Sensational-Adelaide.com

UPDATED: A list of websites apparently set to be blocked by the Government's controversial internet filter appears to be a fake, federal minister Stephen Conroy says.

The list, purported to be from the Australian Media and Communications Authority (ACMA), was "leaked" to an international website and included an Australian dentist's page, poker websites, and a pornography site ranked in Alexa's Top 50 most popular websites in Australia.

"I am aware of reports that a list of URLs has been placed on a website. This is not the ACMA blacklist," Senator Conroy - the federal Communications Minister - said in a statement.

The website which published the list currently appears to be offline.

"The published list purports to be current at 6 August 2008 and apparently contains approximately 2400 URLs, whereas the ACMA blacklist for the same date contained 1061 URLs."

Last November, ACMA said its blacklist contained 1370 sites.

"ACMA is investigating this matter and is considering a range of possible actions it may take, including referral to the Australian Federal Police," Senator Conroy said.

The watchdog has warned that anyone who republishes the list or attempts to access child pornography sites on it could face up to 10 years in prison.

It has also warned that linking to sites on the list could incur fines of up to $11,000 a day.

"The ACMA blacklist of prohibited URLs has been in place since 2000," Senator Conroy said.

"URLs placed on the list have been deemed to contain prohibited content as determined by the Broadcasting Services Act 1992. The ACMA blacklist is currently provided to vendors of filtering software.

"Under current law, ACMA has the power to issue take-down notices for prohibited URLs hosted in Australia. However, it has no power to do the same for content hosted overseas."

Concerns about purported blacklist

Earlier, commenting on the list published online, Electronic Frontiers Australia vice-chair Colin Jacobs said "many of the sites clearly contain only run-of-the-mill adult material, poker tips, or nothing controversial at all" .

"Even if some of these sites may have been defaced at the time they were added to the list, how would the operators get their sites removed if the list is secret and no appeal is possible?"

Under the Government's highly controversial mandatory web filtering plan, all internet service providers will be forced to block access to sites on the blacklist.

The list was published on a public website without any age verification or warnings.

“The leaking of the list has confirmed some of our worst fears,” said Mr Jacobs.

“This was bound to happen, especially as mandatory filtering would require the list to be distributed to ISPs all around the country.

"The Government is now in the unenviable business of compiling and distributing a list which includes salacious and illegal material and publicising those very sites to the world.”

MUCH has been written about the Rudd Government's proposed "'clean feed" internet censorship regime. But it isn't until you delve into the policy's unintended consequences that some of its biggest problems come into view.

Shamefully for the Government, these consequences are entirely predictable for those with a solid grasp of how the technology works.

A growing mountain of criticism rightly targets the policy's cost, its likely performance impact, the impossibility of its meeting required reliability standards, its expense, and the fact that its compulsory nature violates a Labor Party election promise.

But further gems of controversy have attracted little attention, and deserve to be brought to light. None are particularly complicated; all are damning.

If you don't like the new censorship regime and want to get around it, you can. If internet users avail themselves of free access to what those in the networking game call an open VPN (virtual private network), their traffic would become opaque to the Government and immune from the effects of the censorship system. Accessing a VPN is as simple as installing a free browser plugin, and requires no technical knowledge.

So, where would that leave us?

To begin with, it would leave us in the same situation we were in before - with uncensored, unfiltered internet access - only several hundred million dollars poorer. All we would have to show for the money spent on the censorship system would be the inevitable slowdown it would cause.

However, the effects of widespread VPN use run deeper than this.

Subscribers who intended to violate copyright would flock to VPN technology as the new censorship regime drew more attention to VPNs' ability to provide anonymity. In addition to "relocating" internet users - mainly to a new U.S. jurisdiction - VPNs also encrypt network traffic.

This has some profound effects on criminality and law enforcement. A natural side effect of the implementation of mandatory Government censorship would be to encourage criminals to use VPNs, because the kinds of network activity these people intend to carry out would be inhibited by the censorship system, leaving them with little alternative.

Once they were encrypting their traffic, the telecommunications interception warrants used by law enforcement would be useless. A police officer cannot do anything productive with an encrypted data stream - it holds no value as evidence. It is virtually inevitable some criminals would go free for lack of evidence against them once the government firewall was in place.

It would be bad enough if the Government's policy stopped at merely protecting criminals, but the Minister for Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy's proposed "clean feed" would go a step further by actually helping them find illegal material.

The minister's aim is to have every internet service provider in Australia carry out mandatory censorship using a blacklist of prohibited content supplied by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

Blacklist a 'Yellow Pages of Evil'

The blacklist would need to be distributed to several hundred ISPs, and would be accessible to several thousand technical staff. The information security implications of this are obvious. Taking such a sensitive, secret resource and distributing it to thousands of people guarantees that the blacklist would eventually leak.

