Intellectual Property Law

Australia Censors Wikileaks Page

By Ryan Singel, Kevin Poulsen, Sarah Lai Stirland, Kim Zetter, and David Kravets

Australia blacklisted a webpage on Monday from the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks that contains an index of URLs censored by Dutch authorities, a move adding to the country's debate about whether the government should mandate internet filters.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority added two Wikileaks pages to its censorship list: one for the Dutch government's secret index of banned child porn sites as well as Wikileaks' press release about how the index was used and why the site was publishing it.

ACMA's list is estimated to hold more than a thousand URLs currently and is distributed to Australian ISPs, which are required by law to make filters available to users.

Wikileaks, the net's foremost site for leaked documents, responded by announcing the ban, writing "The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship."

The Wikileaks page was submitted to the authorities for consideration in mid-February by a self-proclaimed anti-censorship advocate Tardis42, a member of whirlpoolnet.au, a popular Australian online tech discussion site.

The federal government in Australia has been wanting to force all ISPs to use the list to censor the internet for everyone, but that plan has sputtered under severe criticism from online liberty groups and technical experts.

But just last week, ACMA forced Whirlpool to remove a user forum link that pointed to graphic pictures on an anti-abortion website. ACMA threatened the site's hosting provider with fines of $11,000 a day if the link was not removed.

That, free speech advocates say, shows the censorship regime isn't limited to fighting child pornography and will be used to block legitimate political speech.

This is not a first for Wikileaks. A Cayman Islands bank angry about the leak of customer information briefly convinced a U.S. judge in February 2008 to censor the site for Americans, but the judge soon reversed course. The incident galvanized support for the then-nascent site run by hackers and open government coders.

See Also:

• Immune to Critics, Secret-Spilling Wikileaks Plans to Save Journalism
• Cayman Islands Bank Gets Wikileaks Taken Offline in U.S.
• Judge Allows WikiLeaks to Resume U.S. Operations
• Sensitive Guantanamo Bay Manual Leaked Through Wiki Site
• Wikileaks Forced to Leak Its Own Secret Info ? Update
• Wikileaks Has Docs, Needs Cash

Full post as published by Threat Level on March 17, 2009 (boomark / email).