Internet censorship expands

Internet censorship expands

The Rudd Government’s internet censorship scheme could wipe out illegal online sharing of gay and lesbian films under new expanded filters.

Live trials of the censorship scheme were due to begin over Christmas, but already it has been expanded beyond the scope originally put to voters to now include non-web online tools such as peer-to-peer sharing.

Technology is improving all the time. Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial, broadband minister Stephen Conroy announced on his departmental blog last month.

The two biggest gay and lesbian themed peer-to-peer services could be blocked entirely if the expanded filter is implemented. Although neither Gay Torrents nor Gay Torrent News contains child pornography, they have large stores of copyright films that have not been distributed in Australia and have not been rated by the Classification Board.

Both services are both hidden behind protected websites and users often also employ encryption to avoid prosecution by the copyright owners or being outed as gay.

Many Australian users on the Gay Torrent News forums were fearful they’d lose access to the services altogether.

As an Australian I’m pretty worried. Supposedly they would only be filtering -˜illegal’ material, but it’s a very slippery slope and a fine line if you ask me, a user calling himself Cezson wrote.

Another calling himself Onekusu said he had mistakenly voted in that bastard Stephen Conroy and feared losing his freedom to view YouTube, XTube, MySpace, let alone our GTN.

Others expected the plans to be dropped once the filter trials proved inefficient and ineffective.

I know that iiNet is participating in trials just to prove [to] them it just simply won’t work, user dcbunny wrote. It’s awful enough to know that the government even thinks of doing this sort of thing. And Senator Conroy just calls those that oppose the censorship pro-child porn. It’s so silly.

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23 responses to “Internet censorship expands”

  1. The issue of Internet Filtering is more than just about access to gay websites, or the ability to download gay porn. The implementation of Internet Filtering is the continuation of the implementation of the Labor “Nanny State” – where you will be told what you can read, what you can listen to, what you can watch, what you can eat … How long before websites that present an opposing view to that of the Government of the day are “banned”, or websites that provide information that may be “inconvenient” to the Government?

    With respect to Oliver (and his ilk), yes there is some pretty perverse and extreme stuff on the internet – but you don’t have to look at it! There is this thing could personal responsibility – and it is about time that individuals started exercising it.

  2. One of the more insidious effects of Conroy’s plan is that it threatens the existence of political free speech by blacklisting the new Australian Sex Party website. This site is non explicit but in 2002 the party’s ‘parent’, the Eros Association had its site blacklisted by Parliament House security because of its name and its non explicit content. The people who put together the Parliament House ‘censored’ list of sites just assumed that of course an organisation that represented the rights of adult traders would be a porn site. This is how ignorant many people in the ‘filtering’ industry are. It took Eros management nearly six months of intensive lobbying to convince these authorities that it was an industry association like the Pharmacy Guild or the Nurses Association. The other issue with the filter and freedom of political speech is that it threatens to cut off funding of the Sex Party by traders who sell classified X rated material. Conroy probably never thought about this when he framed his proposal but in the same way that the ALP is funded by unions and the Libs by big business, the Sex Party will be supported in roughly an equivalant way by average adult retail businesses. Blacklisting adult sites that would be free to sell classified X rated films on the street in the ACT and NT, is like banning unions or big business from donating to the ALP and the Libs. Because the Australian Sex Party supports gay marriage and other gay and lesbian rights as one of its ‘core’ policies Conroy’s filter also threatens a lot more than free speech.

  3. Does not matter if your gay or not the real issue is the freedom and liberty and the atempt of goverments to control the internet that is basicly an open space. Technicaly the software will never achieve it goal and the whole exersise is pointles. The perpertrators of child porn are been watched very closly by law enforcer around the word and over time willl be caught up to. This technology will never stop these deviates. It like e revolving door wehn one shuts another will open. so Why do this at all? what are the 10000 urls they going to block.. This site may be one

  4. It might or it might not work. It will all depend on the definition what the illegal content is. If the government start filtering legal stuff then they’ll be subject to law suits. You have to be a dictatorship to get away with it. Is Rudd government that ambitious?

