Internet censorship in Australia
Encyclopedia
Internet censorship in Australia currently consists of a regulatory regime under which the Australian Communications and Media Authority
(ACMA) has the power to enforce content restrictions on Internet content hosted within Australia, and maintain a "black-list" of overseas websites which is then provided for use in filtering software.
Since October 2008, the governing Australian Labor Party
has proposed to extend Internet censorship to a system of mandatory filtering of overseas websites which are, or potentially would be, "refused classification" (RC) in Australia. This means that internet service providers would be required to block access to such content for all users. As of June 2010, legislation to enact this policy still has not been drafted. The proposal to introduce mandatory filtering has generated substantial opposition, with a number of concerns being raised by opponents and only a few groups strongly supporting the policy. Such legislation may therefore have difficulty passing through the Senate
. With the announcement made on 5 August 2010 by Joe Hockey
that the Coalition parties
will not vote in favour of the policy should the Labor party be re-elected, it is now virtually impossible for the filtering scheme to pass through the Senate.
In November 2010, Department of Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy (DBCDE) released a document indicating that the earliest date any new legislation could reach parliament was mid-2013.
The content is deemed to be "prohibited" where it is (or in ACMA's judgement likely would be):
Where content is deemed to be prohibited, the ACMA is empowered to issue local sites with a take-down notice under which the content must be removed; failure to do so can result in fines of up to $11,000 per day. If the site is hosted outside Australia, the content in question is added to a blacklist of banned URLs. This list of banned Web pages is then added to filtering software (encrypted), which must be offered to all consumers by their Internet Service Providers. In March 2009, this blacklist was leaked online.
A number of take down notices have been issued to some Australian-hosted websites. According to Electronic Frontiers Australia
in at least one documented case, the hosting was merely shifted to a server in the United States, and the DNS
records updated so that consumers may never have noticed the change.
.
s. The Internet Industry Association and EFA
are actively opposing these efforts.
In New South Wales, Internet censorship legislation was introduced in 2001 which criminalises online material which is unsuitable for minors. In 2002, the New South Wales Standing Committee on Social Issues issued a report recommending that the legislation be repealed, and in response the New South Wales government
stated that the legislation "will be neither commenced nor repealed" until after the review of the Commonwealth Internet censorship legislation had been completed.
Minister Michael Costa attempted, without success, to shut down three protest websites by appealing to the then-communications minister Richard Alston
. The Green Left Weekly
stated these were Melbourne Indymedia and S11
websites, and that the Australian Broadcasting Authority
(the predecessor to ACMA) cleared them of breaching government regulations on 30 October 2002.
Also in 2002, and under the terms of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975
, the Federal Court ordered Dr Fredrick Töben
to remove material from his Australian website which denied aspects of The Holocaust
and vilified Jews.
In 2006, Richard Neville published a "spoof" website that had a fictional transcript of John Howard apologising to Australians for the Iraq War. The website was forcibly taken offline by the government with no recourse.
After the devastating bushfires in February 2009, details about an alleged arsonist were posted online by bloggers. Victorian police deputy commissioner Kieran Walshe has asked the state Director of Public Prosecutions
to examine the possibility of removing these blogs from the web, as they might jeopardise any court case.
In March 2009, after a user posted a link to a site on ACMA's blacklist on the Whirlpool forum, Whirlpool's service provider
, Bulletproof Networks, was threatened with fines of $11,000 per day if the offending link was not removed. The same link in an article on EFA's website was removed in May 2009 after ACMA issued a "link-deletion notice", and the EFA took the precautionary step of also removing indirect links to the material in question.
The 2009 winner of the George Polk award for videography shows footage of 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan
being shot and dying during Iran protests. This footage has also been declared "prohibited content" by ACMA, attracting fines of $11,000 per day for any Australian website which posts a link to the video.
After the Australian government announced plans to mandate web filtering in Australia in December 2009, an anti-censorship website hosted on stephenconroy.com.au (The full name of the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy) was taken offline by auDA after only 24 hours of being published online.
In October 2000, Electronic Frontiers Australia
(EFA) attempted under the Freedom of Information Act
(FOI) to obtain documents relating to the implementation of the web filter. While a few were released, many were not, and in 2003 new legislation, "Communications Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2002", was passed by the Liberal government and four independents, and opposed by The Greens and the Australian Labor Party. While the stated reason for the bill was to prevent people accessing child pornography
by examining the blocked sites, this bill exempted whole documents from FOI, many of which did not reference prohibited content at all. EFA state that the bill was designed to prevent further public scrutiny of web filtering proposals.
), Firewall Australia or Great Firewall Reef (a reference to Great Barrier Reef
and the Great Firewall of China
)
, but this censorship plan did not work.
In 2001, CSIRO was commissioned to examine Internet content filtering. The report focused primarily on evaluating the effectiveness of client-side filtering schemes (which were generally ineffective), but also discussed some of the difficulties with ISP-based filtering
In March 2003, the Fairfax papers The Age
and the Sydney Morning Herald reported the results of a survey taken by The Australia Institute
of 200 children, which found that many of them had found pornography on the Internet. Over the next few days was a storm of media and political attention, and there were calls for finer Internet filters and tougher censorship laws. Analysis of the report showed little new material, and only 2% of girls had admitted being exposed to pornography, while the figure for boys was 38%; such a difference between boys and girls would seem to indicate that inadvertent exposure was rare, contrary to the conclusions of the report. After the controversy died down, no new action resulted from the new report, media attention, or political speeches.
In 2003, the Labor Party opposed filtering at the ISP level, with Labor Senator Kate Lundy
stating
Shortly before the 2004 federal election, two political parties issued new policies on Internet censorship. The Australian Labor Party's
policy involved voluntary adherence by users. The Family First Party
released a far stricter policy of mandatory filtering at the Internet service provider
level.
The Australian Family Association
petitioned the Australian Federal Government in 2004 to further restrict access by children to pornographic material via the Internet
. The petition was submitted in December 2004.
On 21 March 2006, the Labor party committed to requiring all ISPs to implement a mandatory Internet blocking system applicable to “all households, and to schools and other public Internet points” to “prevent users from accessing any content that has been identified as prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority”.
On the same day, the then communications minister Helen Coonan
stated that to
announced the Federal Government's intention to introduce an ISP-based filter to censor "inappropriate material" from the Internet to protect children. In this announcement, it was stated that adults could opt out of the filter to receive uncensored access to the Internet.
In May 2008, the government commenced an $82 million “cybersafety plan” which included an additional mandatory filter with no opt-out
provision. This ISP-based filter aims to stop adults from downloading content that is illegal to possess in Australia, such as child pornography or materials related to terrorism
.
In March 2009, Stephen Conroy dismissed suggestions that the Government would use the filter to crack down on political dissent
as "conspiracy theories". He stated that the filter would only be used to remove "refused classification" (RC) content, using the same rationale as existing television, radio and print publications, and that the Senate could be relied upon to provide rigorous assessment of any proposed legislation. However, Labor's policy statement on the issue contradicts this. It is also contrary to an earlier ministerial release in 2008.
The most recent explanation of the government's position on this issue is provided on the ministry website. This clearly states that only ISP-level filtering of (designated) refused classification (RC) material will be mandatory under their policy. However, ISP's will be encouraged to offer ISP-level filtering of 'adult content' as an optional (commercial) service to their customers. Such an optional extra service is aimed at parents trying to protect their children from 'undesirable' content that would otherwise be available, because it would not be RC (e.g. it might receive a classification of "R").
Labor Senator Kate Lundy
said in January 2010 that she is lobbying within the party for an "opt-out" filter, describing it as the "least worst" option. In February 2010 she said she would propose the opt-out option when the filtering legislation goes before caucus.
Stephen Conroy has stated that 85% of Internet Service Providers, including Telstra, Optus, iPrimus and iiNet, welcome the Internet filter. In response, Steve Dalby, iiNet's chief regulatory officer, stated that iiNet as a company does not support the Internet filter, and never has.
On 9 July 2010, Stephen Conroy announced that any mandatory filtering would be delayed until at least 2011.
In June 2011 two Australian ISPs, Telstra and Optus, confirmed they would voluntary block access to a list of child abuse websites provided by the Australian Communications and Media Authority and more websites on a list compiled by unnamed international organizations from mid-year.
obtained independent legal advice confirming that a mandatory censorship regime would require new legislation. In March 2009, after the ACMA blacklist was leaked and iiNet withdrew from the filtering trials, he stated that Stephen Conroy was "completely botching the implementation of this filtering policy".
In March 2010, shadow treasurer Joe Hockey
attacked the filter, saying "What we have in the government’s Internet filtering proposals is a scheme that is likely to be unworkable in practice. But more perniciously it is a scheme that will create the infrastructure for government censorship on a broader scale". During the 2010 Federal Election, Liberal communications spokesman Tony Smith announced that
"a Coalition government will not introduce a mandatory ISP level filter", with Joe Hockey also announcing an intention to vote against the policy if Labor is re-elected.
predicts that due to obstruction in the Senate, the legislation will not be introduced until after the next Federal Election.
At the end of 2008 he asked questions in parliament related to the filtering trial, for which the Government provided answers in January 2009:
Ludlam believes that the Labor party may have hit a wall of "technical impossibility", and the filter does not suit its purpose:
Despite their lack of support for the filter, The Greens preselected Clive Hamilton
, whose think-tank The Australia Institute
first suggested an ISP-based Internet filter, for the by-election in the seat of Higgins
.
and fetish material under the Government's plans to filter access to the Internet. A Family First spokeswoman confirmed that the party wants X-rated
content banned for everyone, including adults.
A spokesman for independent senator Nick Xenophon said
Senator Xenophon has, however, stated that he has serious concerns about the plan, and in February 2009 withdrew all support, stating that "the more evidence that's come out, the more questions there are on this." He believes that money would be better spent educating parents and cracking peer-to-peer
groups used by paedophiles.
A political party associated with The Eros Foundation, the Australian Sex Party
, was launched in November 2008 and plans to campaign on issues including censorship and the federal Government's promised Internet filter.
(IWF) blacklist. In December 2008 the IWF list caused problems when the Wikipedia
article Virgin Killer
was added to the list, as it prevented many people in the UK from being able to edit Wikipedia
.
The ACMA definitions of "prohibited content" give some idea of what could potentially be blacklisted. Online content prohibited by ACMA includes:
In answer to a question in Parliament in October 2008, the government in January 2009 stated that the black list
contained 1370 websites. 674 were related to child pornography, and the remainder would be classified as R18+ and X18+.
Two websites are known to be on the ACMA blacklist after they were submitted to ACMA for review. When ACMA responded with the advice that these sites had been placed upon its blacklist, ACMA's response was in turn posted back to the web by the original submitters, with the purpose of demonstrating that political content would be censored by the mandatory filter. One was an anti-abortion
website, with details posted to Whirlpool
, and the other was a copy of Denmark's own Internet blacklist, with both the blacklist and ACMA's response posted on Wikileaks
. The web hosting company for Whirlpool, Bulletproof networks, was threatened with $11,000 in fines per day if the link was not removed, so Whirlpool voluntarily removed the link to the restricted site. Civil liberties campaigners regard the inclusion of these sites on the blacklist as a demonstration that it is not difficult to get a site placed on the blacklist, and that the blacklist includes sites which are themselves not illegal to view.
19 March 2009: Australian media sources report that the ACMA blacklist has been leaked to WikiLeaks
ACMA claimed that the list which appeared on the Wikileaks website was not the ACMA 'blacklist', as it contained 2300 URLs. ACMA claimed the ACMA list contained only 1061 URLs in August 2008, and has at no stage contained 2300.