When it leaked, it would be published on the internet. If the list is even half as accurate as the minister claims it will be, the effect of that publication will be to make what has beeen dubbed "The Australian Federal Government's Yellow Pages of Evil" available to every child-exploiting abuser on the planet, directing criminals in all corners of the world to a smorgasbord of illegal content.

The Labor Government would need to explain why it thought that unknowable quantities of "collateral damage" all over the world was an acceptable price to pay for Australian internet censorship.

Of course, that somewhat alarming outcome is predicated on the trustworthiness of Senator Conroy's claim that only the most outrageously illegal material would be blocked. A diligent enquirer might wonder whether that is true.

In a Senate Estimates Committee hearing on 20 October, 2008, Senator Conroy confirmed that ACMA's existing prohibited online content list would form the basis of the mandatory "illegal material" censorship scheme. The problem is the ACMA-prohibited online content list doesn't actually restrict itself to illegal material.

In addition to the illegal material Senator Conroy would like to ban for adults, the list also contains material the Office of Film and Literature Classification has refused to classify, but which may still be legal to possess (if not to sell, hire, exhibit, or import) in Australia, as well as material rated X18+, also R18+ material not protected by an adult verification service, and some MA15+ material. Material in these categories is mostly legal in Australia.

The ACMA-prohibited online content list also contains a class of material that hasn't been examined by the OFLC, but which, in the opinion of ACMA bureaucrats, "would be" classified into one of the categories of prohibited content.

But because the blacklist is secret, unaudited, and specifically exempted by legislation from the Freedom of Information application process, the OFLC would never get a chance to check the accuracy of these classifications - unless they downloaded the list once it was leaked. That brings us to the most pernicious of unintended consequences: nobody would know (at first) what had been banned.

Our society accepts that it is up to the courts to determine what is illegal. We do not then expect faceless public servants to be the real arbiters of an internet content blacklist. Yet Senator Conroy, who has established a remarkable track record of being wrong in this area, expects Australians simply to take his word for it when he says that "illegal material is illegal material".

IT is clear that a great many Australians disagree, despite Senator Conroy's hysterical accusations that to do so is to endorse child pornography. In a nation that has enjoyed uncensored access to online services (including those that predate the internet) for over three decades without ill effect, imposing a national censorship regime such as the one proposed by Senator Conroy is a radical act requiring radical justification.

We are over a year into this debate, and still none of these concerns has been addressed. It time for the Labor Government to abandon this policy. To the Government I ask: "Please, won't somebody think of the adults?"

* Mark Newton has spent a decade as a network engineer at a large Australian Internet Service Provider. This is an edited version of an article which first appeared in the summer 2008-09 issue of Policy magazine published by the Centre for Independent Studies.

Prince George wrote:Wikileaks isn't contactable from here either, Wayno, so I don't think that it's something happening in Oz.

peas_and_corn wrote:Whenever you have a site that doesn't work, always check http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com

Wayno wrote:

peas_and_corn wrote:Whenever you have a site that doesn't work, always check http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com

what if i can't get to this website?

Minchin attacks internet filtering trial after iiNet pulls out
ABC News Online, 24 March 2009

The Federal Opposition has stepped up its attack on the Government's internet filtering trial following the withdrawal of the country's third largest internet provider.

iiNet has pulled out of negotiations with the Government because it believes the trial is fundamentally flawed.

iiNet says it was prepared to participate in the trial, but has pulled out because it believes the Government's definition of "unwanted" websites is too vague and the purpose of the trial is confused.

A spokeswoman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says the company never raised those concerns during negotiations.

She also says the Government is confident the trial will still be successful without the company.

But Opposition communications spokesman Nick Minchin says the trial is looking increasingly shaky.

"We're prepared to wait and see what these trials show but the Government won't commit to independent auditing," he said.

"We have the three biggest ISPs not participating. You've really got to start to doubt the credibility and veracity of this trial itself."

He says without Australia's largest internet providers the trial will lack credibility.

"This is a damning indictment of the incompetence of Senator Conroy and the Government in their approach to this whole, very unpopular policy of compulsory mandated internet filtering," he said.

Earlier, iiNet's managing director Michael Malone says they only agreed to participate in the trial to demonstrate that the policy was fundamentally flawed, a waste of taxpayers' money and would not work.

He says constant changes in the policy, confused explanations of the purpose of the trial and recent revelations regarding the blacklist as clear indications that the trial is unnecessary.

"We are not able to reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility, our customer service objectives and our public position on censorship," he said.

"It became increasingly clear that the trial was not simply about restricting child pornography or other such illegal material, but a much wider range of issues including what the Government simply describes as 'unwanted material' without an explanation of what that includes.

"Everyone is repulsed by, and opposed to, child pornography but this trial and policy is not the solution or even about that."

Mr Malone says the Government needs to rethink its approach.

"In reality, the vast majority of online child pornography activity does not appear on public websites but is distributed over peer-to-peer networks which are not and cannot be captured by this trial or policy," he said.