It was only a matter of time, but it’s finally happened. The DBCDE has alienated enough of its private sector partners that one of them has leaked the blacklist.
Asher Moses from the SMH posted an article about the leaking mere hours ago.
The EFA has promptly responded that this is a ‘wake up call’ to anyone concerned with secret government censorship. It’s also a wake up call to child protection agencies now that the ACMA has allowed a list containing links of child abuse to be published to the world. Failure.
It’s unfortunate that not a week after Senator Conroy asked Australians to ‘have faith’ in his department and the ACMA, proof arises that his attempts at child protection are a facade and that a significant proportion of the blacklist are in fact gambling sites or, in some cases, harmless MySpace and YouTube profiles. The site of a Queensland dentist was also put on the blacklist though no reasons for this have been forthcoming.
The ACMA has already come out threatening 10 years jail to any Australian that publishes (snip! -ed) the blacklist in an effort to control the blunder.
Who leaked the Blacklist?
Until recently there was only a limited number of people with access to the blacklist, including ACMA officials, DBCDE staff and official Internet Filter vendors. Recently, however, the DBCDE opened the gates to the blacklist by accepting small home run businesses into the ISP filter trial.
The DBCDE failed to heed warnings that this was a serious security risk and proceeded anyway.
So who has the DBCDE specifically alienated? Besides Telstra and all but one of Australia’s largest ISPs, the DBCDE hasn’t made itself popular with many PC based filtering vendors that were either shut out of the process entirely or, in the case of Optenet, booted out of the Net Alert scheme with no public reason given.
Now that the DBCDE has included 6 more companies, including a home-run ‘mum and dad’ operation, it’s anyone’s game, though the security around tech2u.com.au is probably not so crash hot that some bored script-kiddy couldn’t have lifted the list without much problem.
In the meantime, Net Alert Filter vendors are literally preparing for raids by Federal Police after hearing about the Blacklist being leaked.
The question now remains, will the ACMA take legal action against, or attempt to blacklist the twitter profiles of people who have linked the blacklist on twitter?
