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Why won't the Government publish what is included in the ACMA blacklist?
I support very narrow censorship of films, books, and other media. I suspect I might support the govt's Internet censorship proposal if it was technically feasible and very narrow. However, what informs me that I am being conned is the govt desire to keep the list of banned items secret. What on earth is the govt ashamed of? The technical challenges are a mere tactical issue. The secrecy of the list is the key strategic issue. I cannot ever consider supporting the proposal until the banned list is open to scrutiny and legal challenge.
Posted by Claude / 10 Dec 2008 12:05am / Permalink
If you must proceed with the filter, legislate EXACTLY what is allowed to be filtered, ie: child porn, terrorist websites etc. In addition to making the full list of banned IP and URL addresses publicly available at any time for any Australian to review and question, as is our right!
Posted by Brad / 10 Dec 2008 7:51pm / Permalink
I do not understand how you can propose a blanket filter to all Australia without even the courtesy of publishing the black listed websites free for all Australia to read.
Posted by narfin / 10 Dec 2008 1:00pm / Permalink
The ACMA blacklist must be made easily accessible by the general public for peer review. If the filtering does go ahead, those of us who are not children will need a copy of the blacklist to confirm that the children have indeed been protected as promised. If the filtering does not go ahead, those of us who are not children may choose to implement our own filtering based on our own research, so will still need a copy of the blacklist.
Posted by Keong / 10 Dec 2008 11:03am / Permalink
These contributors are correct that the ACMA blacklist is currently protected from release under the FOI Act. However, there is good reason for this. Distribution of child pornography is illegal under both Commonwealth and state laws. Publishing the title or internet address of child abuse material would constitute distribution of illegal material and is therefore protected from release. To do otherwise would allow a person to view and download the material in jurisdictions where ISP-level filtering was not implemented. Given that most of this material relates to child sexual abuse, the publication of this information is clearly not in the public interest.
Stephen Conroy
Return to the Promoting a Civil and Confident Online Society blog topic or see other responses:
This is an attack on freedom of speech- Why aren’t PC-level filters sufficient?
- How will the blacklist be maintained?
- How does ACMA determine what sites will be included on the blacklist?
- Hasn’t the Government already undertaken a trial of the technical issues surrounding internet filtering? Didn’t this trial find that filtering was not effective?
- Won’t internet filtering reduce internet speeds?
- Internet filtering won’t stop peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic—so why bother?
- So what else is the Government doing to help protect children online?