I have written before reporting on the threats to the openness of the Internet, and the ability for people to publish and access information outside the control of their governments.
I have pointed out what a threat this is to the existing power structures, and that governments will begin taking steps to curb the power of the open Internet.
Australia seems to be willing to take a leading position in this movement. Given the total uselessness of United States Congress, one wonders how far behind they can be.
Attempts by the Australian government to blacklist and censor web sites is spinning completely out of control.
Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11,000 a day
March 17, 2009 - 11:48AM
The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks.
Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark's list of banned websites.
The move by the Australian Communications and Media Authority comes after it threatened the host of online broadband discussion forum Whirlpool last week with a $11,000-a-day fine over a link published in its forum to another page blacklisted by ACMA - an anti-abortion website.
ACMA's blacklist does not have a significant impact on web browsing by Australians today but sites contained on it will be blocked for everyone if the Federal Government implements its mandatory internet filtering censorship scheme.
But even without the mandatory censorship scheme, as is evident in the Whirlpool case, ACMA can force sites hosted in Australia to remove "prohibited" pages and even links to prohibited pages.
Online civil liberties campaigners have seized on the move by ACMA as evidence of how casually the regulator adds to its list of blacklisted sites. It also confirmed fears that the scope of the Government's censorship plan could easily be expanded to encompass sites that are not illegal.
"The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship," Wikileaks said on its website in response to the ACMA ban. Australia secretly censors Wikileaks press release and Danish Internet censorship list, 16 Mar 2009
The site has also published Thailand's internet censorship list and noted that, in both the Thai and Danish cases, the scope of the blacklist had been rapidly expanded from child porn to other material including political discussions.
And, as any sane person could have and would have and probably did predict, putting any such power of censorship in the hands of government will of course lead immediately to expanding the list of censored sites to cover politics and anything else the government fears or has a distaste or fear of.
ACMA Blacklist leaked, contains legal websites
March 19, 2009 – 11:17 am
What is claimed to be a copy of the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s (ACMA) secret blacklist of prohibited websites has been leaked on the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.
I can confirm the list includes a range of legal websites, including that of a political group supporting euthanasia and a popular Australian owned adult website to name only two.
The list is currently only distributed to approved filter vendors, but if mandatory ISP level filtering is introduced as planned this would be the list of websites that all Australian’s would be restricted from viewing. In other words, the blacklist which cannot be opt out of.
As if all of that were not bad enough, remember that there are conservative religious forces here in the USA just salivating to get control of the Internet and clean it up according to their standards of morality, whatever they may be, whether yours, or not.
The following is a post on Lauren Weinstein's Privacy Forum blog.
March 18, 2009 ICANN Asked to Remake the Internet in Joseph Smith's Image?
The Register connects the dots of a rather sordid sequence of events in an article posted today.
Executive summary: It appears that mainly Utah-based Mormon anti-porn crusaders, in league with Ralph J. Yarro III (SCO Group chairman) have combined forces to petition ICANN toward the creation of a new "Cybersafety Constituency" -- and are now reportedly using form letters to dominate the brief period of time available for comments.
To better understand how this all comes together and what such a Cybersafety Constituency might be after, one must be aware that Cheryl Preston, a key player for CP80 (headed by Yarro) is spearheading this effort.
CP80, which has been around for a number of years, has been pushing a radical and impractical (decorum prevents me from saying "loony" at this juncture) plan for fundamental restructuring of Internet architecture, along with associated new laws, to "channelize" the Internet into the censorship advocates' dream machine. These are hard-core Internet content control zealots we're talking about, at least judging from their own materials.
CP80 says that a whole slew of big name corporations, including Apple, Toshiba, Wal-Mart, Sony, PetSmart, Office Depot, and on and on, are "contribution partners" to their effort -- seeming to imply support for the CP80 agenda. In reality, it appears likely to me that these are merely purchase affiliation links, and I wonder how many of these firms are aware of the manner in which CP80 is using their names and logos.
While it's difficult to visualize CP80's radical agenda gaining much traction in the short term, their entanglement with the new ICANN petition and what appears to be a well orchestrated Mormon pressure campaign certainly rate a "yellow shading toward orange" alert.
To be exceptionally clear about this, the key issue here isn't the particular religion involved. I'd say exactly the same thing about any other organized religion that appeared to be involving itself -- in my view -- inappropriately in technology policy matters.
Unfortunately, history teaches us that organized religion (a concept that I've always considered to be utterly orthogonal to truly meaningful questions of God, gods, and spirituality in general) is all too often an instrument for societal control rather than enlightenment.
I consider it crucial that the Internet not be sucked into this particular maelstrom.