lenin. Hitler. Mao. Pol Pot. Nixon. Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy. FDR. Hoover. Teddy Roosevelt. Bush the first. Clinton. W. Obama. Genghis Khan. Alexander. many more, I do not consider them to be good for people as a general principle though they left their marks alright.

OTOH I consider people like Martin van Buren to be historically significant because they did NOT leave marks like that and instead allowed the PEOPLE to live their lives in a much freer society because of much smaller government intrusion. He was for complete separation of government from banking, from money, from business in general and he did not sell out for more power. He strengthened peace with the British instead of pursuing war.

Warren Harding would be another case, he was the POTUS when USA went through its first Federal reserve inflated bubble crash that cause a depression. He did not do anything and instead cut government spending by 70% and the problem dissipated in 1.5 years.

(you still haven't defined where central government stops and local government starts, by the way)

- good question. As with everything there are grey areas here, but at the least with local governments you know the people that are elected, they live in your town probably and they do their business in the town, they are responsible to people in the town. I suppose the real difference is proximity to power, the more central the power is the further away you are from it, the more abstract it is, the more institutionalised it is, the less you can have direct influence on the outcomes for your locality. Ideally there is enough competition that you can choose to live in a town with central government or in a town where there is no government of any kind at all and all decisions are completely on individual and business levels.

the ones with a larger or more effective central governments always won out.

- you find this to be desirable, I do not.

the largest and most successful nations/organizations in history were marked by highly effective, pervasive and very large central governments.

- I disagree with your definition of the word 'successful'.

AFAIC any system that destroys individual rights is unsuccessful by definition. What is the success for an individual in that scenario? Ability to steal from a minority by using a huge institutionalised authority that has enough apparatus at hand that crashing an individual is not even an afterthought, I disagree that this is even remotely a success story.

Just for fun, show me nation-wide numbers.

I will do better. Stalin said something I agree with: when a person is killed people see it as a tragedy. When millions are killed, that's just statistics.

Governments are the biggest criminals and harbour the biggest criminals in history of humanity. Every government that started a war for power and resources and egos are criminal by definition. In the eyes of history the only difference between war criminals and heroes is who lives to tell the story.

I don't need to talk about hundreds of millions killed by central governments over the millennia, how about Iraq to make this simple? What local government, what private institution or individual can boast up to a million people dead over 10 years of murder and destruction?

Did you know that in Mein Kampf, Hitler specifically argued that the State power must be diminished for the explicit purpose of increasin

Re:You have consented to large government

[Obfuscant]

New Zealand has immigration laws that would prevent this.

Re:You have consented to large government

[s.petry]

While you make a fair "feel good" argument, it's not historically accurate. If you read history, you will find that there have been no perfect Governments. Governments that are granted powers always request more and more, until the point where a revolution is required to restore a Government that people can live with.

I guess you could ignore the fact that the US had been trending toward a tyranny for a very long time. Each year, more and more power is granted to the Government. Each year we pay more and more in taxes, and what does the average person get? The trend has not been moving the other direction, because that is how it works. Governments become corrupt, the corruption becomes entrenched, and the corruption becomes the normal Government. People will go through several phases (apathy, complacency, etc..) before they are fed up enough to revolt. But it happens in every single situation where corruption becomes the Government Normal. Where it has not happened yet, is places like Russia and China who have been diligent about shooting anyone that discusses revolt.

Australia kind of leapfrogged past the US and even the UK in terms of a soft tyrannical take over. I found it surprising, but as soon as they lost their ability to fight (gave up the guns) the changes have been moving very quickly.

A tyranny is not necessarily an outrageously oppressive Government murdering masses. I think this is why you are trying to justify such Government and attack people that point them out. It's easier to live in delusion than face cognitive dissonance.

Re:You have consented to large government

[gnoshi]

Thankfully because of the lessons of history, we can hopefully change the course this time around.
For example, perhaps we could have the positive benefits of government (gun control, progressive taxation used to fund public services, telling people what they can do with their private property - 'no, you can't build a rubbish tip in suburbia, sorry') and actually intervene in the problem of creeping power (such as this).

