They’ve drawn up a blacklist, just like the medieval index of banned books. Right now it’s a voluntary pilot project to which Internet service providers can submit. But if the trial run is deemed a success and made law, anyone who links to a blacklisted site can be fined $11,000 a day. That means it will be a crime not just to provide the contents of a web site, but to merely reproduce its address.
That’s not just like banning books. It’s like banning books, and banning saying the banned book’s title. It’s a lot of banning.
But here’s the tricky part: the government won’t even say what those 1,370 banned web sites are. It’s secret. So there are 1,370 web sites out there that could result in your criminal prosecution in Australia. But you won’t find out what they are — until you link to one of them. That’s right out of Alice in Wonderland. The pretzelian logic goes like this: if the Australian government were to list those 1,370 banned web sites, then not only would they be breaking the rules themselves, but that list would serve as an advertisement. Out of the billions of web pages on the Internet, 1,370 would be given special attention, inviting anyone curious to check them out.
Of course, people who compile the secret blacklist know what’s on it. But apparently they can be trusted not to succumb to the temptation to look at the sites. And the list was sent to selected Australian Internet companies for a trial run. That didn’t work out quite as well. The list was leaked to Wikileaks, the web site that specializes in publishing confidential documents, especially embarrassing internal government memoranda.
And that’s when things got even weirder. Wikileaks published the entire blacklist on one of its pages. So now that Wikileaks page, too, has been added to the blacklist. It’s number 1,371.
I guess this is the modern leftard equivalent of Savonarola’s Bonfires of the Vanities.
I suppose there will always be nosy, controlling busy-bodies trying to bend everyone else to their will.
We can hope these new breeds fall to the same fate that Savonarola suffered (and deserved.)
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
the quick way for this to be defeated – and it will be defeated – is for every website extant to publish links to all of the banned sites.
So what # is SDA on the list?
But here’s the tricky part: the government won’t even say what those 1,370 banned web sites are.
Kafka saw it all. See: The Trial and The Castle, while you’re at it.
Which reminds me, I gotta half shelf of Kafka I should re-visit.
What was that I was saying about a world-wide Marxist revolution?
If they banned Ezra Levant they would be off to a great start.
Its mostly porno sites, many of which you’re better off remaining just curious about, such as 2girls1cup.
But for some reason, a Dutch forklift rental company found their way onto that list as well.
This reminds me of an amusing incident years back…
A construction crew….majority dutch immigrants had a young wasp worker saying 808 little stoves in dutch as an explitive….apparently he had asked to be taught dutch swear words and some intelligent fellow tutored him to say 808 little stoves in dutch accurately…..
Stop thinking non conformist thoughts.
One day, the left will lose its grip on power, and then all these tools of oppression that they got passed onto law (that they thought only they would ever be able to use), will be available for petty revenge!
Kos: banned.
Democratic Underground: banned.
Rabble: banned.
It will be a glorious day!
Here’s the list: http://wikileaks.org/leak/acma-secret-blacklist-11-mar-2009.txt
Let’s see how long until SDA ends up on it.
From your friend Kathy Shaidle the com whoops conservative Government of Canada does the same.
http://westernstandard.ca/website/article.php?id=3007
I always thought Harper the hypocrite was a Liberal, didn’t realise just how far in left field he really is.
Meanwhile out in the world of real censorship, the Berlusconi government is on the verge of passing a law that “would force bloggers to edit any post denounced to the government as defamatory. If the blogger refused, the denouncing citizen could sue for as much as $18,000.”
After looking at the list it looks to me like these sites have probably been banned because they contain either images of violent or child pornography.
Gord Tulk; I thought, in response to your suggestion, ‘What a great idea!’…Then I reconsidered; what if there ARE child porn sites on that list? I’m not so hot on the idea of adults sodomizing little kids, being given carte blanche access to any and every internet outlet in the world. In that particular situation, children ARE being seriously damaged and I have to admit I support every and any effort to stamp out the perps.
Dutch forklifts on the other hand…
“what if there ARE child porn sites on that list?”
There’s no “if” involved here. In some European countries it’s legal for 17 year olds to appear in porn. In Canada, and I’m assuming Australia, the legal age of consent is 18 however. Therefore any site that has pornographic images of 17 year olds is, by legal definition in Canada, considered to be engaging in the transmission of child pornography. Frankly I’m surprised this hasn’t become an issue here too.
