Leaked Australian blacklist reveals banned sites

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/03/19/1237054961100.html

The Australian communications regulator's top-secret blacklist of banned
websites has been leaked on to the web and paints a harrowing picture of
Australia's forthcoming internet censorship regime.

Wikileaks, an anonymous document repository for whistleblowers, obtained the
list, which has been seen by this website, and plans to publish it for public
consumption on its website imminently.

Wikileaks has previously published the blacklists for Thailand, Denmark and Norway.

University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt said the leaked list
"constitutes a condensed encyclopedia of depravity and potentially very
dangerous material".

He said the leaked list would become "the concerned parent's worst nightmare" as
curious children would inevitably seek it out.

But about half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and
include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight
porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions
such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour
operator and even a Queensland dentist.

"It seems to me as if just about anything can potentially get on the list,"
Landfelt said.

The blacklist is maintained by ACMA and provided to makers of internet filtering
software that parents can opt to install on their PCs.

However, if the Government proceeds with its mandatory internet filtering
scheme, sites on the blacklist will be blocked for all Australians. The
Government has flagged plans to expand the blacklist to 10,000 sites or more.

In a special report, written in conjunction with the Internet Industry
Association and presented to the Government over a year ago, Landfeldt warned
that "list leakage" was one of the main issues associated with maintaining a
secret blacklist of prohibited sites.

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, dug up the blacklist after ACMA added
several Wikileaks pages to the list following the site's publication of the
Danish blacklist.

He said secret censorship systems were "invariably corrupted", pointing to the
Thailand censorship list, which was originally billed as a mechanism to prevent
child pornography but contained more than 1200 sites classified as criticising
the royal family.

"In January the Thai system was used to censor Australia reportage about the
imprisoned Australian writer Harry Nicolaides," he said.

"The Australian democracy must not be permitted to sleep with this loaded gun.
This week saw Australia joining China and the United Arab Emirates as the only
countries censoring Wikileaks."

The leaked list, understood to have been obtained from an internet filtering
software maker, contains 2395 sites. ACMA said its blacklist, as at November
last year, contained 1370 sites.

Assange said the disparity in the reported figure is most likely due to the fact
that the list contains several duplicates and variations of the same URL that
stem from a single complaint. Alternatively, some sites may have been added to
the list by the filter software maker.

ACMA said Australians caught distributing the list or accessing child
pornography sites on the list could face criminal charges and up to 10 years in
prison.

Opposition communications spokesman Nick Minchin said the leaking of the list
was irresponsible but highlighted how this type of information could surface
despite the efforts of ACMA to protect it, and could be used by those with a
perverse interest in its content.

"The regrettable and unfortunate reality is there will always be explicit and
illegal material on the web and - regardless of blacklists, filters and the like
- those with the means and know-how will find ways of accessing it," he said.

"Adult supervision is the most effective way of keeping children safe online and
people shouldn't be led into believing by Labor that expanded blacklists or
mandatory filters are a substitute for that."

Colin Jacobs, spokesman for the online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers
Australia, said the leak was not surprising and would only get worse once the
list was sent to hundreds of Australian ISPs as part of the Government's
mandatory internet filtering policy.

He said the Government could be considered a "promoter and disseminator of links
to some pretty unsavoury material".

"The list itself should concern every Australian - although plenty of the
material is unsavoury or even illegal, the presence of sites like YouTube,
MySpace, gambling or even Christian sites on the list raises a lot of
questions," he said.

"There is even a harmless tour operator on there, but there is no mechanism for
a site operator to know they got on or request to be removed. The prospect of
mandatory nation-wide filtering of this secret list is pretty concerning from a
democratic point of view."

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, said the leak and publication of
the ACMA blacklist would be "grossly irresponsible" and undermine efforts to
improve cyber safety.

He said ACMA was investigating the matter and considering a range of possible
actions including referral to the Australian Federal Police. Australians
involved in making the content available would be at "serious risk of criminal
prosecution".

"Under existing laws the ACMA blacklist includes URLs relating to child sexual
abuse, rape, incest, bestiality, sexual violence and detailed instruction in
crime," Senator Conroy said.

"No one interested in cyber safety would condone the leaking of this list."

 

If and when a mandatory filter based on the ACMA blacklist is
implemented, NOT publishing it would be "grossly irresponsible" because
there would be no way for us to know what is being censored.

 

It's worse (stupider) that that, it's like saying:

Gov: Within our society, we need you to comply with some of our rules.

Joe: Sure, what are they?

Gov: We're not going to tell you.

 

and a simple host sight off shore defeats the whole thing
unless suddenly krudd feels his magnificent omnipotence extends to all
and sundry making them pull the forelock ( still he will be told by the
au public very shortly "feck off sunshine")

 

You mean a site, don't you? And not quite.

Well, you can't get to wikileaks.org any more. All they've done is munged DNS
entries. The use of any proxy server based overseas will get you past that.
http://www.proxy4free.com/ note that ports 80 and 8080 are probably unusable if
your ISP does local proxy caching. And don't bother with any proxy server in
China for obvious reasons.

 

This one resolves

http://www.wikileak.com/

Same thing? (Note: no "s").

Or a chancer cybersquatting?

 

Its the easiest way of doing it. But not always the most effective.

A look up on http://whois.ausregistry.com.au/whois/whois_local.jsp? report no
data. I would expect all the other Australian registries to be the same.
Overseas ones will list it. Hmm ... you might be able to get to by IP address.

 

Its a cybersquatter.

 

Appears so, it appears to contain a list of almost exclusively links to
either buying, shopping, shopping comparison or otherwise pointless crap.

 

Googling wikileaks shows:

Wikileaks - Wikileaks
Murder: Wikileaks related human rights lawyers assassinated. On Thursday
afternoon, Oscar Kamau Kingara, director of the Kenyan based Oscar legal aid
88.80.13.160/ - 81k - Cached - Similar pages

That IP appears to go nowhere, from here anyway.

 

It took seconds to bypass the govco stuff , vpn to an overseas site
correctly sighted and done , does cost a couple of bucks a month but for
the price of freedom in reading

 

Err, you mean hosting your web pages with links offshore does?

It is when the filtering becomes compulsory that that has no effect.

 

exactly.

 

explain to me how a site sighted off shore with links unless listed can
be blocked considering the list only stops some local access ,
especially if one takes the time to use an overseas proxy or similar its
not going to stop accesses
Tnx in advance .

 

Err, if you get the ip address back, then dns is working. might be their
serve is down/overloaded again.

Can never remember that site to test in this case.

 

wikileaks.org is accessible as of 0030 20090320. But it really annoyed
me that I wasn't able to access information I wanted on the assassination
in Kenya. This is strongly redolent of that stupid UK blocking of Wikipedia
because one page had a picture of a tasteless record cover from five years
ago.

Atom Egoyan
Melbourne

 

Um, works fine from here (Geelong Vic)

 

It's working here today. Bris, but not last night.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/mar/19/wikileaks-banned-australian-websites

 

Yes, you can have your list hosted OS and the man can do SFA about it,
but it doesn't make the linked sites accessible.

BTW, what is your proxy service and how much?

Ca