The ACMA report on the issue noted the similarities between the two lists, yet addressed only the claim reported in the media that the list was the blacklist. The report only contains the following claims about the two lists:
20 March 2009: WikiLeaks published another list, this time closer to the length published by ACMA. Wikileaks believes that the list is up-to-date as of the time of publication
25 March 2009: Stephen Conroy has reportedly stated that this list closely resembles the ACMA list..
26 March 2009: The above report of 25 March 2009 was followed by the Minister's statement on the ABC's 'Q&A' television program the following day that "the second list which has appeared appears to be closer [to the true black-list]. I don't actually know what's on the list but I'm told by [...] ACMA it appears to be closer to the actual, legitimate list."
On the program Senator Conroy also explained that the seemingly inexplicable censoring of a dentist's website was due to subversion of the website by the Russian mafia, who had inserted RC material.
In the same discussion Bill Henson
's website, despite the PG rating given to his photographs by the same body, appeared on the blacklist due to a technical error according to Stephen Conroy The ACMA has since released a statement claiming the technical error was a "computer system caching error" and further stated "found that this is the only URL where a caching error resulting in the URL being incorrectly added to the list."
On 28 July 2008, an ACMA
report entitled “Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Internet Content Filtering” showed performance and accuracy problems with the six unnamed ISP-based filters trialled. EFA
analysis of the report showed that:
In November 2008 the Government hired Melbourne company ENEX TestLab, an RMIT
spin-off, to design a live pilot test on a real network. In this trial, in which several ISPs have expressed an interest, 10,000 blacklisted "unwanted" websites would be blocked in addition to 1,300 websites identified by ACMA. As an incentive for participation, the department states that participating ISPs
These ISPs will also be allowed to keep any software and hardware purchased by the government for the trial. The trial may include some ability to block or alert on the presence of proxies. Both filtered and unfiltered users will be surveyed as part of the trial.
ISPs participating in the Live Trial will be required to enter into a non disclosure agreement
with ACMA.
Communications from Senator Conroy's office have indicated that the live trial will occur without the participation of any customers due to concerns about the impact on network performance
of filtering 10,000 URLs. Telstra and Internode have stated that they will not take part in the trial. iiNet has stated that it will take part in the trial only to show that the filtering will not work. Optus has stated that it will only test a heavily cut-down filtering model containing only 1300 URLs in a limited geographic area, and customers will be allowed to opt out.
At the end of 2008, Stephen Conroy anticipated that the live trial would test the filtering of Bittorrent traffic, but in March 2009 he stated that the proposed filters would not be effective on peer-to-peer traffic.
The trial was originally scheduled to be commenced in December 2008, but, after the existence of a report critical of the trial became known, the trial was pushed back. On 11 February 2009 a new filtering trial was announced, initially with the ISPs iPrimus Telecommunications, Tech 2U, Webshield, OMNIconnect, Netforce and Highway 1. Testing with each ISP will take place for at least six weeks once filtering equipment has been obtained and installed, and iPrimus expects the trial to begin in late April or early May with five or ten thousand participants. The trial will be opt-in, with ISPs asking for volunteers, although all WebShield customers already receive a filtered service. None of the top three ISPs, Telstra, Optus and iiNet, have been included in the trial, although both iiNet and Optus did expect to be involved at a later time. iiNet withdrew itself from consideration for the trial in March 2009, with Michael Malone giving as reasons the media storm around the leaked blacklist, the changing nature of policy, and "confused" explanations of the trial's purpose.
In July 2009 some results from the trials began to emerge. Five of the nine participating ISPs reported minimal speed or technical problems associated with the trials. Some ISPs reported that thousands of their members had voluntarily participated in the trials; others, that less than 1% had participated, and that this was not a representative sample. Some customers complained about over-blocking, and withdrew from the trial. One example was the blocking of the pornography website redtube.com
: ACMA refused to confirm or deny if the site was on the list, or if the site was legal. Leading Australian statistic experts, however, have labelled the trials as unscientific, lacking in proper methodology, unrepresentative and "about the worst way you can do it".
In December 2009, the results of the filtering trial were released. Stephen Conroy stated that "The report into the pilot trial of ISP-level filtering demonstrates that blocking RC-rated material can be done with 100 percent accuracy and negligible impact on Internet speed" However, concerns have been raised about the report: only a small minority of ISP users participated; the trial did not test using any high-speed Internet connections similar to those available with the National Broadband Network
; there is evidence that the filter was evaded; and with only 600-700 sites on the RC blacklists, then the effect of the filter would be marginal at best.
, for IP address
es known to host objectionable material, through a transparent proxy.
Some risks and limitations of hybrid filters have been identified, including heavy congestion when blocks are applied to busy web server
s, and a procedure to use the filter itself to identify all sites on the blacklist.
Some vendors have approached smaller ISPs and offered to provide them with required equipment to take part in the filtering trials.
After widespread coverage, the IWF removed the Wikipedia page from its blacklist, citing the availability of the image on other websites as a factor:
The wide variation to answers to essentially the same question can be attributed to variations in the wording of the questions asked. The results were initially reported as "80pc back web filter: poll" despite the fact that 46% were against "a government body determining whether a website is appropriate to visit". The question asked were whether respondents supported the results despite the evidence that the filter will not effectively achieve these results, respondents were not made aware of the limitations of such a filter.
In February 2009 a national telephone poll of 1,100 people was conducted by Galaxy and commissioned by GetUp!. It found that only 5 per cent of respondents want ISPs to be responsible for protecting children online, and only 4 per cent want Government to have this responsibility.
In March 2010 the results of the Whirlpool Australia broadband survey 2009 were published. This survey was of 21,755 experienced Internet users, and only 8% were in favour of the mandatory filter.
In May 2010 the results of a study commissioned by the Safer Internet Group were published. The Safer Internet Group includes Google, Internet Industry Association, iiNet, Australian Council of State School Organisations and the Australian Library and Information Association. 39 people participated in four focus group interviews. The study stated that while people were aware of the pending filter legislation, they did not understand its details. When details of the Government's proposal was explained, along with the possible alternatives, enthusiasm for the filter dropped.
organised these protests, declaring an intent to rally continuously until censorship as a whole is taken off the table.
The Internet-based political activism
organisation, GetUp!, which has previously run mainstream campaigns action against Work Choices and to free David Hicks
, is backing the offline action of the DLC to oppose the web censorship plan. GetUp! first called for donations during December 2008 to raise awareness of Internet censorship in Australia. The group raised an unprecedented $30,000 before the end of the appeal's first day.
GetUp! teamed up with award winning, non-traditional and digital creative agency Fnuky Advertising to launch a campaign in Australia to raise awareness of the Australian Government's flawed plans to introduce web censorship. The campaign impersonated the Australian Federal Government by presenting web censorship as a mock consumer product branded as Censordyne, a parody of the toothpaste brand, Sensodyne
. Fnuky Advertising's Creative Director, David Campbell selected toothpaste as the platform for the campaign after Stephen Conroy
stated the purpose of web censorship in Australia was to 'Fight Moral Decay'. The Censordyne campaign was launched online during July 2009 by a single Twitter
post by fake Stephen Conroy, a popular impersonator of the Australian Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy. The campaign featured an online video, a Censordyne product website and a Censordyne search engine. Within 24 hours of launch, the words GetUp and Censordyne were the number 2 and 3 most talked about brands on Twitter worldwide. The campaign received widespread coverage in most major Australian newspapers and news websites. Censordyne become a topic of discussion on Nova 96.9 radio in Sydney and was featured on the Australian ABC television program Insiders.
GetUp! raised over $45,000 in donations from the general public during July 2009 to see the Censordyne commercial on TV and on Qantas
flights during the month of August 2009, where all Australian politicians would be travelling to Canberra
. Following the Censordyne campaign launch, Qantas chose to censor the anti-censorship campaign from their flights.
In a speech in January 2010, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accuses countries with Internet censorship of breaching the UN's Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and the Australian filter literally fits her definition for censorship. Stephen Conroy welcomed Clinton's speech, and agrees with her that "freedom of expression has its limits". Colin Jacobs responded in turn to note that while there are limits to free speech, Clinton had stated that the advantages of the Internet would be jeopardised by introducing censorship. As part of a diplomatic assault by the USA on Internet censorship in many countries, US State Department spokesman Noel Clay has raised concerns about the filter plan with Australian officials.
The leaders of three of Australia's largest ISPs (Telstra
, iiNet
and Internode
) have stated in an interview that the web filtering proposal simply cannot work for various technical, legal and ethical reasons. The managing director of iiNet, Michael Malone, has said of Stephen Conroy "This is the worst Communications Minister we've had in the 15 years since the [Internet] industry has existed," and plans to sign up his ISP for participation in live filtering trials by 24 December to provide the Government with "hard numbers" demonstrating "how stupid it [the filtering proposal] is."
Dale Clapperton, then chairperson of EFA, argued that the Labor party cannot implement the clean feed proposal without either new legislation and the support of the Australian Senate, or the assistance of the Internet Industry Association. As the Liberals and Greens have both stated that they will not support legislation, it can only be implemented with the support of the IIA.
International lobby group Netchoice, which is backed by companies including eBay
, AOL Time Warner, Oracle Corporation
and some trade associations , is likely to oppose the mandatory filter. Google opposes the filter primarily because the scope of content to be filtered is too wide, and is likely to delay the introduction of Google TV
to Australia because of technical concerns about the filter.
Internode engineer Mark Newton was the subject of a letter of complaint from Stephen Conroy's office for his participation in a Whirlpool
forum showing the negative impact of the filter on Internet access speeds.
Some child welfare
groups ( Save the Children
/ National Children's & Youth Law Centre ) have attacked the filtering plan as ineffective, stating that resources would be better spent elsewhere, and agreeing with the opposing position presented by Australia's ISPs. Other child welfare groups continue to support the filters. In 2008, ChildWise defended the plan as "a victory for common sense,"
NSW Young Labor has abandoned the web filtering plan, passing a motion rejecting Conroy's plans, and calling on him to adopt a voluntary, opt-in, system.
Colin Jacobs, vice-chairman of Electronic Frontiers Australia
, said that the pitfalls of mandatory ISP filtering were illustrated by the problems in the UK caused by the blocking of a single Wikipedia page. He also said of the IWF blacklist:
Conservative South Australia
n Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi
does not support the mandatory web filter. He considers Stephen Conroy's plan to be "so devoid of detail" that it is impossible to form an opinion on it, and says
Clive Hamilton
, a senior ethics professor at the Australian National University
whose think tank
the Australia Institute was responsible for the initial media attention for a mandatory Internet filter in 2003, argues
to stand in the Federal seat of Higgins.
Retired Justice Michael Kirby believes that it is a bad example for the government of a democratic country like Australia to take control of what people hear and what information they get, and made comparisons to the situation in Iran and Burma
In an open letter to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd
, Reporters Without Borders
states that the web filter is not the solution to combating child sex abuse, and the plan entails risks to freedom of expression. The blocking of websites by ACMA
, rather than a Judge, is in contravention of laws. The criteria for blocking "inappropriate" websites is too vague, and it would be a dangerous censorship option to target "Refused classification" sites, many of which are unrelated to sexual abuse. Subjects such as abortion, anorexia, aborigines and legislation on the sale of marijuana would all risk being filtered, as would media reports on these subjects.
