Australian Government adds Wikileaks to banned website list; $11k/day fine for linking | Hacker News Reader

Australian Government adds Wikileaks to banned website list; $11k/day fine for linking

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119 pointsnickb70 comments

I wonder if the government realizes how much damage they're doing to the country's reputation by ensuring that when the rest of the world thinks of the words "Australia" and "Internet," the next word that follows in most people's minds is "censorship." They're practically marketing themselves as a backwater, in the same way Kansas does every time they try to outlaw evolution.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the source for HN censor links to certain websites?

And what's your point? You don't see the difference between a free and private owned and operated website restricting access and a countries government making it totally illegal?

I'm not really making a point. I was hoping to open up the discussion on censorship in general - where do you draw the line between what is acceptable and unacceptable? Is all censorship bad? Where is the line between censorship as it is obviously being practiced in Australia and 'censorship' on a 'private owned and operated website'?

The difference between the two is fairly clear to anyone who has studied political theory or common law.

The difference is that in one case, you have a privately owned and operating website exercising censorship as a function of the owner's property rights.

Just as you have the right to deny a stranger entry into your home, a website owner has the right to set the rules of engagement in their properties.

Whereas,

As in the case of the Australian Gov't, ostensibly based on common law, is exercising the bludgeon of government fiat in order to ban access for all citizens outright to a particular website, and in doing so, is engaging in censorship.

There is a difference between a gov't engaging in censorship reminiscent of Stalinist-era USSR and you telling a stranger they cannot enter your home without your permission.

The division between public and private is central to nearly all modern governments, even a "communist" gov't like China makes the distinction even though that gov't does exercise power at will, more or less.

That's interesting. However, presumably the consequences of censorship on the censored individual can be equally detrimental whether it is perpetrated by the state or an individual/corporate entity?

For example, what happens if a company makes a product with a flaw that is literally killing people. Are they justified in removing a post from their web site forum that points this out? By your argument, in law, the answer is 'yes', but how does a user of product X feel about this?

Just because it is legal and should be legal doesn't mean it isn't morally reprehensible.

That's implicit in ftse's point, which is to raise the question of when censorship is moral.

I'm sorry, it is not clearly implicit to me. I might have been too hung up on whether it should be legal or not.

I read his post and think: Yes, it can be legal for the company to censor their own website, and it would not be immoral for it to be legal. But, it would be completely immoral for them to remove a post from their website without fully dealing with the problem.

Are they justified in removing a post from their web site forum that points this out? Yes, because it's their property.

That said, law doesn't prevent private individuals from setting up a website to warn others, and then googlebombing the name of the company at fault.

The difference is that we censor links that are offtopic for HN. But countries don't have topics.

I've often wondered if websites that censor posts or allow users to bury comments that are 'off topic' shouldn't have a page where all can be seen. It would make interesting reading, and would partly counter accusations of censorship.

You can see everything that's killed on HN by setting showdead in your profile.

I think the other important point is that censorship of the net like this isn't something that will stop people visiting websites. It's easy enough to just get the content another way.

So the censorship will have pretty much no effect, apart from negative PR.

I suspect that we're talking about some old people here.. legislators who have literally no idea what they are attempting to regulate, or it's potential consequences.

Yeah, that's the problem.

A mechanism like this get's implemented under false pretenses ("do this and it will end child porn forever") - then it becomes a future tool to abuse individual freedoms.

The ironic thing that really amazes me about the whole censorship thing is that these proposals are being pushed primarily from the left wing side of our political system.

The other ironic thing is that our right wingers are called the Liberal Party.

Go figure eh?

http://www.wikileaks.com/

I guess I've been taking linking for granted.

Could any HNers residing in Australia please add their thoughts to this? I could only imagine what would happen if the US did something similar...

Australia also banned Grand Theft Auto. And kratom.

I'm not sure if GTA was 'banned', but it certainly went close.

Actually, banned isn't quite the right word. Down under we don't have an (R18+) Rating for video games. This means anything deemed not suitable for the lower (MA) rating is not given a Classification.

...And it's illegal to sell a game without a Classification Rating.

It's a fine distinction, and not one that can be made about the internet filtering debacle.

GTA IV was almost banned - they had to cut one scene to get the MA15+ cert.

For the past year or so the federal government has been trialling software they will make mandatory for ISPs to filter the internet. The industry doesn't want it, the public doesn't want (trials show it demonstrable slows ALL internet traffic), but they persist.

The relief we have so far is that we're reasonably confident they won't really be able to enforce a lot of things, including links. I'm personally confident that they will eventually find an excuse to 'park' the project, but the closer it gets the louder we need to be about censorship.

