Stan Beer
Thursday, 19 March 2009 20:07
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
That material happens to be a "secret" list of banned
websites that Australia's communications regulator ACMA has been
administering since the year 2000.
That list was distributed to six chosen ISPs for
use in a trial commissioned by Government aimed at censoring the
Internet using filtering technology at the ISP level.
There has been some conjecture as to whether the list that Wikileaks
published is the same one sent to the chosen ISPs by ACMA as the
Wikileaks list is larger by a factor of two.
However, despite Communication Minister Stephen Conroy's protestaions,
it's a fair bet that the Wikileaks list is a superset of the ACMA list.
Perhaps, it is a conglomeration of the ACMA list and those of other
countries such as Denmark and the UK.
The point is the "secret" list contained a significant number of false
positives - travel operator, dentist, dog breeder and so on. It's
almost certain that these innocent parties, grouped in with the likes
of pedophile promoters, had no idea of their status with Australian
authorities or why no one was visiting their sites.
In fact, in light of the information made available by Wikileaks, there
may even be a case for some of these innocent affected parties to
pursue compensation for lost business and damage to their reputation,
Personally, I hope they do if that's possible under our current laws.
The Government is now on the back foot. After the first demonstrated
failure of its ISP Internet filtering program, which does not include
any of the top three ISPs, it is lashing out with threats.
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