Ian Steadman
Australia's government is under fire after it appears to have
introduced web censorship without warning, expanding
already-controversial powers to block access to child pornography
into a wider web filtering system.
The reluctance of the government to release information about
who has requested sites be blocked, and lists of those sites, has
also alarmed many Australians. Two convenors from Melbourne Free
University (MFU), whose site was blocked without warning or
explanation on 4 April, have described it as a "glimpse [of]
the everyday reality of living under a totalitarian
government".
For a country that perhaps has a reputation for taking it easy,
Australia's governments have been particularly keen on web
censorship. In 2008, a web filter was
proposed that would have potentially blocked as many as 10,000
sites by placing them on a blacklist, but years of
criticism from industry, political and public groups --
including Anonymous "
declaring war" on it, and Wikileaks publishing
the confidential blacklist to show it included some sites that were
only, contrary to government assurances, subjectively offensive --
led to the idea being dropped in November 2012.
That might have been the end of it, but no -- instead of going
through legislative channels, it looks like web censorship is back,
and this time it's taking advantage of a legal loophole. On 4
April, more than 1,200 sites were suddenty unavailable to
Australian web users
One of those sites that was blocked was that for the MFU, a
non-profit organisations that runs talks and workshops about
"radical equality" and other activist topics. Jasmine-Kim
Westendorf and Jem Atahan, convenors at MFU, wrote a blog
post about their Kafkaesque experience of finding their site
blocked for nine days and struggling to find any kind of answer as
to why:
"After persistent questioning, our local internet supplier
reluctantly told us that the internet address of our website had
been blocked by the 'Australian Government'. Even more alarmingly,
they said they were legally unable to 'provide the details
regarding who has blocked the IP or why'. Our first thought was,
what have we done to draw the eye of the authorities? Who have we
had speak at the MFU that might be on a blacklist? In that instant,
we glimpsed the everyday reality of living under a totalitarian
government."
The fact that someone, somewhere in the Australian government
has been blocking websites didn't go unnoticed, and journalist,
advocacy bodies like the
Electronic Frontier Foundation and even politicians began
demanding answers. Eventually, Aussie tech website
Delimiter broke the story that the sites had
been blocked at the request of Australia's financial regulator, the
Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).
The issue relates to the
Telecommunications Act 1997, clause 313 of which describes the
"obligations" of service providers "to prevent telecommunications
networks and facilities from being used in, or in relation to, the
commission of offences against the laws of the Commonwealth or of
the States and Territories".
When the more draconian web filter was dropped last November,
its main proponent, communications minister Stephen Conroy, instead
switched attention to the Telecommunications Act. He described a
"voluntary" filtering system that he would like ISPs and other
service providers (like Vodafone) to sign up to, and it
would only seek to block sites which had been blacklisted by
Interpol -- the vast majority of which host child pornography.
However, it appears that using clause 313 of the
Telecommunications Act in this way has set a worrying precedent
(something that
had been foreseen by some experts at the time). ASIC has been
submitting lists of sites to the filter blacklist to try and crack
down on financial scams. One of those sites was hosted on an IP
address shared by those 1,200 other sites that were blocked in
early April, alerting Australian web users to the silent creep of
internet filtering, proceeding on without their knowledge.
The fact that government ministries are now able to ask ISPs to
take down sites without any kind of legal or regulatory oversight
has, unsurprisingly, angered a lot of opposition politicians.
Australian Greens senator Scott Ludlam told the Australian
Financial Review: "It's extraordinarily difficult to find
who has issued these notices and on behalf of whom, for what
categories of content, or what you do if you find yourself on a
block list. We've got a very serious problem and it's not at all
clear whether the government knows what it's actually doing."
Australians will now have to petition their government to get
this situation under control.