The Howard Government commissioned a number of independent technical experts to examine Internet filtering. The resulting report was delivered to the Australian Government in February 2008, and released publicly in December 2008. Professor Bjorn Landfeldt, one of the report's authors, stated that filtering technology simply does not work, as it can easily be bypassed and slows access to the Internet by up to 87%. In response, Stephen Conroy has stated that the report involved no empirical testing, and was simply a literature review
of material available from other sources; any problems raised by the report would be tested during the filter trials scheduled for mid-January 2009.
A report by Tim Stevens and Dr Peter Neumann for the London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence
(ICSR) analyses each of the available ISP-based filtering solutions and concludes that they are ineffective in the fight against terror. A hybrid filtering scheme was rated the best, but it is ineffective against dynamic content such as chat pages and instant messaging
, and had political implications because it required the existence of a blacklist of blocked pages. The report instead advocates the use of take-down notices for extremist content, and prosecutions to "signal that individuals engaged in online extremism
are not beyond the law."
The Metaverse Journal suggests that because web filtering logs every site visit, and some information about who is visiting the site, then it is ripe for abuse by whoever runs the filters. It potentially allows surveillance of any user of the Internet, such as journalists, political opponents, or even the family members of politicians.
Ross Fitzgerald
of The Australian
believes that the filter was not introduced in 2010 to defuse it as an election issue, and that if it is re-introduced into the next parliament it could be even more censorious than the current proposal.
Australian radio presenter and writer Helen Razer
dislikes the filter because she enjoys pornography, does not believe it causes harm to adults, and doesn't think that children are at much risk:
, automatically redirecting them to a page on the same site with a message mocking censorship efforts with the text:
In September 2009 the group Anonymous reawakened, in Operation Didgeridie, in order to protest the policy of Internet censorship, and on 9 September initiated a Distributed Denial of Service attack against the prime minister's website. As a result of this attack, the site was taken offline for approximately one hour.
On 10 February 2010, the Australian Parliament of Australia's website, www.aph.gov.au, was attacked by Anonymous once again. The attacks included distributed denial of service, blackfaxes, prank calls and spam emails. The attacks commenced at 12 midnight local time and the website has been down for over 2 days. The attack, named "Operation Titstorm
" is reportedly in defiance of the Government's banning of small-breasted women & female ejaculation in pornography. The group called for physical media to be distributed to members of the Australian Labor Party as well as assaulting email addresses, phone numbers and fax numbers with spam and pornographic images that were in the categories to which were going to be filtered by the government's policy.
filter and a web filter. The world-wide-web is a myriad of software documents
containing pointers
to each other, hosted on server computers
around the world. The Internet is the physical network used to convey requests from users' computers to these servers and responses from the servers back to the users.
The proposed filter only monitors certain ports specific to conveying web traffic. As it aims to monitor the majority of web traffic, it is appropriately referred to as a web filter. As it is agnostic of the majority (99.99%) of other connections
a user's computer might establish with other computers on the Internet, it is something of a misnomer to refer to it as an Internet filter.
Since the proposed filter is situated at the Internet service provider
(the junction between users and the Internet at large), introducing such a filter cannot possibly slow down the Internet itself. It can only (potentially) slow down access to the Internet by users of that ISP. Ignoring load
considerations, communication speed across the Internet for any non-web traffic would be unaffected.
is banned from within several state and federal government departments, including Stephen Conroy
's ACMA
. Convenor of the Australian Sex Party, Fiona Patten
, has described this ban as "unconstitutional".
, that the Australian Government had added Dr Philip Nitschke's
online Peaceful Pill Handbook, which deals with the topic of voluntary euthanasia
, to the blacklist maintained by the Australian Communications and Media Authority
used to filter web access to citizens of Australia. Euthanasia groups will hold seminars around Australia teaching how to evade the proposed filter using proxy servers and virtual networks
. A spokeswoman for Senator Conroy said that euthanasia would not be targeted by the proposed web filter, however Stephen Conroy has previously stated that "while euthanasia remains illegal it will be captured by the RC filter".
and Amazon
.
article "Aboriginal" was removed from the search engine results of Google Australia
, following a complaint that its content was racist
.
George Newhouse, the lawyer for the complainant, claims the site is "illegal" and should be blocked by the mandatory web filter.
As the address of the site appeared on the leaked ACMA blacklist, it is likely that the whole site would be blocked by the filter. A search on terms related to the article will produce a message that one of the results has been removed after a legal request relating to Australia's Racial Discrimination Act 1975
.
Australian Communications and Media Authority
The Australian Communications and Media Authority is an Australian government statutory authority within the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy portfolio...
(ACMA) has the power to enforce content restrictions on Internet content hosted within Australia, and maintain a "black-list" of overseas websites which is then provided for use in filtering software.
Since October 2008, the governing Australian Labor Party
Australian Labor Party
The Australian Labor Party is an Australian political party. It has been the governing party of the Commonwealth of Australia since the 2007 federal election. Julia Gillard is the party's federal parliamentary leader and Prime Minister of Australia...
has proposed to extend Internet censorship to a system of mandatory filtering of overseas websites which are, or potentially would be, "refused classification" (RC) in Australia. This means that internet service providers would be required to block access to such content for all users. As of June 2010, legislation to enact this policy still has not been drafted. The proposal to introduce mandatory filtering has generated substantial opposition, with a number of concerns being raised by opponents and only a few groups strongly supporting the policy. Such legislation may therefore have difficulty passing through the Senate
Australian Senate
The Senate is the upper house of the bicameral Parliament of Australia, the lower house being the House of Representatives. Senators are popularly elected under a system of proportional representation. Senators are elected for a term that is usually six years; after a double dissolution, however,...
. With the announcement made on 5 August 2010 by Joe Hockey
Joe Hockey
Joseph Benedict "Joe" Hockey , is an Australian politician and member of the Australian House of Representatives, representing the Division of North Sydney for the Liberal Party of Australia since 1996....
that the Coalition parties
Coalition (Australia)
The Coalition in Australian politics refers to a group of centre-right parties that has existed in the form of a coalition agreement since 1922...
will not vote in favour of the policy should the Labor party be re-elected, it is now virtually impossible for the filtering scheme to pass through the Senate.
In November 2010, Department of Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy (DBCDE) released a document indicating that the earliest date any new legislation could reach parliament was mid-2013.
Current status (Federal law)
A collection of both federal and state laws apply to Internet content in Australia.Broadcasting Services Act 1992
The provisions of Schedule 5 and Schedule 7 of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 inserted in 1999 and 2007 allow the Australian Communications and Media Authority to effectively ban some content from being hosted within Australia. Under this regime, if a complaint is issued about material "broadcast" on the Internet the ACMA is allowed to examine the material under the guidelines for film and video.The content is deemed to be "prohibited" where it is (or in ACMA's judgement likely would be):
- refused classification, or classified X18+
- classified R18+, and not protected by an adult verification systemAdult Verification SystemAn Adult Verification System also known as an "Age Gate" is a computing system used by a website to confirm that the user attempting to access their website is of the age required to view the website's content, which typically includes sex, nudity, violence or profanity, or Entertainment Software...
- classified MA15+ and not protected by an adult verification system, where the user has paid to access the content.
Where content is deemed to be prohibited, the ACMA is empowered to issue local sites with a take-down notice under which the content must be removed; failure to do so can result in fines of up to $11,000 per day. If the site is hosted outside Australia, the content in question is added to a blacklist of banned URLs. This list of banned Web pages is then added to filtering software (encrypted), which must be offered to all consumers by their Internet Service Providers. In March 2009, this blacklist was leaked online.
A number of take down notices have been issued to some Australian-hosted websites. According to Electronic Frontiers Australia
Electronic Frontiers Australia
Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc. is a non-profit Australian national non-government organisation representing Internet users concerned with online liberties and rights...
in at least one documented case, the hosting was merely shifted to a server in the United States, and the DNS
Domain name system
The Domain Name System is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities...
records updated so that consumers may never have noticed the change.
Suicide Related Materials Offences Act 2006
In 2006 the Federal Parliament passed the Suicide Related Materials Offences Act, which makes it illegal to use communications media such as the Internet to discuss the practical aspects of suicideSuicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
.
Copyright Legislation Amendment Bill 2004
The Copyright Legislation Amendment Bill 2004 was passed on 9 December 2004 by the Australian Senate, and extended copyright reform beyond the Australian-US free trade agreement (FTA). The impact will be felt most heavily by Internet service providerInternet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
s. The Internet Industry Association and EFA
Electronic Frontiers Australia
Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc. is a non-profit Australian national non-government organisation representing Internet users concerned with online liberties and rights...
are actively opposing these efforts.
State and territory laws
Some state governments have laws that ban the transmission of material unsuitable for minors.In New South Wales, Internet censorship legislation was introduced in 2001 which criminalises online material which is unsuitable for minors. In 2002, the New South Wales Standing Committee on Social Issues issued a report recommending that the legislation be repealed, and in response the New South Wales government
Government of New South Wales
The form of the Government of New South Wales is prescribed in its Constitution, which dates from 1856, although it has been amended many times since then...
stated that the legislation "will be neither commenced nor repealed" until after the review of the Commonwealth Internet censorship legislation had been completed.
Notable examples
In 2002, New South Wales PoliceNew South Wales Police
The New South Wales Police Force is the primary law enforcement agency in the State of New South Wales, Australia. It is an agency of the Government of New South Wales within the New South Wales Ministry for Police...
Minister Michael Costa attempted, without success, to shut down three protest websites by appealing to the then-communications minister Richard Alston
Richard Alston (politician)
Richard Kenneth Robert Alston was a Liberal member of the Australian Senate from 1986 to 2004, representing the state of Victoria....
. The Green Left Weekly
Green Left Weekly
Green Left Weekly is an Australian radical left-wing newspaper, written by progressive activists to "present the views excluded by the big business media". It was published by the Democratic Socialist Perspective from its inception in 1990 until January 2010, when the DSP merged into the Socialist...
stated these were Melbourne Indymedia and S11
S11 (protest)
S11 refers to a series of protests against meetings of the World Economic Forum on 11, 12 and 13 September 2000 in Melbourne, Australia, where approximately 10,000 people of many ages and a wide cross section of the community were involved. One of the groups involved in the protests called itself...
websites, and that the Australian Broadcasting Authority
Australian Broadcasting Authority
The Australian Broadcasting Authority was an Australian government agency whose main roles were to regulate broadcasting, radiocommunications and telecommunications....
(the predecessor to ACMA) cleared them of breaching government regulations on 30 October 2002.
Also in 2002, and under the terms of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975
Racial Discrimination Act 1975
The Racial Discrimination Act 1975 is a statute passed by the Australian Parliament during the Prime Ministership of Labor Gough Whitlam....
, the Federal Court ordered Dr Fredrick Töben
Gerald Fredrick Töben
Gerald Fredrick Töben is a German-born Australian citizen and founder and former director of the Adelaide Institute. He is the author of numerous works on education, political science and history, although he is best known for his Holocaust denial. Töben claims he cannot deny that which never...
to remove material from his Australian website which denied aspects of The Holocaust
The Holocaust
The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...
and vilified Jews.
In 2006, Richard Neville published a "spoof" website that had a fictional transcript of John Howard apologising to Australians for the Iraq War. The website was forcibly taken offline by the government with no recourse.