Its mostly porno sites, many of which you’re better off remaining just curious about
Yeah, but let ME decide the ways in which I’m better off, not the government, thank you very much just the same.
It’s not impossible to hit a child porn site, by accident. Maybe moves like this will convince service providers to screen sites more carefully.
No doubt T would prefer sites that only linked to Chavez.
newsfilter.com
is on the list – interestingly, it is a lennox furnace filter site. An abortion picture site is blocked. The rest appear to be porn sites, including kiddie porn.
I have no problem with kiddie porn being blocked.
The problem with a list is that once started any number of sites can be added. For instance, when I tried to access canadafreepress.com access is blocked if your privacy settings are set to medium. Also, one must allow pop ups to view the articles even though they are not pop ups.
Closer to home.
Government of Canada moves to monitor Internet users
“According to University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, the legislation would create additional requirements for ISPs and expand police powers. These ISP requirements can be broken down into two components. First, ISPs will be required to install costly surveillance equipment on their networks. Part of the cost will fall to taxpayers while the remainder will be carried by the companies themselves. Some smaller ISPs will be exempt from this requirement for a period of three years, creating an unfair burden on the larger, more successful companies. Second, the legislation would require that all ISPs give personal information to the government, including the names of their customers, as well as their IP, e-mail, and mailing addresses—on demand and without any judicial oversight.”
Full article here:
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/12977
Feedback on this issue is similar to today’s Supreme Court ruling where the court determined that severe charter violations trump serious crime.
Similarly…
Child Porn: Bad
Violating Charter rights: Worse
Like Me No Dhimmi stated, let me make that choice.
Posted by: Pissedoff at July 17, 2009 12:09 PM
Thanks, PO, for that link. I have sent a note to my CPC MP asking for his position on the issue, and whether or not the CPC intent to allow this to pass. With freedom of speech threatened by the HRC’s, this latest invasion of freedom by government will be a tipping point issue for me come next election. With the complete lack of conservative principles evident in the so-called bailouts, the CPC’s total inaction on the HRCs, if they allow this issue to pass then I won’t be able to even hold my nose and vote CPC next time; I think I’ll just pass.
mhb23re at gmail d0t calm
Dave in Miss; so how would you suggest the flood of images of children being abused be prevented from being uploaded and downloaded? Keep in mind these perverts need the ‘net exposure to justify the expense and labour involved in creating this shite in the first place. (Castration comes to mind, but that still means you need to first catch the scumbags.)
As much as I abhor a lot of the filth on the web it strikes me as cutting off your nose despite your face to remove them. How the hell do you know who they are, where they are or how many there are without the web. It seems to me it’s a built in lead site for the police, is it not?
An RCMP neighbor of mine said that until the net we had no idea of the number scoundrels involved in this type of trash. Why pass laws that make bikies take their colours off? At least you know who they are, and they can shoot each other and not make a mistake of an innocent biker. To me the street is the same as the web, it lets you know who the hell they are.
DaninVan:
I’m as disgusted as anyone with internet kiddie porn. But as No-One points out, government ban lists are dangerous. It’s just too easy to politicize such lists, and as you know, if an entity gets put on the list, it’s awfully hard to get it off again. This is for the simple reason that civil “servants” more than anything fear the fallout of a decision they take. So best not make one. If it’s on the list it stays on the list. And if there’s any doubt at all whether an entity should be put on the list in the first place, the safest option is to put it on.
Put another way, kiddie porn may be a neat excuse to engage in wider censorship, just as “saving the planet” is a great excuse for government expansion and incipient marxist world governance (which Algore has now openly admitted is the long term objective of the climate change bill).
I mean, who’s against saving the planet? = I mean, who’s against fighting kiddie porn?
As much as I abhor a lot of the filth on the web it strikes me as cutting off your nose despite your face to remove them. How the hell do you know who they are, where they are or how many there are without the web. It seems to me it’s a built in lead site for the police, is it not?
An RCMP neighbor of mine said that until the net we had no idea of the number scoundrels involved in this type of trash. Why pass laws that make bikies take their colours off? At least you know who they are, and they can shoot each other and not make a mistake of an innocent biker. To me the street is the same as the web, it lets you know who the hell they are.