Our PM speaks fluent Mandarin. A very useful skill for global diplomacy, but a skill that when combined with censorship draws comparisons he probably doesn't like.

sigh It's frustrating - because - we all know - technically, this just won't work...

I'm sure their reasons are somewhat valid, if only that they are pandering to a small, scared part of the community. However, putting in place this sort of apparatus to do that - with seemingly no checks and measures - seems negligent in the extreme.

The government doesn't inspect every letter, every package, every phone conversation. That's just ludicrous. Instead they just police it.

For some reason, they think this will work with the Internet. It's an embarrassment as all it demonstrates is that the government is completely out of touch with technology.

I've written to my local rep several times. It usually a form reply. They say don't want to stop "legal" activity. This scares the hell out of me. Does that include technically illegal acts such as those against corporate interests? property? political dissent?

Frankly. It's not a tool I want in the hands of a government that seems to be prepared to barter almost anything in order to get legislation though. We've had the parliament held to ransom by crazy independents before (totally marginal, unrepresentative nutjobs on the whole). I hate to think what they will demand once they have this to play with.

I only wish this initiative would quietly die like everyone is mentioning - it still seems to kick on and on though.

I wish people wouldn't make these sorts of arguments, because they're short-term ones, and don't get the real point across. Whether it technically won't work, or whether it will slow down the internet aren't the real issues, because someday, it technically will work and won't slow down the internet.

The real argument to make is that this is wrong because censorship is wrong, and because this is the thin end of the wedge of tyranny. It always starts with child porn or terrorism, because everyone hates terrorists and pedophiles. Once the government gets the capability, they just start taking more and more. Even this article talks about blocking anti-abortion websites. Abortion is one of the most important social issues today, and they're saying that we can't argue against the government position on the internet? How will we ever make progress as a society if we can't talk about anything different than what we are doing today?

I wish people wouldn't make these sorts of arguments

I don't want my government wasting money on something I don't think will work. I believe the resources are better put elsewhere. That's important to me - might not be the case for you.

and because this is the thin end of the wedge of tyranny.

Think I made that point.

Yes this censorship is wrong - I agree with that. However the technical aspects of trying to censor the internet do have important ramifications.

To effectively make censorship work on the internet it would require the government be able to access all you possible means of receiving data - Email, proxies, bittorent, SSH, everything. It is just too easy to re-route censored data over different channels otherwise. Even then it is possible to hide data within other data (Steganography).

So without big brother constantly staring over your shoulder it won't work. Any government serious about making censorship work would be (possibly unknowingly) drawn down this path.

Hmm, the great firewall of Australia?

I prefer to call it 'The Krudd Filter' (after our Prime Minister)

You just got HN blacklisted. Way to go.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=520341

Yeah, bad joke.

I could only imagine what would happen if the US did something similar...

We don't have a bill of rights, which is the big difference - naturally, goes deeper than that, though.

Those who comprehend the absurdity of what is really a series of internet censorship proposals have been unable to publicly embarrass Stephen Conroy (our Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy) to the extent required to kill this thing.

As such it remains largely outside of the public consciousness, and something between a bad joke and a nightmare for civil libertarians on the 'net. The possibility of there being a crime of hyperlinking in this country is closer to the "bad joke" side of that spectrum, but the more of these bad jokes we're subjected to the less humorous they become.

... Oh and also, there's supposed to be a freedom of political communication implied in our Constitution. Not sure what happened to that.

Australia has always been far behind in terms of the Internet. My feeling is that most of the public here have hardly any idea what's going on with the censorship. It's hardly getting any major media coverage.

The saddest thing is that there's not much we can do about it at the moment.

Personally I don't think the filtering will ever become law. The Australian govt are pandering to a single evangelical senator (Steven Fielding) who's vote is critical in getting a lot of their legislation passed. My guess is that they're holding out filtering as a carrot to get other things through. They know it'll be blocked by the other parties if it ever comes to a vote so they don't have to worry about it.

[Edit] Yes, it is embarrassing all the same!

As I understand it - it was actually ONLY the specific page on wikileaks that is actually blocked. So just linking to the Top Domain is not blocked yet. See here for a major news org linking to wikileaks: http://www.smh.com.au/news/home/technology/banned-hyperlinks...

