It is a frequent occurance that events happen so quickly that the Mainstream media are left standing, but not often that I feel that things happen so fast that you can’t blog about them.
For those of you not pluged in to twitter with a subdermal twitterpatch- the issue of ISP Filtering and the not to be mentioned, not to be thought of ACMA blacklist have been buzzing around the twittosphere for the past 48 hours.
Mark Pesce on ABC’s Unleashed offers a good summary of past events:
It’s been a busy week.
It began with a blacklist. The Australian Communications and Media Authority has one – URLs pointing to web sites and web pages deemed too offensive for Australian eyes.
Fair enough: as the Government regulator they have the statutory authority to block content which wouldn’t receive a classification in Australia. But here’s the thing – no one except ACMA knows what URLs are on the blacklist. In other words, not only are the URLs censored, but the list of censored URLs is itself censored.
Welcome to the rabbit hole. [Read More]
But the short of it is(mostly in chronological order):
- A list appears on the famous leak site wikileaks
- Some brave defenders of Free Speech examine the list, noting that it does contain child porn as well as political, religious, and dental sites oh and one belonging to a Tuck Shop (Canteen for you Anmericans) Association
- Senator Conroy says its very irresponsible, and Australian’s are threatened with fines and up to 10 years imprisonement
- wikileaks goes down to the slashdot effect – conspiracy theory that Conroy actually has some overseas influence and has shut down the site suface
- Then he says its not the real list
- Community experts hum and haw and say its pretty damn close
and most recently wikileaks provides information to say they have recieved an updated list and community experts confirm that this list contains sites that they submitted to ACMA see Michael Meloni’s New ACMA blacklist leaked: 1170 URLs dated March 18
Things will be very interesting, pundits are saying that this leak should effectively kill the filter idea dead. I am not so sure? I could see Conroy being enough of a pigheaded prick to try and prosecute some people over this.
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This should get really interesting really quickly…
Yes I will have to resist the urge to hover over the computer tomorrow
Wikileaks has told Conroy "We will come after you" if he attempts to discover the source of the leak.
That was on crikey wasn't it? I thought it was a bit juvenille they could have handled that better
"I could see Conroy being enough of a pigheaded prick to try and prosecute some people over this."
It is, after all, pretty much what he does.
"…one belonging to a Tuck Shop [...] Association"
Er… Whisky Tango Foxtrot. Over.
What the hell were they doing? Selling anatomically correct gingerbread men? O_o
Maybe it was disproportion reference to children
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/technology/c...
Andy, that is fucking shocking, monitoring blogs – this is getting perilously close to government harassment.
No fuck that. It is harassment.
I saw it on wikileaks. It was essentially saying that if Conroy tries to expose the anonymous source, they will use Swedish privacy law to prosecute.
The whole thing has taken on a surreality. I'm now finding it hard to tell whether there's a conspiracy theory playing out or whether things are getting seriously bad. The almost silence from the mainstream media – and most bloggers – just confuses things more.
I think a few people think the issue is buried. While I don't suspect conspiracy I do think that the government is making moves to ensure that it doesn't get royally butt-fucked by the online community again.