Makes me want to cry that the ability to unilaterally and secretly censor our internet is being handed to people who do not even know the difference between a URL and an ip address.
Exactly. How many people do you think would notice if they banned some Google ip's. If they banned some Google domains, people would notice, but a banned IP would just mean one fewer Google servers in that region.
If in 2013 people still believe that once a censorship infrastructure is put in place governments will only block "child porn" or the "worst of the worst sites", they are being really naive.
It usually takes months or even weeks before the system is used to block something else that has nothing to do with the categories they promised to censor.
The child porn filter isn't what's happening here. The article confusingly implies they are related but they're not.
The government child porn filter is not in use – it never left the trial stages. This filtering is also unrelated to the voluptuary Interpol list that numerous Australian ISPs implement, since Interpol are not trying to filter these sites.
This is not about scope creep of an existing filter. This is a whole new kind of censorship that has come from nowhere for no good reason.
I dream of a day when there is a Minister for Communications that doesn't cause Australia, once again, to be an internet-culture punchline.
I've been dreaming of it since at least 1997.
Unfortunately, that portfolio is a parking lot for factional warlords who want the money and prestige, but who also need time off from actual work to keep heavying backbenchers, interfering with preselections and so on and so forth.
Malcolm Turnbull is the current Shadow Minister. And because of the political requirement to Differentiate(tm), his name is currently "mud" in the local technology world. It's a pity. He has actual tech industry pedigree as an investor, is widely regarded as one of the more thoughtful senior politicians of either stripe and his temper tantrums are very entertaining.
I fully expect that once the election is over Turnbull will be trundled off to something like Pacific Affairs and some dunderheaded blockhead who controls some faction in the NSW Liberals will be rotated in to take the spot.
Almost every country is an internet-culture punchline. There are a lot of jokes out there. And Australia's case is somewhat overrated - for a while there, our censorship was considered as bad as China's for simply considering an internet filter despite never having actually implemented it.
Turnbull is unlikely to get tech, simply because apart from the really plum jobs like treasurer, you don't want someone who knows the industry to hold the portfolio - because they won't make cuts to please the head honcho. At least, that's how it was phrased to me by a defence scientist when Bronwyn Bishop had Defence in her portfolio in the 90s.
We've seen demonstrations with 10s of 1000s of people taking to the streets in Australia on internet freedom issues since 1999, when filtering/takedowns were first proposed (and enacted) nominally due to an extreme conservative Christian politician who held the balance of power at the time. Now 14 years on, at least we're getting some representation this year with the new Wikileaks Party and there is some hope for intelligenct policy.
FWIW there were never "blocked" sites in Australia (this may be a first). The only impact of the blacklist was to penalise those who posted links to banned sites (this was an actual offence), even though the list was secret. In fact, the whole point of the backdown from Conroy was that the actual blocking never went into effect.
There are certainly blocked sites. At one point there was a mistakenly blocked shared web server; traceroutes to it mysteriously hit a dead end from my residential connection but not my server.
I meant blocked in respect to Conroy's blacklist. Your ISP may be blocking other sites on behalf of other parties (or for their own reasons)...it would be most interesting to find out for who and why.
The blocked site was from government list, and applied to Optus, Telstra and Exetel (maybe more). There seems to be disinformation in the media about it; the ISPs claim that the government told them to block a particular site, and the government says they didn't. I'm inclined to believe the former.
This is all very recent...changes are apparently afoot. My guess Conroy is trying to have one last, desperate stab at trying to reign in the Internet before he gets tossed out in September (good luck with that). The guy seems to be unable to grok the concept of a free, open and wild space for the unrestricted exchange of information and ideas that exists outside the realm of government censorship and control.
Well it has been done voluntarily by some ISPs...others have refused. There is no way the AFPs tactics would survive a supreme court challenge when/if the ISPs start kicking up a real stink when they are requested to block more generic material under this farcical "assisting police" nonsense. Its a clear abuse of a law aimed more at providing wiretapping/snooping services not censorship.
