Australian ISP Pulls Out Of Censorship Test After Blocklist Discredited

[GhostShip]

One of the major ISP companies in Australia has decided its not going to continue co-operating with the government.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/03/23/1237656833566.html

Australia's third largest internet provider, iiNet, has withdrawn from the Government's internet censorship trials, saying it could not "reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility".
The move comes after the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks last week published a leaked copy of the secret Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) blacklist of prohibited websites, which forms the backbone of the Government's censorship policy.

Far from containing just "illegal material" such as child pornography, the list of prohibited websites includes a wealth of legal material such as regular gay and straight porn sites, YouTube links, online poker sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites and even the sites of a Queensland dentist, a school canteen consultancy and an animal carer.

"Any person or corporation that would be identifiable on the list would potentially be deemed by the general public ... either a child molester or at least in the same category as child molesters," said University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt.
"In effect, this could be interpreted by some as a government sanctioned hate list."

I think this gesture is a momentous event marking as it does the refusal of an ISP to censor and block websites just on the say so of a secret group of people who's identities are not publicly known, and as mentioned above those on the list would be unable to get themselves removed from it, a disgusting situation in a democracy, whats next folks, censorship of viewing opposition political parties websites because they don't vote the way the government  demands ?

We cannot all just sit back while our freedoms are stolen and those that do are as much victims of their own ignorance as their children will be when their is no freedom of speech or expression.

[White Stripes]

wikileaks is apparently the best thing to happen to the web in a long time..

[GhostShip]

It does seem to be acting as a tool to level the playing field of democracy.

Most governments and organisations hide behind the fact that only they have the information needed to ensure the right decision is made and often for political reasons they ensure your never going to see that information so they can manipulate the facts to suit their own agenda, its clear with such sites on the internet that the undemocratic have somethig to fear but I feel we are leaving it rather late in the day to secure our access to such sites, some countries blocklists already contain the wikileaks domain.

[Happy Dude]

Yeah, old thread, but I'm not on MX (or this site) much nowadays.

When Telstra of all evil corporations tells the government "we don't support your filter and will not implement it" - you know it can't be good

[DaBees-Knees]

It seems a lot of the so called democratic governments have a bit of explaining to do. The UK and France to mention two. The UK has tried to make a few dodgy moves and France has shown itself to be anything, but democratic. Recently it has tried to be the bully boy of Europe. Trying to throw it's weight around and persuade Europe to take on the three strikes and your out. Fortunately, other European nations weren't persuaded. 

[Forested665]

Its called lobbying.
Democracy is an illusion even in the US we have lobbyers and even worse, the voting system thats ineffective. You dont get to make the selection of the three or four people you get to vote for, the political parties do that job for you without any input. then as we seen in bush's race against gore you can vote all you want but its the state decision wich candidate gets the vote.