As mentioned above, the list is mainly comprised of pornography websites.
There are any number of software products out there that will block this sort of filth both at the PC and the ISP level. Why the need for government involvement?
… because, rhebner, the issue is as much about statist control of the citizenry as it is controlling or reducing child pornography. Sure, I have my security software on our home PCs filter out undesirable sites from our kids, but that doesn’t allow the government to get involved, does it? They want to be in the driver’s seat, making the decision and exerting control over our personal freedoms and liberty.
Nice summary by MND at 3:16p: well, who ISN’T against saving the planet/children/{insert your pet cause here}?
mhb
George Orwell was a true visionary. He knew that Big Brother and the thoughtpolice were coming …
I’m curious, since sites with links to those sites are banned, why hasn’t the whole internet been banned?
Essentially all sites eventually link to all other sites. Hence the term “web”.
This also brings up an interesting point. Say on a blog or a php forum, a user links to one of these sites, what happens then?
Is it illegal for a user to link to the site? Is it illegal for the forum owner? Is it illegal to click that link yet not knowing what it is?
Too much grey area for me.
Canada already does that. Go and check out http://cybertip.ca. Cleanfeed uses a list of URLs that contain child exploitation images. Any ISP that implements Cleanfeed has special routing setup to block http access to any of those URLs. Now, who could argue against that since it is to protect people from viewing child exploitation images.
Most major Canadian ISPs participate.
But what I always wondered was how they decide what was on the list of URLs? Because it is true that in the case of Cleanfeed the list of URLs was also treated as a big secret. Will they someday add another list of pornography websites? After that, where does it stop?
fcukin’ hilarious.
the level of convoluted twists and turns in the logic is breathtaking.
truly.
(pssst, Kate: you wouldn’t be on the list eh? lot of links coming out of SDA. best check yer bank balance. that’d be expressed in $AU now.)
jeezuz. I need a stiff drink after reading that.
oyph.
Over at the geek site “slashdot”, a favourite meme is to start any comment on Internet censorship, alcohol or tobacco use by adults, education reform, etc. with “Think of the children! Won’t anyone please think of the children!”.
But I have to agree that child porn is a special case, since clearly a child had to be victimized to produce it. (And I’m not talking about the ubiquitous “two kids taking a bath” photo every family seems to have.) IIRC, Canadian law not only forbids people under 18 from appearing in porn, you’re not even allowed to portray someone who is 18 as being younger than that. But if we have all those laws, and the police are demanding the right to have ISP’s turn over IP addresses, aren’t the existing laws enough to catch and prosecute these pervs? Every few months, I see an article about “Project P” (the Ontario police force concentrated on child porn) busting someone. There can’t be that many sickos out there – well, I hope not.
The eye of the storm is now moving.
All hell is going to break soon.
I figure 2010 will be when all this crashes to a head.
“judicial overview”!
der guv & der schwein appear to have a pact.
Like said earlier, there should be no reason for this legislation since they have the needed tools already in place..?
Stone them for saying Jehovah?
This is a tricky subject for sure, but I think the gist of the original Levant piece is Big Brother government deciding for you what you can or cannot view. Hard to do obey the law if you don’t know what is illegal. I mean it is one thing to have a kiddie porn site pop up without any warning but most people I know either block it themselves or have software that catches most of that crap and malware.
I pay $X.xx dollars a year for my software vendor to block potentially harmful sites. Big difference is that they will readily supply you with a list of the bad sites.
I remember my dad getting initiated to the internet before the days of decent pop up blockers and such. Hit a site that wasn’t what it seemed to be and ended up opening lord knows how many pop up windows before the machine came to a crashing halt when the plug was ripped from the wall. btw, did you know that whitehouse.com and whitehouse.gov are two entirely sites or at least was at one point?
By all means go after the distributors and makers of this crap in your own jurisdiction but knock off the secret lists. Even Net Nanny will tell you what is bad (and to which as a parent you can add to for your pc, I believe).
Holy Cow. If the idea is to make child porn illegal to look at – make it illegal to look at child porn. Don’t ban websites – especially secretly! It’s completely weird that they don’t even give you a list to say: don’t go here. That is sooooo strange. They better not be going there in this country. Government censorship is the beginning of the end….