After the devastating bushfires in February 2009, details about an alleged arsonist were posted online by bloggers. Victorian police deputy commissioner Kieran Walshe has asked the state Director of Public Prosecutions
Director of Public Prosecutions
The Director of Public Prosecutions is the officer charged with the prosecution of criminal offences in several criminal jurisdictions around the world...
to examine the possibility of removing these blogs from the web, as they might jeopardise any court case.
In March 2009, after a user posted a link to a site on ACMA's blacklist on the Whirlpool forum, Whirlpool's service provider
Service provider
A service provider is an entity that provides services to other entities. Usually, this refers to a business that provides subscription or web service to other businesses or individuals. Examples of these services include Internet access, Mobile phone operators, and web application hosting...
, Bulletproof Networks, was threatened with fines of $11,000 per day if the offending link was not removed. The same link in an article on EFA's website was removed in May 2009 after ACMA issued a "link-deletion notice", and the EFA took the precautionary step of also removing indirect links to the material in question.
The 2009 winner of the George Polk award for videography shows footage of 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan
Death of Neda Agha-Soltan
Footage of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan drew international attention after she was killed during the 2009 Iranian election protests. Her death was captured on video by bystanders and broadcast over the Internet and the video became a rallying point for the opposition...
being shot and dying during Iran protests. This footage has also been declared "prohibited content" by ACMA, attracting fines of $11,000 per day for any Australian website which posts a link to the video.
After the Australian government announced plans to mandate web filtering in Australia in December 2009, an anti-censorship website hosted on stephenconroy.com.au (The full name of the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy) was taken offline by auDA after only 24 hours of being published online.
In October 2000, Electronic Frontiers Australia
Electronic Frontiers Australia
Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc. is a non-profit Australian national non-government organisation representing Internet users concerned with online liberties and rights...
(EFA) attempted under the Freedom of Information Act
Freedom of Information Act 1982
The Freedom of Information Act 1982 is Australian Commonwealth Freedom of Information legislation which gives members of the public rights of access to official documents of the Government of the Commonwealth and of its agencies.-Outline of the Act:...
(FOI) to obtain documents relating to the implementation of the web filter. While a few were released, many were not, and in 2003 new legislation, "Communications Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2002", was passed by the Liberal government and four independents, and opposed by The Greens and the Australian Labor Party. While the stated reason for the bill was to prevent people accessing child pornography
Child pornography
Child pornography refers to images or films and, in some cases, writings depicting sexually explicit activities involving a child...
by examining the blocked sites, this bill exempted whole documents from FOI, many of which did not reference prohibited content at all. EFA state that the bill was designed to prevent further public scrutiny of web filtering proposals.
Proposed future legislation (mandatory filtering)
Proposed Australian laws on Internet censorship are sometimes referred to as the Great Australian Firewall, Rabbit Proof Firewall (a reference to the Australian Rabbit-proof fenceRabbit-proof fence
The State Barrier Fence of Western Australia, formerly known as the No. 1 Rabbit-proof Fence, the State Vermin Fence and the Emu Fence, is a pest-exclusion fence constructed between 1901 and 1907 to keep rabbits and other agricultural pests, from the east, out of Western Australian pastoral...
), Firewall Australia or Great Firewall Reef (a reference to Great Barrier Reef
Great Barrier Reef
The Great Barrier Reef is the world'slargest reef system composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching for over 2,600 kilometres over an area of approximately...
and the Great Firewall of China
Golden Shield Project
The Golden Shield Project , colloquially referred to as the Great Firewall of China is a censorship and surveillance project operated by the Ministry of Public Security division of the government of the People's Republic of China...
)
History
In 1999, the Federal Government attempted to get an Internet censorship regime together to gain support from minority senators to assist with the sale of TelstraTelstra
Telstra Corporation Limited is an Australian telecommunications and media company, building and operating telecommunications networks and marketing voice, mobile, internet access and pay television products and services....
, but this censorship plan did not work.
In 2001, CSIRO was commissioned to examine Internet content filtering. The report focused primarily on evaluating the effectiveness of client-side filtering schemes (which were generally ineffective), but also discussed some of the difficulties with ISP-based filtering
In March 2003, the Fairfax papers The Age
The Age
The Age is a daily broadsheet newspaper, which has been published in Melbourne, Australia since 1854. Owned and published by Fairfax Media, The Age primarily serves Victoria, but is also available for purchase in Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and border regions of South Australia and...
and the Sydney Morning Herald reported the results of a survey taken by The Australia Institute
The Australia Institute
The Australia Institute is a left wing Australian think tank conducting public policy research, funded by grants from philanthropic trusts, memberships and commissioned research....
of 200 children, which found that many of them had found pornography on the Internet. Over the next few days was a storm of media and political attention, and there were calls for finer Internet filters and tougher censorship laws. Analysis of the report showed little new material, and only 2% of girls had admitted being exposed to pornography, while the figure for boys was 38%; such a difference between boys and girls would seem to indicate that inadvertent exposure was rare, contrary to the conclusions of the report. After the controversy died down, no new action resulted from the new report, media attention, or political speeches.
In 2003, the Labor Party opposed filtering at the ISP level, with Labor Senator Kate Lundy
Kate Lundy
Kate Alexandra Lundy is a member of the Australian Senate, representing the Australian Capital Territory.Born in Sydney, Lundy dropped out of Year 11 without telling her parents and went to work on a construction site...
stating
"Unfortunately, such a short memory regarding the debate in 1999 about Internet content has led the coalition to already offer support for greater censorship by actively considering proposals for unworkable, quick fixes that involve filtering the Internet at the ISP level."
Shortly before the 2004 federal election, two political parties issued new policies on Internet censorship. The Australian Labor Party's
Australian Labor Party
The Australian Labor Party is an Australian political party. It has been the governing party of the Commonwealth of Australia since the 2007 federal election. Julia Gillard is the party's federal parliamentary leader and Prime Minister of Australia...
policy involved voluntary adherence by users. The Family First Party
Family First Party
The Family First Party is a socially conservative minor political party in Australia. It has two members in the South Australian Legislative Council...
released a far stricter policy of mandatory filtering at the Internet service provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
level.
The Australian Family Association
Australian Family Association
The Australian Family Association is a conservative political organisation with the aim of supporting and strengthening traditional family values. It was founded in 1980 by the National Civic Council's then president, B. A...
petitioned the Australian Federal Government in 2004 to further restrict access by children to pornographic material via the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
. The petition was submitted in December 2004.
On 21 March 2006, the Labor party committed to requiring all ISPs to implement a mandatory Internet blocking system applicable to “all households, and to schools and other public Internet points” to “prevent users from accessing any content that has been identified as prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority”.
On the same day, the then communications minister Helen Coonan
Helen Coonan
Helen Lloyd Coonan is a former Australian politician, who was a Liberal member of the Australian Senate representing New South Wales from July 1996 to August 2011.-Early life:...
stated that to
“filter the Internet will only result in slowing down the Internet for every Australian without effectively protecting children from inappropriate and offensive content”
Policy of current Federal Government
On 31 December 2007, Stephen ConroyStephen Conroy
Stephen Michael Conroy is an Australian politician and the current Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy in the Gillard Ministry...
announced the Federal Government's intention to introduce an ISP-based filter to censor "inappropriate material" from the Internet to protect children. In this announcement, it was stated that adults could opt out of the filter to receive uncensored access to the Internet.
In May 2008, the government commenced an $82 million “cybersafety plan” which included an additional mandatory filter with no opt-out
Opt-out
The term opt-out refers to several methods by which individuals can avoid receiving unsolicited product or service information. This ability is usually associated with direct marketing campaigns such as telemarketing, e-mail marketing, or direct mail. A list of those who have opted-out is called a...
provision. This ISP-based filter aims to stop adults from downloading content that is illegal to possess in Australia, such as child pornography or materials related to terrorism
Terrorism
Terrorism is the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion. In the international community, however, terrorism has no universally agreed, legally binding, criminal law definition...
.
In March 2009, Stephen Conroy dismissed suggestions that the Government would use the filter to crack down on political dissent
Political dissent
Political dissent refers to any expression designed to convey dissatisfaction with or opposition to the policies of a governing body. Such expression may take forms from vocal disagreement to civil disobedience to the use of violence. Historically, repressive governments have sought to punish...
as "conspiracy theories". He stated that the filter would only be used to remove "refused classification" (RC) content, using the same rationale as existing television, radio and print publications, and that the Senate could be relied upon to provide rigorous assessment of any proposed legislation. However, Labor's policy statement on the issue contradicts this. It is also contrary to an earlier ministerial release in 2008.
The most recent explanation of the government's position on this issue is provided on the ministry website. This clearly states that only ISP-level filtering of (designated) refused classification (RC) material will be mandatory under their policy. However, ISP's will be encouraged to offer ISP-level filtering of 'adult content' as an optional (commercial) service to their customers. Such an optional extra service is aimed at parents trying to protect their children from 'undesirable' content that would otherwise be available, because it would not be RC (e.g. it might receive a classification of "R").
Labor Senator Kate Lundy
Kate Lundy
Kate Alexandra Lundy is a member of the Australian Senate, representing the Australian Capital Territory.Born in Sydney, Lundy dropped out of Year 11 without telling her parents and went to work on a construction site...
said in January 2010 that she is lobbying within the party for an "opt-out" filter, describing it as the "least worst" option. In February 2010 she said she would propose the opt-out option when the filtering legislation goes before caucus.
Stephen Conroy has stated that 85% of Internet Service Providers, including Telstra, Optus, iPrimus and iiNet, welcome the Internet filter. In response, Steve Dalby, iiNet's chief regulatory officer, stated that iiNet as a company does not support the Internet filter, and never has.
On 9 July 2010, Stephen Conroy announced that any mandatory filtering would be delayed until at least 2011.
In June 2011 two Australian ISPs, Telstra and Optus, confirmed they would voluntary block access to a list of child abuse websites provided by the Australian Communications and Media Authority and more websites on a list compiled by unnamed international organizations from mid-year.
The Liberal Party
In February 2009, then opposition communications spokesman Nick MinchinNick Minchin
Nicholas Hugh "Nick" Minchin is a former Australian politician, serving as a Liberal member of the Australian Senate representing South Australia from July 1993 to June 2011, and a former cabinet minister in the Howard Government....
obtained independent legal advice confirming that a mandatory censorship regime would require new legislation. In March 2009, after the ACMA blacklist was leaked and iiNet withdrew from the filtering trials, he stated that Stephen Conroy was "completely botching the implementation of this filtering policy".
In March 2010, shadow treasurer Joe Hockey
Joe Hockey
Joseph Benedict "Joe" Hockey , is an Australian politician and member of the Australian House of Representatives, representing the Division of North Sydney for the Liberal Party of Australia since 1996....
attacked the filter, saying "What we have in the government’s Internet filtering proposals is a scheme that is likely to be unworkable in practice. But more perniciously it is a scheme that will create the infrastructure for government censorship on a broader scale". During the 2010 Federal Election, Liberal communications spokesman Tony Smith announced that
"a Coalition government will not introduce a mandatory ISP level filter", with Joe Hockey also announcing an intention to vote against the policy if Labor is re-elected.
The Greens
The Greens do not support the Internet filter, and Greens senator Scott LudlamScott Ludlam
Scott Ludlam is an Australian politician and Greens member of the Australian Senate since July 2008, representing the state of Western Australia....
predicts that due to obstruction in the Senate, the legislation will not be introduced until after the next Federal Election.
