The Federal Government has condemned the leaking of a list claiming to contain websites that will be blocked under a mandatory internet filtering scheme, and has denied the list is authentic.
The list was released yesterday on to Wikileaks.com, a site known as a haven for whistleblowers to release secret documents. The site claims that it published the list to show how censorship systems “are invariably corrupted into anti-democratic behaviour”.
But Communications Minister Stephan Conroy, who is leading the charge for the Government’s mandatory filtering system, has denied the leaked list is the Government’s own.
“I am aware of reports that a list of URLs has been placed on a web site. This is not the ACMA blacklist,” Conroy said in a statement.
“The published list purports to be current at 6 August 2008 and apparently contains approximately 2400 URLs, whereas the ACMA blacklist for the same date contained 1061 URLs.”
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has also denied the list’s authenticity, but says several of the URLs on the list are also on the blacklist.
“ACMA has previously investigated and taken action on material – including child pornography and child sexual abuse images – at some of the sites on this list of 2300 URLs,” ACMA said.
“However, some of the URLs that remain active appear to relate to online depictions of child sexual abuse. Possessing, distributing or accessing such material may amount to an offence under the Commonwealth Criminal Code and relevant state laws.”
ACMA has also said it may refer the matter to the Federal Police.
But Colin Jacobs, vice-chair of lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, which has organised several protests against the filtering scheme, says the list does contain the ACMA blacklist.
“It’s not a hoax. I can’t say definitively but it is almost certainly the backlist at the time it was recovered and perhaps extra links added to it by an ISP vendor,” he says.
“It’s not the exact list, but I expect that it’s a superset of the ACMA blacklist, so there may be things that are extra.”
Jacobs points to the inclusion of a website of a Queensland dentist on the list, and says that businesses should be aware that the scheme could target innocent websites that have had inappropriate material posted on them.
“There’s no mechanism to file a complaint. If you’re a business that gets hacked and you remove anything, you could still go on the list and there’s no mechanism to get off. If you’re a business that relies on traffic it could be disastrous.”
But despite the alleged leaking of the list, Jacobs says the Government is not likely to back down in its effort to pass the filtering legislation.
“I don’t know if it will make any difference, but this does help educate people that the blacklist is very broad and its admin is secret and haphazard, and I think people will be better informed.”
Opposition communications spokesman Nick Minchin has also said the leak shows how efforts to censor internet content will ultimately fail.
”The regrettable and unfortunate reality is there will always be explicit and illegal material on the web, and regardless of blacklists, filters and the like, those with the means and know-how will find ways of accessing it,” Minchin said.
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Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
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