This is an excellent solution to the problem, and should produce outstanding results, just as we’ve seen a vast reduction in gun crime by outlawing guns.
jc
As an Australian computer nerd, I find this whole filtering/censorship debacle quite embarrassing. As earlier commenters have said, the Blacklist is mainly intended to block child porn and other sicko content. But (to expand Ezra’s argument a little) this results in having to ban sites with no public discussion, which pretty much guarantees the Blacklist will be misused.
The main problem with this idea is that it won’t work. Sure, it will reduce (though not eliminate) the likelihood of stumbling across child porn by accident, but it won’t even slow down the real pedophiles, who (the newspapers say) use peer-to-peer protocols rather than the web. Also, it would be easy to evade the blacklist by using web proxies or virtual private networks. Worse still, it would make internet access slower and more expensive; for that reason, our ISPs are vocally opposing the idea.
This is a genuine scandal, but not as big as it may look. Our current left-of-center federal government came to power in 2007 with a campaign promise to Do Something about internet nasties, and now a not-very-important Minister and his not-very-impressive department are trying to implement that promise. It’s not some attempt to take over the internet, just the politics (and bureaucratic empire-building) as usual.
The previous right-of-center government had a much better approach: they provided a user-friendly web filter that people could download and use for free, with no effect on other internet users. (They had a deal with one of the major web-filtering companies.) However, not many people used it. The inevitable news stories about 14 year old hackers circumventing the filters didn’t help, but the main problem was that most of the people who want something done about internet nasties weren’t willing to do anything themselves.
Too too funny. The makers of the list are apparently somewhat computer illiterate, confusing in once instance “skuzi” and “scsi”, the former being Strine for “of negative connotation”, while the latter is of course “Small Computer System Interface”
I see 22 references to “gay” which is interesting seeing as how Sydney, Australia “prides” itself in hosting the worlds largest “gay” parade. The tourist board will be involved quite soon, I would think, before the blue squad shuts down the festivities.
Confusing, but that’s essentially Australia/n
freedom will not be kept by words only by blood. jefferson “the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.” i wonder who they will be?
Statists hate the internet because it is beyond their control. The first step in control of the internet was the laws regarding child pornography. This seemed a safe enough thing to do because very few people have very positive feelings about pedophiles (once the word “politician” elicits the same emotional responses as “pedophile” then we can truly say we’re making some progress towards a free society).
The revulsion against pedophiles is sufficiently strong that very few people saw the law for what it was — the first step at controlling the internet.
There is nothing wrong with child porn images. People may find them offensive but why then is it OK to possess images of children blown to pieces or porn in which the individuals are over 18? This has never made sense to me as, after all, we’re dealing with a collection of bytes.
There is a lot wrong with an individual kidnapping and raping an 8 year old. Rather than take the step which made sense; ie take the perpetrator in this case and give him to the family of the victim to mete out justice, they went after the internet. Pedophiles can’t be rehabilitated so kill them. Very simple solution that maintains freedom.
Once mere possession of child porn is illegal, then many more laws can come in to get at peoples digital information. Statists also hate encryption as they want to know what people are hiding. Make a law to make it illegal to take encrypted files across borders in your laptop as these files might be child porn.
While the internet still exists it is time to organize locally to fight statists while it is still possible. Maybe someday soon anyone who admits they are a politician will get the same reception as an admitted pedophile does today.
Got so worked up about the laws regarding child porn that forgot to mention the most dangerous banned link on the list, namely:
http://
I guess that’s one way to prevent people from looking at porn by not allowing them to use the http protocol. Doesn’t stop file transfers in web browsers using ftp:// though.
I clicked on some of the sites that looked like they might be non-porn, but they were all pretty standard fare and not something I’m particularly interested in visiting. There didn’t appear to be anything illegal going on in these sites as adult porn is legal. I’ve got a lot better things to do with my time than look at porn but it’s obviously of interest to a lot of people given the amount that’s out there.
What I’m hoping will happen to deal with incredibly idiotic ideas like this banned site list is to classify need for control of other people as a mental illness (hopefully by the time the DSM6 comes out). This would allow most politicians to be certified as insane and locked up in places where they can get treatment. Whether or not this affliction is treatable is not known yet but getting such dangerous individuals out of society and no longer be able to harm people would be a first step.