At the end of 2008 he asked questions in parliament related to the filtering trial, for which the Government provided answers in January 2009:
- When asked about the stated public demand for Internet filtering, the government responded that the filtering was an election commitment
- The Internet filter would be easy to bypass using technological measures
- 674 out of 1370 blocked sites on the mandatory list relate to child pornography; 506 sites would be classified as R18+ or X18+, despite the fact that such content is legal to view in Australia. The remaining 190 sites from this number on the blacklist can be viewed at the full revealed blacklists on Wikileaks.
Ludlam believes that the Labor party may have hit a wall of "technical impossibility", and the filter does not suit its purpose:
"This isn't a great advertisement for the workability of any large scale scheme. The proposal has always been unpopular, now perhaps the Government is starting to come to grips with what the industry has been saying all along: if your policy objective is to protect children on-line, this is not the way to go about it."
Despite their lack of support for the filter, The Greens preselected Clive Hamilton
Clive Hamilton
Clive Charles Hamilton AM FRSA is an Australian public intellectual and Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics and the Vice-Chancellor's Chair in Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University. He is the Founder and former Executive Director of the The...
, whose think-tank The Australia Institute
The Australia Institute
The Australia Institute is a left wing Australian think tank conducting public policy research, funded by grants from philanthropic trusts, memberships and commissioned research....
first suggested an ISP-based Internet filter, for the by-election in the seat of Higgins
Division of Higgins
The Division of Higgins is an Australian Electoral Division in Victoria.The division was created in 1949 and is named after Justice H. B. Higgins , who was a Victorian Member of the legislative assembly , president of the Carlton Football Club , Australian Member of Parliament , and justice of the...
.
Independents and minor parties
In October 2008, Family First senator Senator Steven Fielding was reported to support the blocking of hardcore pornographyHardcore pornography
Hardcore pornography is a form of pornography that features explicit sexual acts. The term was coined in the second half of the 20th century to distinguish it from softcore pornography. It usually takes the form of photographs, often displayed in magazines or on the Internet, or films. It can also...
and fetish material under the Government's plans to filter access to the Internet. A Family First spokeswoman confirmed that the party wants X-rated
X-rated
In some countries, X is or has been a motion picture rating reserved for the most explicit films. Films rated X are intended only for viewing by adults, usually legally defined as people over the age of 17.-United Kingdom:...
content banned for everyone, including adults.
A spokesman for independent senator Nick Xenophon said
"should the filtering plan go ahead, he would look to use it to block Australians from accessing overseas online casinoOnline casinoOnline casinos, also known as virtual casinos or Internet casinos, are online versions of traditional casinos. Online casinos enable gamblers to play and wager on casino games through the Internet....
sites, which are illegal to run in Australia".
Senator Xenophon has, however, stated that he has serious concerns about the plan, and in February 2009 withdrew all support, stating that "the more evidence that's come out, the more questions there are on this." He believes that money would be better spent educating parents and cracking peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
groups used by paedophiles.
A political party associated with The Eros Foundation, the Australian Sex Party
Australian Sex Party
The Australian Sex Party is a Australian political party founded in 2009 in response to concerns over the influence of religion in politics. The party was born out of adult-industry lobby group, the Eros Association. Party leader, Fiona Patten, is CEO of Eros and the party's Registered Officer,...
, was launched in November 2008 and plans to campaign on issues including censorship and the federal Government's promised Internet filter.
Two Blacklists
As of October 2008, the plan includes two blacklists, the first used to filter "illegal" content, and the second used to filter additional content unsuitable for children. The first filter will be mandatory for all users of the Internet, while the second filter allows opting out. The government will not release details of the content on either list, but has stated that the mandatory filter would include at least 10,000 sites, and include both the ACMA blacklist and UK's Internet Watch FoundationInternet Watch Foundation
The Internet Watch Foundation is a non-governmental charitable body based in the United Kingdom. It states that its remit is "to minimise the availability of 'potentially criminal' Internet content, specifically images of child sexual abuse hosted anywhere, and criminally obscene adult content in...
(IWF) blacklist. In December 2008 the IWF list caused problems when the Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
article Virgin Killer
Virgin Killer
Virgin Killer is the fourth studio album by the German heavy metal band Scorpions. It was released in 1976 and was the first album of the band to attract attention outside Europe. The title is described as being a reference to time as the killer of innocence. The original cover featured a nude...
was added to the list, as it prevented many people in the UK from being able to edit Wikipedia
Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia
On 5 December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation , a British watchdog group, blacklisted content on the English version of the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia related to Scorpions' 1976 studio album Virgin Killer, due to the presence of its controversial cover artwork, depicting a young girl posing...
.
The ACMA definitions of "prohibited content" give some idea of what could potentially be blacklisted. Online content prohibited by ACMA includes:
- Any online content that is classified RC or X 18+ by the Classification Board. This includes real depictions of actual sexual activityHuman sexual behaviorHuman sexual activities or human sexual practices or human sexual behavior refers to the manner in which humans experience and express their sexuality. People engage in a variety of sexual acts from time to time, and for a wide variety of reasons...
, child pornography, depictions of bestiality, material containing excessive violence or sexual violence, detailed instruction in crime, violence or drug use, and/or material that advocates the doing of a terrorist act. - Content which is classified R 18+* and not subject to a restricted access system that prevents access by children. This includes depictions of simulated sexual activity, material containing strong, realistic violence and other material dealing with intense adult themes.
In answer to a question in Parliament in October 2008, the government in January 2009 stated that the black list
Blacklist
A blacklist is a list or register of entities who, for one reason or another, are being denied a particular privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition. As a verb, to blacklist can mean to deny someone work in a particular field, or to ostracize a person from a certain social circle...
contained 1370 websites. 674 were related to child pornography, and the remainder would be classified as R18+ and X18+.
Two websites are known to be on the ACMA blacklist after they were submitted to ACMA for review. When ACMA responded with the advice that these sites had been placed upon its blacklist, ACMA's response was in turn posted back to the web by the original submitters, with the purpose of demonstrating that political content would be censored by the mandatory filter. One was an anti-abortion
Pro-life
Opposition to the legalization of abortion is centered around the pro-life, or anti-abortion, movement, a social and political movement opposing elective abortion on moral grounds and supporting its legal prohibition or restriction...
website, with details posted to Whirlpool
Whirlpool (website)
Whirlpool is an Australian broadband user web site, started in 1998 by founder, Simon Wright. Since then, it has grown significantly with over 450,000 registered users while remaining independent.-History:...
, and the other was a copy of Denmark's own Internet blacklist, with both the blacklist and ACMA's response posted on Wikileaks
Wikileaks
WikiLeaks is an international self-described not-for-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organisation, claimed a database of more...
. The web hosting company for Whirlpool, Bulletproof networks, was threatened with $11,000 in fines per day if the link was not removed, so Whirlpool voluntarily removed the link to the restricted site. Civil liberties campaigners regard the inclusion of these sites on the blacklist as a demonstration that it is not difficult to get a site placed on the blacklist, and that the blacklist includes sites which are themselves not illegal to view.
Leaking of the ACMA blacklist
18 March 2009: WikiLeaks publishes a list which is"derived from the ACMA list for the use of government-approved censorship software in its "ACMA-only" mode." Included in the list were "the websites of a Queensland dentist, a tuckshop convener and a kennel operator".
19 March 2009: Australian media sources report that the ACMA blacklist has been leaked to WikiLeaks
"The seemingly innocuous websites were among a leaked list of 2300 websites the Australian Communications and Media Authority was planning to ban to protect children from graphic pornography and violence."
ACMA claimed that the list which appeared on the Wikileaks website was not the ACMA 'blacklist', as it contained 2300 URLs. ACMA claimed the ACMA list contained only 1061 URLs in August 2008, and has at no stage contained 2300.
The ACMA report on the issue noted the similarities between the two lists, yet addressed only the claim reported in the media that the list was the blacklist. The report only contains the following claims about the two lists:
- "The list provided to ACMA differs markedly in length and format to the ACMA blacklist."
- "The ACMA blacklist has at no stage been 2300 URLs in length and at August 2008 consisted of 1061 URLs."
20 March 2009: WikiLeaks published another list, this time closer to the length published by ACMA. Wikileaks believes that the list is up-to-date as of the time of publication
25 March 2009: Stephen Conroy has reportedly stated that this list closely resembles the ACMA list..
26 March 2009: The above report of 25 March 2009 was followed by the Minister's statement on the ABC's 'Q&A' television program the following day that "the second list which has appeared appears to be closer [to the true black-list]. I don't actually know what's on the list but I'm told by [...] ACMA it appears to be closer to the actual, legitimate list."
On the program Senator Conroy also explained that the seemingly inexplicable censoring of a dentist's website was due to subversion of the website by the Russian mafia, who had inserted RC material.
In the same discussion Bill Henson
Bill Henson
Bill Henson is an Australian contemporary art photographer.-Background:Henson's art has been exhibited in many locations, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Venice Biennale, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in...
's website, despite the PG rating given to his photographs by the same body, appeared on the blacklist due to a technical error according to Stephen Conroy The ACMA has since released a statement claiming the technical error was a "computer system caching error" and further stated "found that this is the only URL where a caching error resulting in the URL being incorrectly added to the list."
Live filtering trials
The government has committed to trials of the mandatory Internet filter before implementation.On 28 July 2008, an ACMA
Australian Communications and Media Authority
The Australian Communications and Media Authority is an Australian government statutory authority within the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy portfolio...
report entitled “Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Internet Content Filtering” showed performance and accuracy problems with the six unnamed ISP-based filters trialled. EFA
Electronic Frontiers Australia
Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc. is a non-profit Australian national non-government organisation representing Internet users concerned with online liberties and rights...
analysis of the report showed that:
- One filter caused a 22% drop in speed even when it was not performing filtering;
- Only one of the six filters had an acceptable level of performance (a drop of 2% in a laboratory trial), the others causing drops in speed of between 21% and 86%;
- The most accurate filters were often the slowest;
- All filters tested had problems with under-blocking, allowing access to between 2% and 13% of material that they should have blocked; and
- All filters tested had serious problems with over-blocking, wrongly blocking access to between 1.3% and 7.8% of the websites tested.
- The trial tested speed on a simple 'black listed or not' basis for all simulated clients on all systems, yet the report outlines the ability of the filters to provide customised filtering to each client (as would be required by the two levels of filtering which ACMA is proposing) which would significantly impact test results.
In November 2008 the Government hired Melbourne company ENEX TestLab, an RMIT
RMIT University
RMIT University is an Australian public university located in Melbourne, Victoria. It has two branches, referred to as RMIT University in Australia and RMIT International University in Vietnam....
spin-off, to design a live pilot test on a real network. In this trial, in which several ISPs have expressed an interest, 10,000 blacklisted "unwanted" websites would be blocked in addition to 1,300 websites identified by ACMA. As an incentive for participation, the department states that participating ISPs
"will be recognised for their participation in the Pilot. This recognition will strengthen their brand image with the community."
These ISPs will also be allowed to keep any software and hardware purchased by the government for the trial. The trial may include some ability to block or alert on the presence of proxies. Both filtered and unfiltered users will be surveyed as part of the trial.
ISPs participating in the Live Trial will be required to enter into a non disclosure agreement
Non-disclosure agreement
A non-disclosure agreement , also known as a confidentiality agreement , confidential disclosure agreement , proprietary information agreement , or secrecy agreement, is a legal contract between at least two parties that outlines confidential material, knowledge, or information that the parties...
with ACMA.
