World Twitter: Internet censorship in Australia

Friday, June 8, 2012
Internet censorship in Australia

Internet
 censorship in Australia currently consists of a regulatory regime under
 which the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has the 
power to enforce content restrictions on Internet content hosted within 
Australia, and maintain a "black-list" of overseas websites which is 
then provided for use in filtering software.

Since
 October 2008, the governing Australian Labor Party has proposed to 
extend Internet censorship to a system of mandatory filtering of 
overseas websites which are, or potentially would be, "refused 
classification" (RC) in Australia. This means that internet service 
providers would be required to block access to such content for all 
users. As of June 2010, legislation to enact this policy still has not 
been drafted. The proposal to introduce mandatory filtering has 
generated substantial opposition, with a number of concerns being raised
 by opponents and only a few groups strongly supporting the policy. Such
 legislation may therefore have difficulty passing through the Senate. 
With the announcement made on 5 August 2010 by Joe Hockey that the 
Coalition parties will not vote in favour of the policy should the Labor
 party be re-elected, it is now virtually impossible for the filtering 
scheme to pass through the Senate.

In
 November 2010, Department of Broadband, Communications and Digital 
Economy (DBCDE) released a document indicating that the earliest date 
any new legislation could reach parliament was mid-2013.




Current status (Federal law)

A collection of both federal and state laws apply to Internet content in Australia.




Broadcasting Services Act 1992

The
 provisions of Schedule 5 and Schedule 7 of the Broadcasting Services 
Act 1992 inserted in 1999 and 2007 allow the Australian Communications 
and Media Authority to effectively ban some content from being hosted 
within Australia. Under this regime, if a complaint is issued about 
material "broadcast" on the Internet the ACMA is allowed to examine the 
material under the guidelines for film and video.

The content is deemed to be "prohibited" where it is (or in ACMA's judgement likely would be):

refused classification, or classified X18+

classified R18+, and not protected by an adult verification system

classified MA15+ and not protected by an adult verification system, where the user has paid to access the content.

Where
 content is deemed to be prohibited, the ACMA is empowered to issue 
local sites with a take-down notice under which the content must be 
removed; failure to do so can result in fines of up to $11,000 per day. 
If the site is hosted outside Australia, the content in question is 
added to a blacklist of banned URLs. This list of banned Web pages is 
then added to filtering software (encrypted), which must be offered to 
all consumers by their Internet Service Providers. In March 2009, this 
blacklist was leaked online.

A
 number of take down notices have been issued to some Australian-hosted 
websites. According to Electronic Frontiers Australia in at least one 
documented case, the hosting was merely shifted to a server in the 
United States, and the DNS records updated so that consumers may never 
have noticed the change.




Suicide Related Materials Offences Act 2006

In
 2006 the Federal Parliament passed the Suicide Related Materials 
Offences Act, which makes it illegal to use communications media such as
 the Internet to discuss the practical aspects of suicide.




Copyright Legislation Amendment Bill 2004

The
 Copyright Legislation Amendment Bill 2004 was passed on 9 December 2004
 by the Australian Senate, and extended copyright reform beyond the 
Australian-US free trade agreement (FTA). The impact will be felt most 
heavily by Internet service providers. The Internet Industry Association
 and EFA are actively opposing these efforts.




State and territory laws

Some
 state governments have laws that ban the transmission of material 
unsuitable for minors. In New South Wales, Internet censorship 
legislation was introduced in 2001 which criminalises online material 
which is unsuitable for minors. In 2002, the New South Wales Standing 
Committee on Social Issues issued a report recommending that the 
legislation be repealed, and in response the New South Wales government 
stated that the legislation "will be neither commenced nor repealed" 
until after the review of the Commonwealth Internet censorship 
legislation had been completed.




Notable examples

In
 2002, New South Wales Police Minister Michael Costa attempted, without 
success, to shut down three protest websites by appealing to the 
then-communications minister Richard Alston. The Green Left Weekly 
stated these were Melbourne Indymedia and S11 websites, and that the 
Australian Broadcasting Authority (the predecessor to ACMA) cleared them
 of breaching government regulations on 30 October 2002.

Also
 in 2002, and under the terms of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, the
 Federal Court ordered Dr Fredrick Töben to remove material from his 
Australian website which denied aspects of The Holocaust and vilified 
Jews.

In
 2006, Richard Neville published a "spoof" website that had a fictional 
transcript of John Howard apologising to Australians for the Iraq War. 
The website was forcibly taken offline by the government with no 
recourse.

After
 the devastating bushfires in February 2009, details about an alleged 
arsonist were posted online by bloggers. Victorian police deputy 
commissioner Kieran Walshe has asked the state Director of Public 
Prosecutions to examine the possibility of removing these blogs from the
 web, as they might jeopardise any court case.

In
 March 2009, after a user posted a link to a site on ACMA's blacklist on
 the Whirlpool forum, Whirlpool's service provider, Bulletproof 
Networks, was threatened with fines of $11,000 per day if the offending 
link was not removed. The same link in an article on EFA's website was 
removed in May 2009 after ACMA issued a "link-deletion notice", and the 
EFA took the precautionary step of also removing indirect links to the 
material in question.

The
 2009 winner of the George Polk award for videography shows footage of 
26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan being shot and dying during Iran protests. 
This footage has also been declared "prohibited content" by ACMA, 
attracting fines of $11,000 per day for any Australian website which 
posts a link to the video.

After
 the Australian government announced plans to mandate web filtering in 
Australia in December 2009, an anti-censorship website hosted on 
stephenconroy.com.au (The full name of the Minister for Broadband, 
Communications and the Digital Economy) was taken offline by auDA after 
only 24 hours of being published online.

In
 October 2000, Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) attempted under the 
Freedom of Information Act (FOI) to obtain documents relating to the 
implementation of the web filter. While a few were released, many were 
not, and in 2003 new legislation, "Communications Legislation Amendment 
Bill (No. 1) 2002", was passed by the Liberal government and four 
independents, and opposed by The Greens and the Australian Labor Party. 
While the stated reason for the bill was to prevent people accessing 
child pornography by examining the blocked sites, this bill exempted 
whole documents from FOI, many of which did not reference prohibited 
content at all. EFA state that the bill was designed to prevent further 
public scrutiny of web filtering proposals.