From the political side - this is likely (hopefully) a bit of a dead duck. Kevin Rudd (and the Labour Party) have the majority in the lower house (the House of Reps) - but don't have that in the upper house (Senate). To get through the Senate - Labour needs either the support of the Liberal Party (who are our 'right-wing' major party) - OR the support of The Greens (5 senators), Steve Fielding (from the 'Family First' party) and the one Independant (Nick Xenophon). The Greens and the Liberals have some out against this policy, as has Nick Xenophon. So unless something dramatic changes - then this wont pass the Senate.

We've also got the ridiculous lack of classification of R rated games. So games like GTA IV can't get released here (without being modified).

All that being said - I've been giving some thought to this.. If I import a package, bring home a suitcase, etc - it may get inspected (either based on a suspicion or on random screening). Can I get some wisdom from the HN crowd - how is random screening / occasional screening of Packets logically or legally different to this? Obviously there are technical problems - but I can't see a logical difference.

Another thought on our Internet access - it's slow and we all have download caps (usually with shaping after that - occasionally with extra charges) Parrt of this is our major telco (Telstra) dragging their feet - but large parts are the fact that theres only so many cables linking us to the rest of the world...

So what's so good about Australia? Good weather, great beaches, banks that aren't bankrupt, friendly people... :D

Can I get some wisdom from the HN crowd - how is random screening / occasional screening of Packets logically or legally different to this?

Bad analogy: a) internet packages are not suitcases but words spoken across the border, b) you think only sites hosted outside Australia will be censored? Ha ha.

As I understand it - anything that is hosted inside australia and would end up on the blacklist is illegal in the "throw you into jail" sense... So I understood (b) all right.. I know that the argument is: This 'X' is illegal in Australia - you can't buy it in a book / you can't host it / why should you be allowed to 'import' it as bits..

as for a) -- It's a long way to shout to PNG.. :) And I'm still not 100% comfortable with describing TCP Packets as "words'.

You seem to reason like this: we already have internal censorship, why not external? Of course, once you're okay with censorship as a general idea, you can invent all sorts of logical arguments to justify expanding it. But I find this thought process disturbing - don't you?

With all the stuff that happens in Aus there are far more important things to sort,

When Peter Garrett sang Bad On Fire there where lots of voices who called to censor him, I guess the wheel turned...

FTA: Currently, it is not illegal for internet users in Australia to click on the sites found on the web blacklist. The people targeted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) are webmasters linking out to the sites that the government have flagged up as inappropriate.

This could all change, however, if a mandatory internet filtering censorship scheme is implemented – something that is being debated at the moment.

In case any Australian is reading this, you can bypass Internet censorship with Tor: http://www.torproject.org/

>In case any Australian is reading this, you can bypass Internet censorship with Tor: http://www.torproject.org/

Or VPN'ing through your VPS, googling for "start using CGIproxy", using an online translator, Google cache, archive.org, etc. See http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15013 for as much info on this matter as you should ever need.

Or here's something that works on a ton of machines, with no major rocket science necsessary:

1. ssh -D1080 username@host 2. change proxy settings to have http traffic go through a proxy running on port 1080 3. enjoy.

I've always used the ssh -D proxy as a SOCKS proxy, not a HTTP proxy. It works well, though, and it's dead simple to set up.

The most important thing here its the censorship. Brainwashing has become very difficult since the internet showed up.

So, they're only going after "webmasters", rather than the rest of us, who are purely passive consumers of information. That's an incredibly archaic thing for them to say, and it shows that they really don't get it.

There is no hard distinction between the people who make content online and the people who view it. If someone posts a comment on an Australian forum that links to Wikileaks, who gets fined? The person running the forum, who can't possibly police such things? The person who posted the link, who may be identified only by a username? Can Australia's policies deal with an indignant storm of linking to forbidden web sites? A thousand culprits, and not a webmaster to be found in the whole bunch!

The people writing the laws still think of the Internet as television 2.0, as a broadcast medium.

Well this is a clusterfuck of a trivial civil disobedience protest and concomitant selective enforcement defense just waiting to happen.

It is possible that the anarchic nature of the present-day web is an aberration, a symptom of a new technology catching the authorities momentarily unaware.

The rapid innovation, widespread criminal activity, anonymity, and other hallmark features of the modern web will likely be tempered as regulation increases. However, humanity will still be better off for its existence than it would be without. It may be suboptimal, but it will not be the end of the world.

I do not think humanity would be better off if, to take this theory to its most extreme conclusion, the internet became a collection of sites whitelisted by the various governments around the world.

There was a grammatical ambiguity in my sentence. I think we would be better off with a regulated internet than with no internet.

I think I got you the first time, actually. My point was that humanity might actually be worse off with an internet that is regulated in a totalitarian manner than without an internet.