Somehow people manage to keep bringing this back to gun control - "when we gave up our guns we lost our ability to fight". However, gun control is widely supported in Australia, and I'm pretty sure that pretending we'd be able to overthrow the government with our guns wouldn't aid the cause of social change. Clearly having a profusion of crazy (and sane) people will guns in the U.S. has stopped your problem of creeping government overreach, right?

Yes, there is a need to monitor government and work to ensure their are limits on their powers, but can we stop pretending that progressive social policies are part of an inexorable creeping towards totalitarianism? I understand that may be hard for some people who need to justify their access to guns and their anger at paying tax, but please do try.

Re:You have consented to large government

[roman_mir]

The point that you're missing is that every time there was any resource contention, any conflict whatsoever, the larger, more organized group of people won out.

- I am not missing anything, the entire point of USA Constitution is to ensure that individuals are not treated by the government in that exact manner - where the federal government exercises its power to destroy any freedoms of individuals (and when we talk about State rights, we are not automatically giving authority to State governments, we are talking about individual rights).

The point (and which you're missing again) is that there's always a power center. If government is weak - whether it is by design, or because it is too local - it is overtaken by private power

- no, you are missing the point. With local decisions being made locally (and for all I care even your street shouldn't be forced into a scheme of government that it objects to) there is competition and thus you have huge number of choices, real choices that you can make as to how you prefer your locality to be governed if at all. I am not talking about restricting your ability to gang together with a bunch of likeminded neighbours and to come up with your own system of local government if you want one.

The problem with that ridiculous assertion is that the only people who think that way are those whose basic needs are fulfilled, aren't threatened by government overreach or warlord terror

- so you know all about all "those people" and you know all of their personal conditions. By the way, your personal conditions are not supposed to change the way a government treats you under law, whatever your personal circumstances are, you shouldn't be getting any special treatment. That's the only way to achieve a society that does not discriminate against people while creating the most diverse market, market where individuals are not obstructed from actually creating new wealth and are not punished for that either.

Holy crap. I had no idea that you could so completely misread Stalin.

- I didn't misread a thing. He was happy he could control people easier because to them very large numbers stop being personal and become abstract.

Of-course Stalin and every ruler like him and every government employee under him should be tried for every case of murder, every case of maiming, every case of destruction and confiscation of private property.

Millions upon millions of cases because these government kill, maim, steal from millions and millions of individuals. That's what is lost when people think of others as just of large numbers - the fact that they are individuals.

That's it. If something has the slightest negative effect on you, it is terrible, regardless of how much it helps others.

- millions of people were killed by Stalin's government. I don't know where you see positive effects in that, positive effects for the entire country in fact, that was robbed of the most incentivized, most individually entrepreneurial people.

Considering how badly you mangled the Stalin quote, I'm waiting for the entire paragraph in Mein Kampf where you got that quote from. In German.

- I am in Germany. I spend enough time here over the last 3 years that I can easily give you the necessary paragraphs, but will YOU be able to read them?

Der Foderalismus als Maske ...

Die Bedeutung der Einzelstaaten wird kunftig uberhaupt nicht mehr auf staats- und machtpolitischem Gebiet liegen; ich erblicke sie entweder auf stammesmassigem oder auf kulturpolitischem Gebiete. Allein selbst hier wird
Heer und Einzelstaaten die Zeit nivellierende wirken. Die Leichtigkeit des modernen Verkehrs schuttelt die Menschen derart durcheinander, dass langsam und stetig die Stammesgrenzen verwischt werden und so selbst das kulturelle Bild sich allmahli

Re:You have consented to large government

[s.petry]

You can't change human nature. This is why Socrates stated that the only people that should be representing people in a Republic are the people that don't want the job. This prevents people craving power from holding offices and abusing their offices to gain power. Remember power comes in many forms.

Socrates was also adamant that society needs to be highly educated. The people holding offices in the US have done everything they can to make the populace some of the dumbest people in history. People don't understand fallacy and rhetoric, and the people in Government don't want them to understand either. It's not just in the US either, all of the "free" countries have gone down the same road.

