Edit 19/3 4.00pm: The Minister has refuted the authenticity of the list in a media release. Indications are that the leaked list contains the ACMA list plus sites chosen by the filter vendor. In any case, comments about individual sites on the list should therefore be treated with caution.

Electronic Frontiers Australia today hailed the leaking of the government’s secret internet blacklist as a “wake-up call for Australians concerned about secret censorship”. The blacklist, which appeared on the whistle-blower site Wikileaks, is compiled by the Australian Communications and Media Authority and distributed to the vendors of approved internet filters, but is otherwise secret.

“The leaking of the list has confirmed some of our worst fears,” said EFA Vice-Chair Colin Jacobs. “This was bound to happen, especially as mandatory filtering would require the list to be distributed to ISPs all around the country. The Government is now in the unenviable business of compiling and distributing a list which includes salacious and illegal material and publicising those very sites to the world.”

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Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today welcomed widespread opposition to Internet censorship proposals by the government.

“The forthcoming protests by the Digital Liberty Coalition and the petition by GetUp! show the depth of community disagreement with the government on this issue”, said EFA spokesperson Danny Yee.

The proposed censorship system would target web material that would be legal in other media. “Australians are unhappy with existing censorship of computer games and films. The last thing they want is even more stringent censorship of online content.”
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Electronic Frontiers Australa (EFA) today expressed concern about a lawsuit filed against Internet Service Provider iiNet in the Federal Court. A consortium of media companies have sued the ISP for allegedly allowing its users to download infringing movies and TV shows by failing to terminate their accounts after allegations of infringement by the copyright industry.

“This lawsuit is the latest attempt by the movie industry to bully Internet Service Providers into becoming copyright police,” said EFA spokesperson Nicolas Suzor. “ISPs are not in a position to monitor and terminate internet access to users based upon unsubstantiated threats from copyright owners, and should not be asked to do so.”
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Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today expressed alarm at the news that the Government’s “Clean Feed” Internet censorship plan will not allow Australian adults to opt-out.

The filter, which will be mandatory for all Australians, was initially touted as a “cyber-safety” measure for homes with children. However, recent comments by experts have revealed the existence of a second, secret black list, that would apply even to homes that managed to opt out of the child-safe filtering scheme.

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Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today expressed its concern about the lack of transparency in the development of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). EFA is also troubled by the little information that is available about the substantive content of the proposed plurilateral agreement, which threatens to dramatically alter the copyright balance in favour of corporate rights owners, impose significant liability on Internet Service Providers, and require the institution of invasive surveillance and filtering.

EFA Chair Dale Clapperton slammed the negotiation process. “Negotiations for ACTA have been conducted secretly. The public have a right to be involved in the development of measures which will significantly alter their legal rights. So far, only copyright owners have been involved in this process, and the outcome will undoubtedly favour their interests over the legitimate interests of users and reusers of copyright material.”

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Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today labelled a recent government trial of ISP-based Internet filtering a failure.

The recently released ACMA report entitled “Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Internet Content Filtering” showed that of the six unnamed ISP-based filters evaluated:

• One filter caused a 22% drop in speed even when it was *not* performing filtering;
• Only one of the six filters had an acceptable level of performance (a drop of 2% in a laboratory trial), the others causing drops in speed of between 21% and 86%;
• The most accurate filters were often the slowest;
• All filters tested had problems with under-blocking, allowing access to between 2% and 13% of material that they should have blocked; and
• All filters tested had serious problems with over-blocking, wrongly blocking access to between 1.3% and 7.8% of the websites tested.

Despite this report highlighting the inaccuracy of these filters and the loss of performance caused by their use, Senator Conroy announced the government will press ahead with a real-world pilot program in furtherance of Labor’s pre-election commitment to force all Australian ISP’s to filter their customers’ Internet access.
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Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today expressed its disappointment at the Federal Government’s decision to fund its mandatory “clean-feed” Internet in the 2008-09 federal budget.