  5. GayMiddleEast.com blocked in Saudi Arabia

    As reported by Reporters Without Borders the LGBT news and information web site, GayMiddleEast.com, has been blocked in Saudi Arabia. In addition, the popular web sites gay.com, gaydar.com, and 365gay.com have also been blocked.

    Despite being readily accessible locally (from a non-filtered location), the websites were inaccessible when accessed through computers in Saudi Arabia. Instead, of the requested content a message was displayed indicating that the requested website could not be accessed. Further testing has revealed that the web site of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) [www.iglhrc.org] along with the Gay and Lesbian Arabic Society (GLAS) [www.glas.org] have also been blocked.

    913 URL’s were retrieved from the Google search engine using “gay” as a search term. The results were retrieved using Google’s SafeSearch feature, which attempts to block web pages containing explicit sexual content from appearing in search results.* Each of these URL’s were tested from 5 computers located in Saudi Arabia. The testing revealed that 170 of the 902 accessible web sites returned from the search result are blocked in Saudi Arabia.

    Copied from http://opennet.net/bulletins/002

  6. “Also its interesting how the government wont revel the list of internet websites”

    1. Because that would tip everyone off to the fact that the mandatory component of the filter will ban all X-rated material. They wanted to “surprise” everyone when it was too late. (Catholic Conroy has been VERY coy about what TYPES of sites will be banned, for this very reason)

    2. In addition to that, they would not want to release the details & specific web addresses of the extreme illegal sites, hacking information sites etc.

  7. Also its interesting how the government wont revel the list of internet websites thats currently blocked, Why ?

  8. If it goes thru, we will need to replace the term Same Sex Couples with Same Gender Couples.
    In terms of marriage, we should already be using the term Equal Marriage, anyway rather than Gay or Same Sex marriage.
    Single gay guys can be referred to as SGA…. Same Gender Attracted.

  9. Oliver’s right! – But I wasn’t allowed to spell in the words “same sex marriage” into some Computer because of censurship laws – This is not communist China, this is Australia!

  10. and i thought Big Brother had been axed … seems he is alive and well and living in Canberra ..
    Honestly, what next? We are all going to have to seek permission to have sex?
    Come on Rudd, leave well enough alone and start focussing on some real social issues like child pverty, homelessness, the disgraceful state of our tax system and the poor standard of health care in this country .. that’s where the real problems are ..

  11. The Government is trying to “save the kiddies” from porn, but little to they realise that young people today have moved passed the internet, and are now accessing whatver materials they want (be it porn, music or anything else) through Blue Tooth technology. Yep, that’s right, it’s in the school playgrounds that kids say “watch this!” or “blue tooth that too me”. Often that material is not only unclassified, but it is real. ie.real fights, real accidents etc. Kids messageing each other is so much harder to police – if not impossible.

  12. the problem is what’s next? once they have it in place they can block whatever they want.

    They’ve already cesored in the past, for example when the TV show ” Australian Idol” accidently published caseydonovan.com instead of .com.au Telstra forced it’s users that typed the .com to be automatically re-directed to the .com.au the net won’t be the same again!

    What if someone like me who personally doesn’t like anything to do with religion, got into power and decided that religion causes more problems than adult content, the system would be in place to easy add all words regarding religion… just like China’s firewall!

    Only a few days ago the US press described trying to filter the internet at ISP level as political suicide.

    Just cause some MPs spend all their time working on ludicrous laws and aren’t around to supervise their own children it shouldn’t mean the rest of the country, probably 95% should have to sacrifice fast internet to protect their unsupervised bratts!

  13. The issue here is whether LGBT p2p sites are being targeted specifically, while ‘mainstream’ p2p sites are not. The article isn’t clear on that point.