Re:You have consented to large government

[NeutronCowboy]

Wow. You always, always amaze me with your ability to change topics, redefine commonly used words and ignore statistics to cherry-pick data. But what takes the cake is that instead of actually following up with your ideals, you move from a somewhat socialist country (Canada) to an even more socialist country (Germany). Next, I expect you to end up in Sweden or France. It's almost as if those countries offer better opportunities than the countries that fit your small-government ideals. Nah, that couldn't be.

By the way, thanks for actually providing the relevant text. As expected, the concept that you ascribe to your quote is a descriptive detail to the overall theme of the paragraph: that the idea of federal state is being made irrelevant by easier travel, and that the concept of the cultural nation is taking over. As a result, for Nationalsocialism to compete on the field of cultural ideas, it also has to ignore the federal states. Which is quite different from what you said it does, and, coincidentally, is very similar to what you're arguing for: that the idea of laissez-faire capitalism and personal freedom has to transcend the boundaries of federal states in order for it to win in the battle with the other social ideas. Even funnier is that the carrot at the core of Nationalsocialism is more individual freedom. Ironic, to say the least.

Your ideas are as old as the world, ideas of freedom are very young, they are going to become more prevalent I think than your old ideas.

Even ignoring for a second the fact that local government is how government even got started, your own life is giving lie to your propaganda. If even someone like you is actually moving to more socialist, more big-government countries, your ideas are losing followers, not gaining them.

Re:You have consented to large government

[NeutronCowboy]

You misunderstood. I'm not arguing that there have been perfect governments. I'm arguing that when it came to contesting for resources, larger, more efficient organizations always won out. Furthermore, by standard measures of prosperity, larger, more efficient organizations always come out on top. The only exceptions are smaller organizations that can piggy-back on the services of larger, nearby organizations.

Furthermore, what's decried as tyranny is pretty damn far from what people normally have in mind when they complain about tyranny. In the US, people argue that a tax rate of 35% on the top income is tyranny, which is ridiculous. Talk to me when you get killed for criticizing the government.

Each year we pay more and more in taxes, and what does the average person get?

Considering how wrong you are about this, I'm not sure how much credence to give to the rest of your post. Fun fact: what was the top marginal tax rate from the thirties through the sixties?

Re:Here we go --

[lightknight]

'Tis quite alright. In the future, the public internet (what's left of it) will only run encrypted data-streams. That's ultimately where this is headed. And since encryption is easier to make than decryption....well, the censors will always be on the losing side. Eternally.

The real fun part will be, of course, if / when humanity runs into other sentient lifeforms out in the universe. I'm sure that they will, of course, naturally have chosen similar schemes for controlling information within their own populations, as well as limiting reproductive choices, and implementing artificial castes. And that when they gaze upon what our great planet has invented, the very jewel of our solar system, the fruits of brightest minds and the labor bought off the backs of millions of straining peoples, they will acknowledge that we truly are just like them, and worthy to open trade negotiations / some sort of alliance. When our drones are flying over enemy territory, our borders, even our homeland itself, we are telling those with peering, but hidden eyes far up in the heavens exactly the kind of freedom America stands for. And they will know, like in all our broadcasts and films, that when they wish to pay homage to our wonderful civilization, exactly which building to visit and which leader they should strike up a conversation with.

Re:Here we go --

[smash]

You already have DMCA take-downs, and they spread to other countries.

Re:Here we go --

[FuzzNugget]

I could be wrong, but I think it already has. I've tried accessing certain sites with a US proxy and they'll consistently time out. Switch off the proxy and they'll magically work.

Re:Denied

[houstonbofh]

Links doesn't work... keep getting error 403 access denied. So im just going to assume that the facts are wrong in this case.

Not down. Just filtered in your country. Try a VPN...

they are dropping IP address's

[johnjones]

ok they are not even filtering they are producing a drop list

clearly they do not understand how a IP network functions and are simply taking whatever huawei can fund...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_by_country

surveillance via huawei marketing dollars... working well...
(just ignore the fact huawei copy cisco kit and install backdoors and your fine...)

have fun

John

I think it went something like this

[TheSpoom]

"Sir, they just don't want to have their internet filtered."
"Do it anyway and don't tell them about it. They'll get used to it eventually."