“At a time when the Government is cutting services to fight inflation, it’s bewildering that they would decide to spend tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on a filter before feasibility trials are even complete,” said EFA spokesman Colin Jacobs. “Given the manifest impracticality of the clean-feed scheme, I’m sure this money could have been put to much better use,” he added.

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Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) has lodged a submission to the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department (AGD), arguing that Australian consumers be given the right to make digital copies of their films, photographs, and computer and video games for their private use.

The submission is in response to the AGD’s review of sections 47J and 110AA of the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), which currently only permit certain forms of analog to digital and digital to analog copying. For example, the current law allows Australians to digitise a purchased photo once, or to print a purchased digital photo once, or to make a DVD copy of a VHS tape.

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Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today attacked a government plan, championed by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, that would mandate “clean feed” filtered Internet connections to all homes and schools. This scheme, which will supposedly censor the Internet of pornography and other “inappropriate material”, goes further than the Coalition’s previous policies, by requiring individuals to opt-out of the scheme rather than request filtering from their service provider.

“Waving the ’save the children’ flag may be good politics, but it ignores serious technological problems which will likely cause the proposed scheme to fail,” said EFA Chair Dale Clapperton. “Furthermore, Australia is supposed to be a liberal democracy where adults have the freedom to say and read what they want, not just what the Government decides is ‘appropriate’ for them.” “These announcements smack of the condescending paternalism which contributed to the downfall of the Howard government,” Clapperton continued. “The proposals threaten the free speech rights of every Australian, and our concerns will not be silenced by Government sound bites equating free speech with access to child pornography.”

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Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today welcomed a court decision that the operator of an Australian Internet forum site was not liable for comments containing racial discrimination which were posted in the forum by a third party.

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Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today slammed a Bill introduced into the Senate which would give members of the Australian Federal Police powers to ban access to Internet content.

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Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today welcomed the decision by software vendor 2Clix Australia Pty Ltd (2Clix) to abandon their lawsuit against Internet forum site Whirlpool.net.au.

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Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today condemned a lawsuit filed against the operator of whirlpool.net.au, one of Australia’s largest online discussion forums.Some messages posted in the Whirlpool forums have criticised the products and services offered by software company 2Clix Australia Pty Ltd (2Clix). The lawsuit alleges that the operator of Whirlpool has maliciously published those comments, with the intention of damaging 2Clix’s business. 2Clix claims that these comments have caused a “severe downturn in monthly sales” of approximately $150,000 per month.

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Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today said that the latest in a long series of embarrassing data security breaches proves that the Commonwealth government can not be trusted to maintain the security of the proposed Health Services Access Card database.

“The government has dozens of databases containing sensitive and personal information about millions of every-day Australians,” said EFA Chair Dale Clapperton. “Yet the government is unable to prevent its own employees from illegally snooping through personal records that they have no business accessing.”

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Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) is appalled by Friday’s announcement that the federal Coalition government will force all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Australia to provide ‘filtered’ Internet connections upon request. This ‘initiative’ is nothing more than a tiresome repeat of previously announced and abandoned policies, and comes before the government has even conducted their recently-announced feasibility study of ISP-level filtering.

The government has also failed to implement their National Filter Scheme, first announced in June 2006 and aimed at providing free PC-based filters, and they have now announced it once again. The Minister has no credibility in this matter.

‘Internet censorship to “save the children” has always been a political “free kick” for both sides of politics,’ said EFA Chair Dale Clapperton. ‘It seems that in the lead-up to the federal election, the Howard government wants to be seen to be “doing something” to make the Internet safe for children.’

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Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today expressed its concern at the decision of the Full Federal Court in the Cooper v Universal Music Pty Ltd appeal. The initial decision in this case held that a Brisbane webmaster, his Internet Service Provider (ISP), a director of the ISP, and a technical support employee of the ISP were liable for ‘authorising’ the infringing activities of users of a website which acted as an index and search engine for MP3 files located elsewhere on the Internet.

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