Communications from Senator Conroy's office have indicated that the live trial will occur without the participation of any customers due to concerns about the impact on network performance
Network performance
Network performance refers to the service quality of a telecommunications product as seen by the customer. It should not be seen merely as an attempt to get "more through" the network....
of filtering 10,000 URLs. Telstra and Internode have stated that they will not take part in the trial. iiNet has stated that it will take part in the trial only to show that the filtering will not work. Optus has stated that it will only test a heavily cut-down filtering model containing only 1300 URLs in a limited geographic area, and customers will be allowed to opt out.
At the end of 2008, Stephen Conroy anticipated that the live trial would test the filtering of Bittorrent traffic, but in March 2009 he stated that the proposed filters would not be effective on peer-to-peer traffic.
The trial was originally scheduled to be commenced in December 2008, but, after the existence of a report critical of the trial became known, the trial was pushed back. On 11 February 2009 a new filtering trial was announced, initially with the ISPs iPrimus Telecommunications, Tech 2U, Webshield, OMNIconnect, Netforce and Highway 1. Testing with each ISP will take place for at least six weeks once filtering equipment has been obtained and installed, and iPrimus expects the trial to begin in late April or early May with five or ten thousand participants. The trial will be opt-in, with ISPs asking for volunteers, although all WebShield customers already receive a filtered service. None of the top three ISPs, Telstra, Optus and iiNet, have been included in the trial, although both iiNet and Optus did expect to be involved at a later time. iiNet withdrew itself from consideration for the trial in March 2009, with Michael Malone giving as reasons the media storm around the leaked blacklist, the changing nature of policy, and "confused" explanations of the trial's purpose.
In July 2009 some results from the trials began to emerge. Five of the nine participating ISPs reported minimal speed or technical problems associated with the trials. Some ISPs reported that thousands of their members had voluntarily participated in the trials; others, that less than 1% had participated, and that this was not a representative sample. Some customers complained about over-blocking, and withdrew from the trial. One example was the blocking of the pornography website redtube.com
Redtube
RedTube is a Web 2.0, video sharing, pornography site which in November 2009, held an Alexa ranking within the World's top 100 sites. However by June 2014 it had fallen out of the top 100...
: ACMA refused to confirm or deny if the site was on the list, or if the site was legal. Leading Australian statistic experts, however, have labelled the trials as unscientific, lacking in proper methodology, unrepresentative and "about the worst way you can do it".
In December 2009, the results of the filtering trial were released. Stephen Conroy stated that "The report into the pilot trial of ISP-level filtering demonstrates that blocking RC-rated material can be done with 100 percent accuracy and negligible impact on Internet speed" However, concerns have been raised about the report: only a small minority of ISP users participated; the trial did not test using any high-speed Internet connections similar to those available with the National Broadband Network
National Broadband Network
The National Broadband Network is a national wholesale-only, open-access data network under development in Australia. Up to one gigabit per second connections are sold to retail service providers , who then sell Internet access and other services to consumers...
; there is evidence that the filter was evaded; and with only 600-700 sites on the RC blacklists, then the effect of the filter would be marginal at best.
Filtering Technology
The Swedish vendor NetClean reported that its own product, WhiteBox, will be trialled in Australia. WhiteBox is a hybrid filtering technology which routes web trafficWeb traffic
Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. It is a large portion of Internet traffic. This is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit...
, for IP address
IP address
An Internet Protocol address is a numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing...
es known to host objectionable material, through a transparent proxy.
Some risks and limitations of hybrid filters have been identified, including heavy congestion when blocks are applied to busy web server
Web server
Web server can refer to either the hardware or the software that helps to deliver content that can be accessed through the Internet....
s, and a procedure to use the filter itself to identify all sites on the blacklist.
Some vendors have approached smaller ISPs and offered to provide them with required equipment to take part in the filtering trials.
UK IWF blockage of Wikipedia
The IWF blacklist will form part of the mandatory blacklist used in Australia. In December 2008, hybrid filtering technology implemented by UK providers caused disruption of Wikipedia operations in the UK when a Wikipedia page was added to the IWF watchlist. When Wikipedia blocked UK vandals by their IP address, this block affected all users coming from these IP addresses. As these IP addresses belonged to the filter proxies, some Wikipedia users in the UK, depending on their ISP, attempting to edit an article without a login name were blocked. Some proxies also collapsed under load generated by Wikipedia traffic.After widespread coverage, the IWF removed the Wikipedia page from its blacklist, citing the availability of the image on other websites as a factor:
"IWF’s overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the Internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect ... We regret the unintended consequenceUnintended consequenceIn the social sciences, unintended consequences are outcomes that are not the outcomes intended by a purposeful action. The concept has long existed but was named and popularised in the 20th century by American sociologist Robert K. Merton...
s for Wikipedia and its users."
Opinion Polling
In February 2010 ABC's Hungry Beast program commissioned McNair Ingenuity Research to perform a telephone poll of 1,000 Australians. Key results were- To the proposition We need Government regulation of content on the Internet the same as we have Government regulation of content for other media 62% agreed, 35% disagreed.
- Having a mandatory Government Internet filter that would automatically block all access in Australia, to overseas websites containing material that is Refused Classification? Refused Classification was defined as Images and information about one or more of the following: child sexual abuse, bestiality, sexual violence, gratuitous, exploitative or offensive sexual fetishes, detailed instructions on or promotion of crime, violence or use of illegal drugs. 80% were in favour, 19% against.
- A Government appointed body determining whether a website is appropriate for you to visit? 50% in favour, 46% against.
- If a mandatory Internet Filter is established, are you in favour or not in favour of the community being advised which websites have been Refused Classification and the reason why they have been refused classification? 91% in favour, 8% against.
- Some opponents of the Government’s mandatory Internet Filter are concerned that if it were put in place, future Governments could use Internet Filtering technology to restrict free speech or block other forms of website content they don’t approve of. Do you share this concern? 70% concerned, 27% unconcerned.
The wide variation to answers to essentially the same question can be attributed to variations in the wording of the questions asked. The results were initially reported as "80pc back web filter: poll" despite the fact that 46% were against "a government body determining whether a website is appropriate to visit". The question asked were whether respondents supported the results despite the evidence that the filter will not effectively achieve these results, respondents were not made aware of the limitations of such a filter.
In February 2009 a national telephone poll of 1,100 people was conducted by Galaxy and commissioned by GetUp!. It found that only 5 per cent of respondents want ISPs to be responsible for protecting children online, and only 4 per cent want Government to have this responsibility.
In March 2010 the results of the Whirlpool Australia broadband survey 2009 were published. This survey was of 21,755 experienced Internet users, and only 8% were in favour of the mandatory filter.
In May 2010 the results of a study commissioned by the Safer Internet Group were published. The Safer Internet Group includes Google, Internet Industry Association, iiNet, Australian Council of State School Organisations and the Australian Library and Information Association. 39 people participated in four focus group interviews. The study stated that while people were aware of the pending filter legislation, they did not understand its details. When details of the Government's proposal was explained, along with the possible alternatives, enthusiasm for the filter dropped.
Anti-censorship campaigns
Protests involving hundreds of people were held on 1 November 2008, with people in all capital cities nationwide marching on state Parliaments, and on 13 December 2008, in all capital cities. The Digital Liberty CoalitionDigital Liberty Coalition
The Digital Liberty Coalition is a non-profit Australian national organisation that emerged from the public backlash against the Australian government's plans to implement compulsory ISP-level filtering of internet content...
organised these protests, declaring an intent to rally continuously until censorship as a whole is taken off the table.
The Internet-based political activism
Activism
Activism consists of intentional efforts to bring about social, political, economic, or environmental change. Activism can take a wide range of forms from writing letters to newspapers or politicians, political campaigning, economic activism such as boycotts or preferentially patronizing...
organisation, GetUp!, which has previously run mainstream campaigns action against Work Choices and to free David Hicks
David Hicks
David Matthew Hicks is an Australian who was convicted by the United States of America Guantanamo Military Commission under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, on charges of providing material support for terrorism...
, is backing the offline action of the DLC to oppose the web censorship plan. GetUp! first called for donations during December 2008 to raise awareness of Internet censorship in Australia. The group raised an unprecedented $30,000 before the end of the appeal's first day.
GetUp! teamed up with award winning, non-traditional and digital creative agency Fnuky Advertising to launch a campaign in Australia to raise awareness of the Australian Government's flawed plans to introduce web censorship. The campaign impersonated the Australian Federal Government by presenting web censorship as a mock consumer product branded as Censordyne, a parody of the toothpaste brand, Sensodyne
Sensodyne
Sensodyne is a toothpaste, toothbrush and mouthwash marketed for individuals with sensitive teeth and/or dentine hypersensitivity. It is a registered trademark of GlaxoSmithKline which acquired it in 2001 in the purchase of Block Drug which developed it....
. Fnuky Advertising's Creative Director, David Campbell selected toothpaste as the platform for the campaign after Stephen Conroy
Stephen Conroy
Stephen Michael Conroy is an Australian politician and the current Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy in the Gillard Ministry...
stated the purpose of web censorship in Australia was to 'Fight Moral Decay'. The Censordyne campaign was launched online during July 2009 by a single Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
post by fake Stephen Conroy, a popular impersonator of the Australian Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy. The campaign featured an online video, a Censordyne product website and a Censordyne search engine. Within 24 hours of launch, the words GetUp and Censordyne were the number 2 and 3 most talked about brands on Twitter worldwide. The campaign received widespread coverage in most major Australian newspapers and news websites. Censordyne become a topic of discussion on Nova 96.9 radio in Sydney and was featured on the Australian ABC television program Insiders.
GetUp! raised over $45,000 in donations from the general public during July 2009 to see the Censordyne commercial on TV and on Qantas
Qantas
Qantas Airways Limited is the flag carrier of Australia. The name was originally "QANTAS", an initialism for "Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services". Nicknamed "The Flying Kangaroo", the airline is based in Sydney, with its main hub at Sydney Airport...
flights during the month of August 2009, where all Australian politicians would be travelling to Canberra
Canberra
Canberra is the capital city of Australia. With a population of over 345,000, it is Australia's largest inland city and the eighth-largest city overall. The city is located at the northern end of the Australian Capital Territory , south-west of Sydney, and north-east of Melbourne...
. Following the Censordyne campaign launch, Qantas chose to censor the anti-censorship campaign from their flights.
Response
The debate over Internet filtering has incited some tension in Australia, with threatening phone calls and emails being received by advocates of both sides of the debate.In a speech in January 2010, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accuses countries with Internet censorship of breaching the UN's Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and the Australian filter literally fits her definition for censorship. Stephen Conroy welcomed Clinton's speech, and agrees with her that "freedom of expression has its limits". Colin Jacobs responded in turn to note that while there are limits to free speech, Clinton had stated that the advantages of the Internet would be jeopardised by introducing censorship. As part of a diplomatic assault by the USA on Internet censorship in many countries, US State Department spokesman Noel Clay has raised concerns about the filter plan with Australian officials.
The leaders of three of Australia's largest ISPs (Telstra
Telstra
Telstra Corporation Limited is an Australian telecommunications and media company, building and operating telecommunications networks and marketing voice, mobile, internet access and pay television products and services....
, iiNet
IiNet
iiNet Limited is Australia's second largest internet service provider with over 1.3 million customers as of 15th August 2011. Their focus is primarily on ADSL-based Internet access, using their own ADSL2+ infrastructure, and reselling Telstra ADSL1. iiNet also provides dial-up and voice...
and Internode
Internode Systems
Internode, founded on 8 May 1991 by Managing Director Simon Hackett, is an Australian Internet Service Provider . The company focuses primarily on ADSL-based Internet access, but also provides business-class access , web hosting, co-location, Voice over IP, and a variety of related...
