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

[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

[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

[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

[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: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: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...

"Legal" Notices

[skywire]

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

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: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: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 --

[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.