The Australian Government will no longer introduce Mandatory Filtering legislation in Australia.
Labor’s planned filtering legislation would have seen a broad range of legal content (originally defined as “prohibited content” and later re-framed as content that had been “refused classification”) blocked to Australian Internet users. Instead ISPs will now be required to restrict access to child abuse material that is listed on the INTERPOL block list.
Update 7:35AM: The Australian Financial Review is reporting that the government intends to force ISPs to block blacklists maintained by INTERPOL and ACMA. The ACMA blacklist contains a wide range of completely legal websites that don’t meet Australia’s strict classification standards, including websites on abortion, anorexia and sexual fetishes such as spanking. AFR journalist James Hutchison tells me on twitter that the ACMA list is still being actively maintained but the intersection and exact use still unclear. His investigations continue.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said in a statement that “Australia’s largest ISPs have been issued notices requiring them to block these illegal sites in accordance with their obligations under the Telecommunications Act 1997″.
“The Australian Federal Police will now begin issuing notices to smaller ISPs and will work closely to assist them in meeting their obligation under Australian law and prevent their services being used for illegal activities,” Conroy said.
“Given this successful outcome, the Government has no need to proceed with mandatory filtering legislation.”
According to SMH, “Australia’s main internet service providers have agreed to block the child abuse sites”.
Despite expert advice from literally every man and his dog in the Australian technology, social welfare and academic sectors warning against the plan, and widespread hatred from Australian Internet users, Senator Conroy and the Government pushed ahead with their mandatory filtering plan for over 5 years.
It’s early days (and early morning as I write this) but this is welcome news. Questions around how all Australian ISPs will filter the list, the Government’s ability to add websites out of INTERPOL’s scope (the ACMA Blacklist) with ease and the transparency surrounding the INTERPOL block list now need to be answered.
3 comments
Womp says:
Nov 9, 2012
It is anything but welcome news. The australian people said they didn´t want censorship, and Parliament would not have approved censorship. Conroy has basically spat in the face of all Australians and Parliament. He has turned the AFP into his own personal thought Police and bastardised the law. The section of the Act Conroy is using is intended for use in Police enforcement of active Police investigations, it is NOT intended to have any political, or even safety, uses.
We now have censorship we didn´t want, of sites we don´t know, controlled by unkown people in many other countries, and as with all Internet censorship it just plain doesn´t work.
Mike says:
Nov 9, 2012
The original scope of the plan was considerably worse. Providing the ACMA list is not included, the list of websites from INTERPOL is by my understanding much less devastating in terms of impacts on free speech. Under no circumstances is any form of Internet blacklist welcome news, but the fact legislation that would have seen the ACMA blacklist used as the source of what we can and can’t see has been dropped, I consider that a welcome development.
Matthew says:
Nov 10, 2012
There was an article published in the Sydney Morning Herald back on 20/7/11 by Asher Moses; http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/internet-censorship-machine-quietly-revs-up-20110720-1ho0y.html
Of note; “The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) confirmed it was building a list of URLs that “potentially contains child abuse material” and having them formally reviewed by the Classification Board. Sites on the blacklist have been categorised by the Board as “ACMA – ISP FILTERING”.
[….]
While ACMA’s blacklist is separate to the Interpol list the government says it sees filtering the Interpol blacklist as just an “interim step” while ACMA’s list is being prepared.”
More at Irene Graham’s site; http://libertus.net/censor/isp-blocking/au-ispfiltering-voluntary.html
I still don’t trust the government at all on this. It seems to me that this a backdoor way of getting internet censorship through. Also the question not being asked is why is there a Interpol Blacklist in the first place? First child pornography is illegal to distribute practically everywhere in the world. Second, servers exist in physical places and are subject to laws of where they physically are. Police in countries where this material is stored can’t ask owners of servers to delete the material? Oh come on!
Irene Graham on the Whirlpool Forums in regard of the Interpol list;
“FWIW, imo Conroy’s 1400 sites number is not credible, unless there’s a lot of dead sites on the list he’s talking about.
The UK IWF’s (Internet Watch Foundation) calendar year 2011 Annual Report states that during that year:
•they had known of CSA URLs hosted “on 1,595 domains worldwide”
•”the list contained an average of 602 URLs per day over the 12 month period” (and for years they’ve been saying it averages around 500 URLs per day)
•50% of URLs were taken down within 10 days, and 95% within 45 days.
IWF’s CSA criteria is vastly, vastly broader than the criteria used by Interpol.
In November 2010, a Danish police officer said there were then 246 domains on the Interpol list.”
Is it seriously worth risking IWF cock ups (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation#Incidents) or worse for a measly 246 websites? The whole justification for this censorship makes no sense to me.