) have stated in an interview that the web filtering proposal simply cannot work for various technical, legal and ethical reasons. The managing director of iiNet, Michael Malone, has said of Stephen Conroy "This is the worst Communications Minister we've had in the 15 years since the [Internet] industry has existed," and plans to sign up his ISP for participation in live filtering trials by 24 December to provide the Government with "hard numbers" demonstrating "how stupid it [the filtering proposal] is."
Dale Clapperton, then chairperson of EFA, argued that the Labor party cannot implement the clean feed proposal without either new legislation and the support of the Australian Senate, or the assistance of the Internet Industry Association. As the Liberals and Greens have both stated that they will not support legislation, it can only be implemented with the support of the IIA.
International lobby group Netchoice, which is backed by companies including eBay
EBay
eBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...
, AOL Time Warner, Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
and some trade associations , is likely to oppose the mandatory filter. Google opposes the filter primarily because the scope of content to be filtered is too wide, and is likely to delay the introduction of Google TV
Google TV
Google TV is a Smart TV platform from Google. It was announced on May 20, 2010, at Google’s Google I/O event and was co-developed by Google, Intel, Sony and Logitech...
to Australia because of technical concerns about the filter.
Internode engineer Mark Newton was the subject of a letter of complaint from Stephen Conroy's office for his participation in a Whirlpool
Whirlpool (website)
Whirlpool is an Australian broadband user web site, started in 1998 by founder, Simon Wright. Since then, it has grown significantly with over 450,000 registered users while remaining independent.-History:...
forum showing the negative impact of the filter on Internet access speeds.
Some child welfare
Child welfare
Child protection is used to describe a set of usually government-run services designed to protect children and young people who are underage and to encourage family stability...
groups ( Save the Children
Save the Children
Save the Children is an internationally active non-governmental organization that enforces children's rights, provides relief and helps support children in developing countries...
/ National Children's & Youth Law Centre ) have attacked the filtering plan as ineffective, stating that resources would be better spent elsewhere, and agreeing with the opposing position presented by Australia's ISPs. Other child welfare groups continue to support the filters. In 2008, ChildWise defended the plan as "a victory for common sense,"
NSW Young Labor has abandoned the web filtering plan, passing a motion rejecting Conroy's plans, and calling on him to adopt a voluntary, opt-in, system.
Colin Jacobs, vice-chairman of Electronic Frontiers Australia
Electronic Frontiers Australia
Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc. is a non-profit Australian national non-government organisation representing Internet users concerned with online liberties and rights...
, said that the pitfalls of mandatory ISP filtering were illustrated by the problems in the UK caused by the blocking of a single Wikipedia page. He also said of the IWF blacklist:
"In Australia, not only would the Government have the ability to secretly add any site to our blacklist, but an unaccountable foreign-based organisation would as well".
Conservative South Australia
South Australia
South Australia is a state of Australia in the southern central part of the country. It covers some of the most arid parts of the continent; with a total land area of , it is the fourth largest of Australia's six states and two territories.South Australia shares borders with all of the mainland...
n Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi
Cory Bernardi
Cory Bernardi is an Australian politician. He has been a Liberal Party member of the Australian Senate since 2006, representing the state of South Australia.-Early life:...
does not support the mandatory web filter. He considers Stephen Conroy's plan to be "so devoid of detail" that it is impossible to form an opinion on it, and says
"Parental responsibility cannot and should not be abrogated to government - if it is, our society will only become weaker ... Yes, illegal content should be banned from the web ... but it is wrong to give the government a blank cheque to determine what is appropriate for us to view on the Internet."
Clive Hamilton
Clive Hamilton
Clive Charles Hamilton AM FRSA is an Australian public intellectual and Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics and the Vice-Chancellor's Chair in Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University. He is the Founder and former Executive Director of the The...
, a senior ethics professor at the Australian National University
Australian National University
The Australian National University is a teaching and research university located in the Australian capital, Canberra.As of 2009, the ANU employs 3,945 administrative staff who teach approximately 10,000 undergraduates, and 7,500 postgraduate students...
whose think tank
Think tank
A think tank is an organization that conducts research and engages in advocacy in areas such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, and technology issues. Most think tanks are non-profit organizations, which some countries such as the United States and Canada provide with tax...
the Australia Institute was responsible for the initial media attention for a mandatory Internet filter in 2003, argues
"The laws that mandate upper speed limits do not stop people from speeding, does that mean that we should not have those laws? ... We live in a society, and societies have always imposed limits on activities that it deems are damaging. There is nothing sacrosanct about the Internet."Despite proposing the filter, he has been chosen by The Greens
Australian Greens
The Australian Greens, commonly known as The Greens, is an Australian green political party.The party was formed in 1992; however, its origins can be traced to the early environmental movement in Australia and the formation of the United Tasmania Group , the first Green party in the world, which...
to stand in the Federal seat of Higgins.
Retired Justice Michael Kirby believes that it is a bad example for the government of a democratic country like Australia to take control of what people hear and what information they get, and made comparisons to the situation in Iran and Burma
In an open letter to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd
Kevin Rudd
Kevin Michael Rudd is an Australian politician who was the 26th Prime Minister of Australia from 2007 to 2010. He has been Minister for Foreign Affairs since 2010...
, Reporters Without Borders
Reporters Without Borders
Reporters Without Borders is a France-based international non-governmental organization that advocates freedom of the press. It was founded in 1985, by Robert Ménard, Rony Brauman and the journalist Jean-Claude Guillebaud. Jean-François Julliard has served as Secretary General since 2008...
states that the web filter is not the solution to combating child sex abuse, and the plan entails risks to freedom of expression. The blocking of websites by ACMA
Australian Communications and Media Authority
The Australian Communications and Media Authority is an Australian government statutory authority within the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy portfolio...
, rather than a Judge, is in contravention of laws. The criteria for blocking "inappropriate" websites is too vague, and it would be a dangerous censorship option to target "Refused classification" sites, many of which are unrelated to sexual abuse. Subjects such as abortion, anorexia, aborigines and legislation on the sale of marijuana would all risk being filtered, as would media reports on these subjects.
The Howard Government commissioned a number of independent technical experts to examine Internet filtering. The resulting report was delivered to the Australian Government in February 2008, and released publicly in December 2008. Professor Bjorn Landfeldt, one of the report's authors, stated that filtering technology simply does not work, as it can easily be bypassed and slows access to the Internet by up to 87%. In response, Stephen Conroy has stated that the report involved no empirical testing, and was simply a literature review
Literature review
A literature review is a body of text that aims to review the critical points of current knowledge including substantive findings as well as theoretical and methodological contributions to a particular topic...
of material available from other sources; any problems raised by the report would be tested during the filter trials scheduled for mid-January 2009.
A report by Tim Stevens and Dr Peter Neumann for the London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence
The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence
The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence is a non-profit, non-governmental think tank based in London whose mission is to analyse and promote the understanding of political violence and radicalisation....
(ICSR) analyses each of the available ISP-based filtering solutions and concludes that they are ineffective in the fight against terror. A hybrid filtering scheme was rated the best, but it is ineffective against dynamic content such as chat pages and instant messaging
Instant messaging
Instant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...
, and had political implications because it required the existence of a blacklist of blocked pages. The report instead advocates the use of take-down notices for extremist content, and prosecutions to "signal that individuals engaged in online extremism
Extremism
Extremism is any ideology or political act far outside the perceived political center of a society; or otherwise claimed to violate common moral standards...
are not beyond the law."
The Metaverse Journal suggests that because web filtering logs every site visit, and some information about who is visiting the site, then it is ripe for abuse by whoever runs the filters. It potentially allows surveillance of any user of the Internet, such as journalists, political opponents, or even the family members of politicians.
Ross Fitzgerald
Ross Fitzgerald
Ross Fitzgerald is an Australian academic, historian, novelist, secularist, and political commentator.Author of 35 books, in 2009 Professor Fitzgerald co-authored "Made in Queensland: A New History", published by University of Queensland Press and also "Under the Influence, a history of alcohol in...
of The Australian
The Australian
The Australian is a broadsheet newspaper published in Australia from Monday to Saturday each week since 14 July 1964. The editor in chief is Chris Mitchell, the editor is Clive Mathieson and the 'editor-at-large' is Paul Kelly....
believes that the filter was not introduced in 2010 to defuse it as an election issue, and that if it is re-introduced into the next parliament it could be even more censorious than the current proposal.
Australian radio presenter and writer Helen Razer
Helen Razer
Helen Razer is a Melbourne-born and Canberra-raised radio presenter and writer. She is the author of four non-fiction books and a columnist with the Australian version of The Big Issue, Melbourne newspaper The Age, and contributor to monthly magazine, Cherrie .-Media work:Razer was a prominent...
dislikes the filter because she enjoys pornography, does not believe it causes harm to adults, and doesn't think that children are at much risk:
"I enjoy pornography. Perhaps not quite so much as I enjoy living among citizens who take an entitlement to free speech for granted. But I do like it quite a lot. And it seems that my porn is endangered. If Conroy's clean feed works, which some tech sceptics argue that it cannot, it will prevent access to all pornography ... I can report that one doesn't simply amble into X-rated or even R18+ material ... I have become adept at this; children, presumably, have not. And if they have, clearly they are the issue of the world's most reprehensible parents and should be sent to live with Hetty JohnstonHetty JohnstonHetty Margarette Johnston is an Australian child abuse campaigner who runs a child protection organisation called Bravehearts. She has attracted media attention by voicing her opinions on a number of child protection issues involving high-profile members of the Australian public...
forthwith ... Despite the best efforts of some, there is no evidence that pornography will negatively affect me or other consenting adults ... The only lasting effect of my access to porn is a reflex giggle when the pizza delivery man knocks on my door."
Attacks on Government Websites
On 26 March 2009 the Australian Government Classification website, http://www.classification.gov.au/, was attacked by the Internet group AnonymousAnonymous (group)
Anonymous is an international hacking group, spread through the Internet, initiating active civil disobedience, while attempting to maintain anonymity. Originating in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan, the term refers to the concept of many online community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic,...
, automatically redirecting them to a page on the same site with a message mocking censorship efforts with the text:
This site contains information about the boards that have the right to CONTROL YOUR FREEDOMZ. The Classification Board has the right to not just classify content (the name is an ELABORATE TRICK), but also the right to DECIDE WHAT IS AND ISNT APPROPRIATE and BAN CONTENT FROM THE PUBLIC. We are part of an ELABORATE DECEPTION from CHINA to CONTROL AND SHEEPIFY the NATION, to PROTECT THE CHILDREN. All opposers must HATE CHILDREN, and therefore must be KILLED WITH A LARGE MELONS during the PROSECUTION PARTIES IN SEPTEMBER. Come join our ALIEN SPACE PARTY.
In September 2009 the group Anonymous reawakened, in Operation Didgeridie, in order to protest the policy of Internet censorship, and on 9 September initiated a Distributed Denial of Service attack against the prime minister's website. As a result of this attack, the site was taken offline for approximately one hour.
On 10 February 2010, the Australian Parliament of Australia's website, www.aph.gov.au, was attacked by Anonymous once again. The attacks included distributed denial of service, blackfaxes, prank calls and spam emails. The attacks commenced at 12 midnight local time and the website has been down for over 2 days. The attack, named "Operation Titstorm
Operation Titstorm
The February 2010 Australian Cyberattacks were a series of denial-of-service attacks conducted by the Anonymous online community against the Australian government in response to proposed web censorship regulations. Operation Titstorm was the name given to the cyber attacks by the perpetrators...