The article makes it pretty clear that Australian Government has has been blocking sites, "The ‘voluntary’ filter only blocks a set of sites which international policing agency Interpol has verified contain “worst of the worst” child pornography "..."Under the Act, the Australian Federal Police is allowed to issue notices to telcos asking for reasonable assistance in upholding the law. It is believed the AFP has issued such notices to Telstra and Optus to ask them to filter the Interpol blacklist of sites."
Notice the quotes around voluntary. Do you really think Telstra and Optus are going to refuse a request to block child porn sites from the Australian Government?
Again it must be made clear that the Interpol filter the police demanded is DNS based, the filtering ASIC demanded to shut down one unlicensed financial advisor is IP based.
I'm using TPG and I can confirm access to www.globalcapitalwealth.com is still working so I'd say "believed to be major telco TPG" is quite... um... believable. www.globalcapitalaustralia.com is going to the GoDaddy holding page so I'd say they're in the process of packing up shop.
I'm frankly disgusted at the underhandedness of Conroy. He has previously pushed completely unfeasible schemes aiming at mandatory filtering. He caved on this due to huge public backlash, so he just re-interprets section 313 of the telco act to give the AFP the power, if not the obligation, to bully Australian ISPs into mandatory filtering anyway.
The main differences now are that he gets to do it quietly, possibly without the public backlash, and secondly, that the cost for the extra infrastructure and personnel required to implement it is now the sole burden of the ISPs, and not the Australian taxpayer.
Unfortunately, with the current state of Australian politics, this mob are still probably the best choice going. The Greens (although I usually vote for them, idealist that I am) really don't have any chance this election, and the Liberals [1], except to say that they'd cut the investment in the National Broadband Network, aren't even providing their usual hodge-podge of regurgitated conservatism; They're happy watching Julia Gillard lose the election on her own merits. The two Liberal party members to keep an eye on here are Tony Abbott [2], and Malcolm Turnbull [3]. They, between them, have the power to either lose or win (in that order) this election for the Liberal party.
So, we in Australia, like many in the USA, are discovering that the more "progressive" party is just as likely to engage in shady behaviour as their "conservative" counterparts, but have more to lose when they're found out. This reminds me of something I read recently [4] where it was stated that trust is bi-directional. The more a government stops trusting the people it's mandated to represent, the more those same people, in turn, stop trusting their elected government.
Wow, sorry, I seem to have gone off on a tangential rant there... Anyway, not happy at all.
[1] for the benefit of non-Australian readers, the capital 'L' should be interpreted as a negator. They are anything but 'liberal'.
[2] Party leader, and historically likely to lose this election with a single misplaced misogynistic comment.
[3] A chameleon, finger on the pulse and willing to flip with the public opinion of his constituents... Technically a good trait in a politician, but most of his constituents are rich conservatives
[4] might have been in Bruce Schneier's Liars and Outliers, brilliant book.
To be fair, what is one supposed to do? Should nation states just pack up shop because all their information-restricting legislation does not apply to the intertubes?
Taboo-making is a staple of any organised society and we don't really know of anything that could replace it yet. Even assuming complete good faith from authorities, it's clear that they are reluctant to lose a pillar (if not the pillar) of their own existence.
"To be fair, what is one supposed to do? Should nation states just pack up shop because all their information-restricting legislation does not apply to the intertubes?"
The anarchist in me says yes, the realist in me says vote for Julia at the next election and cross my fingers, the idealist in me says move to New Zealand :-)
"Even assuming complete good faith from authorities, it's clear that they are reluctant to lose a pillar (if not the pillar) of their own existence."
I'd say that the fact the reluctance is so clear is indicative of a complete lack of good faith.
I see what you're saying, and it's a very valid point, but I think "Taboo-making" is way too often over-extended to include taboos on anything the current government doesn't like.
The filter was originally pitched as just a device to prevent the distribution of child pornography, and only that. It's now being used to block fraud websites. Slippery slope indeed.
I give it 6 months before thepiratebay.(org|se|gl|is|cx) is blocked in Australia.
Not even that: this legislation is not "the filter", it's a more generic wiretapping-oriented law. It's like they pushed the filter, got rebuffed, so they went fishing for loopholes in other laws.