Sorry, I only noticed the potential ambiguity after I made the comment and I wasn't sure which reading you were responding to.

Perhaps you are right. But everybody having the ability to communicate cheaply with everybody else is a new phenomenon. We got along for a good long time without it.

I would think that the government's ability to control popular opinion was much stronger in the industrial age than in any time since. We got through that period okay.

I think the internet is awesome, and I hope people fight like hell to preserve it. But if some controls are placed on it, I doubt it presages a new Dark Age. Also, I think there will be some lasting benefit due to the reduced cost of global communications and coordination, even if blogs are outlawed.

As we live more and more of our lives online, this control is tantamount to having powerful cameras and microphones in every cafe, on every street corner, at home, in every public and private space, recording everything that happens in a convenient, searchable format.

If this was the case in meatspace, it would certainly have a chilling effect on freedom of thought and discussion.

This may still add up to a net positive for us, but for the next generation(s), who will live more and more of their lives online, the implications are disastrous and, likely, a net negative compared to no internet.

I grant the possibility.

I have a few problems with this. Their attempt to block wikileaks is so that no one can see the URLs they blocked. This is a bit of nonsense - no one can argue for the websites - so in effect they can block everything they want.

If they have a judge that decides which URLs are blocked maybe it would be right.

> The news comes after web forum Whirlpool was threatened with the fine for posting a hyperlink to a blacklisted anti-abortion website.

Hmmm... Why? Can they at least give a reason why a site was banned (except promoting a dissenting view)?

Because if Whirlpool had refused they'd have been fined $11,000 a day, probably from the day the notice was sent out... probably in the slowest mail service imaginable so that by the time Whirlpool got the notice the government would consider them owing like $77,000 and an extra $11,000 for every day that passes between them refusing to take down the link and them getting taken to court.

It's a money making scam. There's no sense in a fine being levied per day for hosting a link other than to extract money.

Edit: It's like getting a speeding ticket, but instead of being charged for how fast over the legal limit you were going, they charge you for every meter you cover whilst speeding. Or being charged for drunk driving, but they charge you per 0.01% over, so for the same crime you get charged a ridiculous amount if you're so drunk you only managed to turn the key before passing out (which in most places being behind the wheel of a running vehicle and drunk, even if the vehicle isn't in motion, counts as drunk driving) but someone who's only 0.03% over the legal limit and is capable enough to drive, but drunk enough to be a danger is given a slap on the wrist.

This kind of system is just whole heartedly moronic. It's like a dentist charging, not for pulling a single tooth out but how many milligrams the tooth weighed. It's complete quackery.

Wee! Streisand effect.

Gottach love the effort of authorities trying to control information. It usually backfires. That's a good thing too.

So glad I'm not living there.

This just put Wikileaks on my daily toread list.

EDIT: I think Wikileaks could benefit from a Reddit / HN style layout.

It's a collaborative wiki, not an index of links (of which you can comment on) sorted by current popularity or similar means like HN/Reddit/Digg.

I know, but from a filtering perspective, it would be a nice tool, IMHO.

when will people learn that you can't censor internet

Same day as the record companies move on, I predict.

When they die of old age.

seems to work for North Korea.

And cuba

I don't think those countries really count, North Korea doesn't have enough fuel to run trains, so I don't think there's like 30 million people just cruising the internet. IIRC Cuba has had restrictions on computer sales up until recently purposefully to allow themselves to establish the infrastructure.

You can't try to build a dam in the middle of a running river, it's just insane. Equally, you can't just begin to set up essentially an electronic dam in a torrent of packets.

It works successfully for certain countries because it's on a small scale, but when you get to the scale of China (whose internet system was built the same way as Cuba and NK) you can start getting problems again. So I hardly see any success happening in a rapid implementation of a complete web-filtering service from an already developed nation.

So, if you can't see the list of banned sites because the only place to see it publicly is banned, how do you know which links you're not allowed to post? I guess you wait for the $11,000+ fine in the mail which will hopefully tell you what link you then have to remove.

It's a monty-pythonish thought, but I keep imagining the letter you receive having the offending link blacked out by the censor's pen, and all the while new fines turning up every day and you frantically removing each link until you get the right one.

This just stinks of a moronic money making scheme. Many countries have a black-list of websites that ISPs don't host links to, most of which are child porn websites or sites used by known terrorists. So why is Australia planning on fining users for clicking on these links and not simply blocking the link?

This isn't about censorship, or protecting the greater good. It's about lining pockets and sheer greed.

I think, from today Tor ( http://tor.eff.org) usage will increase in Australia.

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