" is reportedly in defiance of the Government's banning of small-breasted women & female ejaculation in pornography. The group called for physical media to be distributed to members of the Australian Labor Party as well as assaulting email addresses, phone numbers and fax numbers with spam and pornographic images that were in the categories to which were going to be filtered by the government's policy.
Arguments for Internet censorship
- It will limit access to some adult content by the general population.
- Internet users will be able to use a complaint system which will allow them to report offensive websites that can be blocked.
- Websites that teach crimeCrimeCrime is the breach of rules or laws for which some governing authority can ultimately prescribe a conviction...
and terrorismTerrorismTerrorism is the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion. In the international community, however, terrorism has no universally agreed, legally binding, criminal law definition...
will be blocked.
Arguments against Internet censorship
- The web filter will not just block child pornographyChild pornographyChild pornography refers to images or films and, in some cases, writings depicting sexually explicit activities involving a child...
; it will also block any "RC rated material" which will include blocking access to web pages of banned films, books, hardcore pornographyHardcore pornographyHardcore pornography is a form of pornography that features explicit sexual acts. The term was coined in the second half of the 20th century to distinguish it from softcore pornography. It usually takes the form of photographs, often displayed in magazines or on the Internet, or films. It can also...
(and video games that do not meet the MA 15+ standard). - Material that is illegal to view (e.g. instructions on criminal activity, depictions of child abuse) is a much narrower subset of material that may be classified RC and filtered.
- The organisation responsible for classifying media in Australia will not be involved in any way in the filtering process- so the filtered material will typically not technically be RC.
- The web filter will block content that meets the requirements for an MA 15+ rating if the Government disapproves of the access control software on the website offering the content.
- The web filter will not be able to block peer to peer networks and file sharingFile sharingFile sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multimedia , documents, or electronic books. It may be implemented through a variety of ways...
programs which are usable for distributing child pornography and allow users to download large amounts of it in a short period of time. - The web filter will also block access to websites about politically sensitive issues which have changing criminality statuses e.g. euthanasiaEuthanasiaEuthanasia refers to the practice of intentionally ending a life in order to relieve pain and suffering....
and abortionAbortionAbortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo prior to viability. An abortion can occur spontaneously, in which case it is usually called a miscarriage, or it can be purposely induced...
. - The web filter may slow down access to the internet; this will contradict the Australian Government's plan to provide faster broadbandBroadbandThe term broadband refers to a telecommunications signal or device of greater bandwidth, in some sense, than another standard or usual signal or device . Different criteria for "broad" have been applied in different contexts and at different times...
access speeds. - The proposed filter may damage Australia – United States relations as the United States government is against Australia's filter plan.
- The web filter may be deemed "unconstitutional" under the Australian constitution and may not pass parliament.
- The web filter can easily be bypassed by a proxy serverProxy serverIn computer networks, a proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource available from a different server...
. - The web filter's implementation, deployment and maintenance costs would be footed by the tax-payer.
- Paedophiles and terrorists use sophisticated techniques to conceal their content from the general public, thus limiting the need to protect people from this largely invisible information.
- The most common form of child abuse and including child sexual abuse material can be found on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter published by the children it involves, e.g. cyberbullying.
- The Australian Federal PoliceAustralian Federal PoliceThe Australian Federal Police is the federal police agency of the Commonwealth of Australia. Although the AFP was created by the amalgamation in 1979 of three Commonwealth law enforcement agencies, it traces its history from Commonwealth law enforcement agencies dating back to the federation of...
will not allow ACMAAustralian Communications and Media AuthorityThe Australian Communications and Media Authority is an Australian government statutory authority within the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy portfolio...
to filter child abuse material if doing so will tip off criminals to the discovery of their crime. - After the Australian Federal Police (potentially involving InterpolInterpolInterpol, whose full name is the International Criminal Police Organization – INTERPOL, is an organization facilitating international police cooperation...
and the domestic police of the host country) complete a criminal investigation of child abuse material, the filter will only be effective if the police then choose to allow the server hosting the material to remain operational. - It would be more effective to spend the money on cross-border capabilities to shut down hosts of child abuse material at their source.
Terminology
The proposed filter has been referred to in the media variously as an InternetInternet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
filter and a web filter. The world-wide-web is a myriad of software documents
Web page
A web page or webpage is a document or information resource that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser and displayed on a monitor or mobile device. This information is usually in HTML or XHTML format, and may provide navigation to other web pages via hypertext...
containing pointers
Hyperlink
In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks...
to each other, hosted on server computers
Web server
Web server can refer to either the hardware or the software that helps to deliver content that can be accessed through the Internet....
around the world. The Internet is the physical network used to convey requests from users' computers to these servers and responses from the servers back to the users.
The proposed filter only monitors certain ports specific to conveying web traffic. As it aims to monitor the majority of web traffic, it is appropriately referred to as a web filter. As it is agnostic of the majority (99.99%) of other connections
Internet protocol suite
The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols used for the Internet and other similar networks. It is commonly known as TCP/IP from its most important protocols: Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol , which were the first networking protocols defined in this...
a user's computer might establish with other computers on the Internet, it is something of a misnomer to refer to it as an Internet filter.
Since the proposed filter is situated at the Internet service provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
(the junction between users and the Internet at large), introducing such a filter cannot possibly slow down the Internet itself. It can only (potentially) slow down access to the Internet by users of that ISP. Ignoring load
Load (computing)
In UNIX computing, the system load is a measure of the amount of work that a computer system performs. The load average represents the average system load over a period of time...
considerations, communication speed across the Internet for any non-web traffic would be unaffected.
Political Parties
The website of the Australian Sex PartyAustralian Sex Party
The Australian Sex Party is a Australian political party founded in 2009 in response to concerns over the influence of religion in politics. The party was born out of adult-industry lobby group, the Eros Association. Party leader, Fiona Patten, is CEO of Eros and the party's Registered Officer,...
is banned from within several state and federal government departments, including Stephen Conroy
Stephen Conroy
Stephen Michael Conroy is an Australian politician and the current Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy in the Gillard Ministry...
's ACMA
Australian Communications and Media Authority
The Australian Communications and Media Authority is an Australian government statutory authority within the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy portfolio...
. Convenor of the Australian Sex Party, Fiona Patten
Fiona Patten
Fiona Patten is leader of the Australian Sex Party and a former sex worker . She is also the CEO of the Eros Association."Sex is deeply rooted in the lives of all Australians. It is relevant to hundreds of pieces of legislation made around the country....
, has described this ban as "unconstitutional".
Euthanasia
On 22 May 2009 it was disclosed in the press, citing wikileaks.orgWikileaks
WikiLeaks is an international self-described not-for-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organisation, claimed a database of more...
, that the Australian Government had added Dr Philip Nitschke's
Philip Nitschke
Dr. Philip Nitschke is an Australian medical doctor, humanist, author and founder and director of the pro-euthanasia group Exit International. He campaigned successfully to have a legal euthanasia law passed in Australia's Northern Territory and assisted four people in ending their lives before...
online Peaceful Pill Handbook, which deals with the topic of voluntary euthanasia
Euthanasia
Euthanasia refers to the practice of intentionally ending a life in order to relieve pain and suffering....
, to the blacklist maintained by the Australian Communications and Media Authority
Australian Communications and Media Authority
The Australian Communications and Media Authority is an Australian government statutory authority within the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy portfolio...
used to filter web access to citizens of Australia. Euthanasia groups will hold seminars around Australia teaching how to evade the proposed filter using proxy servers and virtual networks
Virtual private network
A virtual private network is a network that uses primarily public telecommunication infrastructure, such as the Internet, to provide remote offices or traveling users access to a central organizational network....
. A spokeswoman for Senator Conroy said that euthanasia would not be targeted by the proposed web filter, however Stephen Conroy has previously stated that "while euthanasia remains illegal it will be captured by the RC filter".
Video games
In June 2009, it was confirmed that the Government's proposed Internet censorship regime would block downloadable games, flash-based web games and sites which sell physical copies of games that do not meet the MA15+ standard, such as eBayEBay
eBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...
and Amazon
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
.
Racism
In January 2010, the Encyclopedia DramaticaEncyclopedia Dramatica
Encyclopædia Dramatica was a satirical open wiki that used MediaWiki software. Launched on December 10, 2004, it lampooned both encyclopedic topics and current events, especially those related or relevant to contemporary internet culture. It was frequently utilized by a socially fluid and dynamic...
article "Aboriginal" was removed from the search engine results of Google Australia
Google search
Google or Google Web Search is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. Google Search is the most-used search engine on the World Wide Web, receiving several hundred million queries each day through its various services....
, following a complaint that its content was racist
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
.
George Newhouse, the lawyer for the complainant, claims the site is "illegal" and should be blocked by the mandatory web filter.
As the address of the site appeared on the leaked ACMA blacklist, it is likely that the whole site would be blocked by the filter. A search on terms related to the article will produce a message that one of the results has been removed after a legal request relating to Australia's Racial Discrimination Act 1975
Racial Discrimination Act 1975
The Racial Discrimination Act 1975 is a statute passed by the Australian Parliament during the Prime Ministership of Labor Gough Whitlam....
.
See also
- Censorship in AustraliaCensorship in AustraliaAustralia is a federation, and responsibility for censorship is divided between the states and the federal government. Censorship of video games and Internet sites hosted in Australia are considered to be the strictest in the western world....
- Internet censorshipInternet censorshipInternet censorship is the control or suppression of the publishing of, or access to information on the Internet. It may be carried out by governments or by private organizations either at the behest of government or on their own initiative...
- Content-control softwareContent-control softwareContent-control software, also known as censorware or web filtering software, is a term for software designed and optimized for controlling what content is permitted to a reader, especially when it is used to restrict material delivered over the Web...
- For The Children (politics)For The Children (politics)Citing the interests of children is a rationale that is sometimes given for why something should or should not be done.It can also be seen as:* a rationalization/justification* a political tool* a rhetorical phrase Citing the interests of children is a rationale that is sometimes given for why...
External links
- Australian Internet Industry Association
- Comments on Mandatory Filtering and Blocking by ISPs
- Electronic Frontiers Australia
- ISP Filtering Live Pilot - Questions and answers
- Labor’s Mandatory ISP Internet Blocking Plan
- Somebody Think Of The Children a blog documenting censorship and moral panicMoral panicA moral panic is the intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order. According to Stanley Cohen, author of Folk Devils and Moral Panics and credited creator of the term, a moral panic occurs when "[a] condition, episode, person or group of...
in Australia - Virtual Nation. The History of the Internet In Australia.
- Filtering in Oz: Australia's Foray into Internet Censorship by Derek E. Bambauer, Brooklyn Law SchoolBrooklyn Law SchoolBrooklyn Law School is a law school located in Brooklyn Heights, in Downtown Brooklyn, New York.-History:Founded in 1901 by William Payson Richardson and Norman P. Heffley, Brooklyn Law School was the first law school on Long Island. Using space provided by Heffley’s business school, the law...
, Legal Studies Paper No. 125 - Content filtering trial results as reported by Australian ISP, Exetel, in April 2009
- ACMA Research and Developments reports The ACMA reports on internet filtering technology of which the final report shall be submitted in 2009
- DBCDE report on results of filtering trial released in December 2009
- Australian Broadband Survey 2009 (Whirlpool)