PARANOIA

In Australia, since January 2000, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has maintained a blacklist of internet content the agency considers offensive or illegal. To date, ACMA has provided the list to makers of net-filtering programs.

But under a forthcoming mandatory net filtering scheme, ACMA plans to fine any site that links to a blacklisted site up to A$11,000 per day. The catch is -- doubtless you saw this coming, citizen -- the blacklist's contents are secret. If you link to its prohibited sites, you won't know until ACMA fines you. If you yourself are on the list, there's no way to find out and no way to get off it.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports the public-minded site Wikileaks.org has leaked the ACMA blacklist. Wikileaks previously posted similar blacklists maintained by the Danish, Norwegian, and Thai governments. Why don't we link to Wikileaks? Because Wikileaks is on ACMA's banned list.

[A]bout 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.

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.

Slashdot has more (though some might consider the discussion not work-safe): "Wikileaks Pages Added to Australian Internet Blacklist" (March 17) and "Activists Use Wikipedia to Test Aussie Net Censors" (March 18). The former post prompted a comment by Leafheart, "Happiness is Mandatory!":

So you receive a letter in your mailbox saying that you were fined A$11,000 for linking to a site that you didn't know you couldn't link, and if you knew that you couldn't link to it, you would be even more penalized because that information is not for your security level?

Has someone in the Aussie Government been playing PARANOIA recently?

This spawned a long thread with references to Orwell and Kafka, as well as more Alpha Complex info-denialspeak.

Jeff Kotinoff of The Internet Filter blog has a useful discussion, "Lack of Transparency in Filter Lists Equals Failure" -- but be careful. He posts a long list of banned links, which may well trigger whatever might be filtering you.

(Thanks to loyal citizen Jaagup Irve.)