ACMA blacklist leaked?
Update on Australian Internet censorship…
It appears the ACMA’s blacklist may have been leaked. Web site WikiLeaks claims to have received the list and published it on their website. We will not link to it directly, but it is easy to find. See the following articles for more information.
Leaked Australian blacklist reveals banned sites (Fairfax)
Internet filter blacklist leaked on web (ABC)
From the Fairfax (Canberra Times) article, emphasis added:
about half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.
also this:
“There is even a harmless tour operator on there, but there is no mechanism for a site operator to know they got on or request to be removed. The prospect of mandatory nation-wide filtering of this secret list is pretty concerning from a democratic point of view.”
At this early stage we are going to assume both the leak and the list posted on the WikiLeaks site are genuine, however this remains to be verified. We await the Government’s response with interest.
UPDATE:
This comment on the ABC article:
“Ironically the attempt to blacklist these sites (likely mostly abhorrent) has now given them maximum exposure. Now anyone can go to [URL] to browse it and avoid the inconvenience of a search engine!”
UPDATE:
And this from the WikiLeaks site itself:
This week saw Australia joining China and the United Arab Emirates as the only countries censoring Wikileaks. We were not notified by ACMA.
March 11th, 2010 at 10:00 pm
Very good knowledge with this website. It is really hard to find nowadays to find website having details you are researching. So i’m happy I found blog post. I am going to actually bookmark it as well as signup for rss feeds quickly becoming updated on your new threads. Go on the nice job and i’m certainly another someone that searching for appreciated details will be able to stop and use your site for solutions.