"Legal" Notices

[skywire]

A notice does not become "legal" simply because it was issued by a state agent.

That "false positive" was BS

[sirwired]

That "false positive" event was BS, and the EFF should know better. Slashdot covered the story here: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/04/11/1849207/australian-networks-block-community-university-website

Basically, a community college cheaped-out on it's webhost, and it was sharing a single IP with 1,200 other sites. It is certainly not out of the realm of possibilities that one of those 1,200 was doing something naughty (malware, DDOS, spam, kiddie porn, who knows?), and CheapBastardWebhosting was apathetic when informed about it. Just like any harmful of blatantly illegal site, the next step is a block of the IP.

The block was lifted after the outcry, but I suspect that was more because the block got the webhosts attention and they then properly booted the naughty customer.

EFF, please don't Greenpeace or PETA yourselves with silly crap like this. (This wouldn't be the first time their press releases have stretched or misinterpreted facts more than a bit.)

Re:That "false positive" was BS

[Nidi62]

That "false positive" event was BS, and the EFF should know better. Slashdot covered the story here: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/04/11/1849207/australian-networks-block-community-university-website

Basically, a community college cheaped-out on it's webhost, and it was sharing a single IP with 1,200 other sites. It is certainly not out of the realm of possibilities that one of those 1,200 was doing something naughty (malware, DDOS, spam, kiddie porn, who knows?), and CheapBastardWebhosting was apathetic when informed about it. Just like any harmful of blatantly illegal site, the next step is a block of the IP.

The block was lifted after the outcry, but I suspect that was more because the block got the webhosts attention and they then properly booted the naughty customer.

EFF, please don't Greenpeace or PETA yourselves with silly crap like this. (This wouldn't be the first time their press releases have stretched or misinterpreted facts more than a bit.)

So, are you arguing then that using "an IP address does not equal a person" is not a valid defense in MAFIAA lawsuits as well? People should just not "cheap out" and get a seperate internet account, and a separate IP address, for each user in the household, including a guest account? Or maybe a better argument would be that censoring based upon IP address is ineffective and wrong because of the fact that multiple websites can use the same IP address.

Re:That "false positive" was BS

[gl4ss]

that's a false positive by unintentional association.

you can't arrest everyone on the block if someone smokes weed on the balcony...

Re:That "false positive" was BS

[JasterBobaMereel]

The problem is that the solution to a website offering illegal material is not to shut down the website, prosecute the owners of the website but get the ISP to block it ...?

If the material is illegal then prosecute them, if it is not then don't block it ....

Re:Here we go --

[EmagGeek]

They will simply make it illegal to use "unapproved" encryption, where "approved" encryption is that for which you have provided the decryption keys to law enforcement.

Re: WTF Happened to Australia?

[Anonymous Coward]

We sold out to America.

Re:Here we go --

[gruntspeak]

we are telling those with peering, but hidden eyes far up in the heavens exactly the kind of freedom America stands for. And they will know, like in all our broadcasts and films

I, for one, welcome the chance to sue our new overlords for illegally obtaining our broadcasts and films. Goddamn space pirates.

Re:Here we go --

[Immerman]

Not quite - for example virtually all secure internet communication is based on SSL or similar, which allows the secure creation of complementary encryption keys over an insecure data channel. That doesn't help if you can shut down the origin, but it neatly sidesteps any sort of "gatekeeper" censorship that doesn't, as you point out, simply block all encrypted traffic. Even such drastic lockdowns could conceivably be sidestepped by steganographically hiding encrypted data streams within innocuous ones. Obviously that's going to hurt your bandwidth, but we're talking about just making things possible.

Re:Huh?

[Immerman]

So when the Chinese government informs a US ISP of the fact that they're hosting a "bad" Free Tibet website, they should immediately shut down that site for the sake of all the other sites hosted at the same IP that the Chinese government could care less about?

The world is a big place, allowing governments to shut down foreign websites they disagree with is a great way to get an internet populated by nothing but cute cat videos. For that matter there's probably a governement out there somewhere that considers cats to be symbols of evil that may promote social upheval, so those will have to go too.