ACMA Censoring the Internet
March 20th, 2009 by jacobbrett
ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority) have abused their child porn website blacklist and are blocking pages on websites such as WikiLeaks and other legal websites. Supposedly most of the blacklisted sites have no relation to child porn.
WikiLinks was responsible for exposing the secret ACMA August ’08 blacklist two days ago:
While Wikileaks is used to exposing secret government censorship in developing countries, we now find Australia acting like a democratic backwater. Apparently without irony, ACMA threatens fines of upto $11,000 a day for linking to sites on its secret, unreviewable, censorship blacklist — a list the government hopes to expand into a giant national censorship machine.
Most of the sites on the Australian list have no obvious connection to child pornography. Some have changed owners while others were clearly always about other subjects.
Whirlpool (a popular broadband and online rights website) were threatened with the fine for linking to a blacklisted site featuring aborted fetuses:
In an unprecedented move, Australia’s communications regulator has threatened to fine a company up to $11,000 a day for indirectly leaking part of its top-secret list of banned internet web pages.
On March 10, ACMA issued Sydney web hosting company Bulletproof Networks with an “interim link-deletion notice” for allowing its customer, the Whirlpool internet community website, to post the link to an anti-abortion web page blacklisted by the regulator.
Basically, the Australian Government, through ACMA, is using the child porn blacklist as an excuse to block any kind of questionable or politically-dissident webpages and therefore censoring basic human rights to free speech.
On January 5, an internet user in Melbourne, known online as Foad, lodged a complaint with ACMA about “offensive content” on an anti-abortion web page, not the entire website.
The man did not want his real name published for fear of reprisals. He said his motive was to test the system and show that web pages not showing material connected with sexual abuse of children could end up on the blacklist.
This shit is fucked.
