Conroy is promising punitive measures and titheing, to the tune of $11,000 per day for distributing the non? ACMA list. Thus are we all ‘protected’ by governmental paternalist determinations, and we are not trusted to know what it is we are being protected from – who will watch the watchers? Yet it is Conroy’s silly unwanted policies which have brought us to this point – it is his fatally flawed policies, his lack of political nous and foresight which are directly responsible for wikileaks publishing the ?ACMA list. Conroy is guilty as charged, hoisted by his own petard. He was warned what would happen if he continued to ignore legitimate criticism of his policies, and that of which he was warned has transpired. Perhaps he has even unconsciously invited this situation and may learn from it? or otherwise be reshuffled.

It is public apathy and ignorance which permits our successive governments to pander to interest groups with repressive moralities & illogical unproductive agendas and pull the wool over our eyes. Still, we are in a democracy, and if we, the people, don’t like our archiac, backwater censorship laws and government efforts to baby us in ways which do not serve to protect our childrens’ futures, diverting scarce resources away from the police whose job it is to catch exploiters and into unworkable policies which have the potential to destroy our freedoms, it’s up to us to lobby for change.

But opposition communications spokesman Nick Minchin said the leaking of the list also highlighted how such information could surface, despite the efforts of ACMA or the introduction of an internet content filter.

“The regrettable and unfortunate reality is there will always be explicit and illegal material on the web and regardless of blacklists, filters and the like, those with the means and know-how will find ways of accessing it,” Senator Minchin said.

“The coalition also maintains that adult supervision is the most effective way of keeping children safe online and people shouldn’t be led into believing by Labor that expanded blacklists or mandatory filters are a substitute for that,” Senator Minchin said.

Greens senator Scott Ludlam said the leak was further evidence the government should take a step back from the mandatory filtering idea.

He said filtering devices did not solve the problem of child pornography.

“People in the industry … have said first of all that the kind of material the government says it’s most interested in cracking down on is not largely trafficked over websites, it’s a tiny fraction.

“A lot of it is trafficked over peer to peer networks.”

The leaking of the list has also raised concerns about the potential for blacklists and filtering devices to be used as way of censoring other material that is not illegal.

…

Wikileaks said censorship systems, whatever their original intent, were invariably corrupted into anti-democratic behaviour.

It cited the Thailand censorship list, saying that like Labor’s proposed filter scheme, it was originally proposed as a mechanism to prevent child pornography.

But Wikileaks said that in January, the Thai system was used to censor reporting about the case of Australian author Harry Nicolaides who was recently released from a Thai prison after pleading guilty to criticising the Thai royal family.

Wikileaks said research showed that such blacklists were dangerous to “above ground” activities such as political discourse and had little effect on the production of child pornography.

Several Wikileaks pages also appeared on the list published on Thursday.

It appears the Wikileaks website has since been shut down.

Wikileaks shut down? now that would be annoying – hoping it’s temporary server problems.

Meanwhile, Boing Boing comes to the rescue with a mirror. The genie is out of the bottle. Your call, Senator Conroy.

The managing director of Tech 2U, one of six ISPs involved in a trial of filtering technology, told ABC News Online the list bore little resemblance to the official ACMA version.

“The list released on Wikileaks does not agree with the list which was provided to us earlier this year,” Andrew Robson said.

“I don’t know where this list came from, but our copy is kept very securely and only one person in the organisation has access to it.”