    If so, then clearly the agenda is more than just ‘OMG, save the children from porn!’, it’s specifically about pushing the line that gay/lesbian porn is somehow ‘worse’ than straight porn. i.e. it’s a religious agenda.

    If ALL p2p porn sites are blocked equally, then it’s not specifically a queer issue – it’s an issue of denying adults access to material that they CHOOSE to view. Which is a problem with the ratings system and should be addressed as such.

    Some will argue of course that p2p is used ‘mostly’ for sharing of copyrighted material, and is therefore an illegal activity anyway. The problem here is that p2p networks have many legitimate uses (distributing open source software, for example), so if specific technologies are blocked then we are deliberately throwing the baby out with the bathwater… Besides which, it’s not up to government to (e.g.) instruct Australia Post to read every letter that everyone posts and tear up those that contain ‘bad words’, threats, or hate speech. We have a legal system that allows any injured parties to take action against such breaches of law, without the government stepping in to baby-sit the adult population.

    As for the non-adult population, their parents/guardians are the ones responsible for controlling/monitoring/restricting their access to computers or other technologies. There are already widely-available and inexpensive/free tools to assist any parents who CHOOSE to block or restrict their children’s Internet use, including blocking access to p2p networks. The fact that some parents abrogate their responsibilities is no excuse for imposing restrictions on the rest of the population.

  14. In addition to sex shop restrictions, there is a specific 1999 Commonwealth law banning all X-rated material from existing on the internet within Australia.
    Till now, they could only enforce banning it on servers hosted in Australia, but the new filter will allow them to eradicate it completely. For info on the specific internet law see link- http://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Censor/cens1.html#comm (scroll down to the heading “Commonwealth Legislation”).
    The misundertanding of this little known Commonwealth law has been part of the Australian Christian Lobby “masterplan” from the beginning… and why Senator “Catholic Conroy” has been soooo coy on detailing what is banned, careful not to let the cat out of the bag & tell people that all internet X-rated material will disappear overnight when the compulsory component of the filter is turned on.
    It was all meant to get rushed through & passed, & there was nothing we could do about it come day one of the live filter when it was too late (as they are only enforcing an existing 1999 Commonwealth law that relates specifically to the internet). Yes, you’ll still be able to buy X-rated by mail order from Canberra, but you won’t be able to access it anywhere on the internet.
    So, misunderstanding cleared up- so direct your anger at the Australian Christian Lobby, and the federal government.

  15. Just to clarify D’s comment, my understanding is that it is only illegal to SELL X-rated movies in Australian states (not that this stops a lot of adult shops, since the law is rarely enforced) – it’s not illegal to purchase, possess or watch them.

    My advice to everyone would be to a) comment on relevant official government bogs, and b) sign the GetUp! petition against the filter.

  16. Rudd government … Internet censorship plans would be “far worse than China Iran or Cuba go to no No Clean Feed – Stop Internet Censorship in Australia Sign the petition .

  17. Unfortunatley “Catholic Conroy” has a point… if X-rated films are banned in most of Australia, then the government can ban them on the internet, once they obtain the technology to enforce it within Australia. In other countries, X-rated films are legal, and are freely available on the internet. (One way to solve part of the problem would be to get X-rated films legalised in Australian states)
    In addition to this situation, the government can also follow the letter of the law & enforce the blocking of gay-storyline movies simply because no-one has paid to obtain an Australian rating.. meaning they are “unrated”.
    The Australian Christian Lobby /Family First are holding Labor to Rudd’s pre-election promise to enfore the filter & ban all X-rated “illegal” material within Australia. (It’s all spelled out on the Aust Christian Lobby website)
    Those that voted Labor as primary vote are taken for granted, while Labor runs around trying to please those that voted 1 Family First, and 2 Labor. Well there’s one way to fix that in future- vote 1 Greens, and 2 Labor. (a 2 vote still forms a Labor government but under the full influence of the party you voted 1 for… that’s how our Two-Party Preferred voting system works)