Surfing Australia Way

Placing several Wikileaks pages on the Australian government Internet censorship list may have woken the slumbering monster. The Age reports that Wikileaks will be publishing the complete list shortly (I just searched for it but obviously it's not up). I for one will be very curious to see what is on the list. Or rather, what beyond their initial sales pitch (to ban all child porn sites) has crept onto the list. The message here? Don't fuck with Wikileaks because they will fuck you back.

I should be upfront about this. I've been banging this drum for almost six months now to anyone that will listen. Tiresome though my friends may find it, it's certainly important. At least to me. The current administration in Australia plan to censor the Internet. Ostensibly this is to prevent people from looking at child porn and thereby save the children who are being abused. Huh? What's that? Preventing people from looking at child porn on the Internet will not save one single child and the money would be better spent on tracking down the people that upload/share/distribute this vile material? Seriously? Wow, never would have thought that.

The Australian government's model of censorship involves keeping a confidential list of the websites that are deemed "inappropriate". The minute you have confidential lists without independent arbitrators is the same time that suddenly any website condemning the government or disagreeing with their policies starts disappearing. The beauty of all this? We would never know! It smacks of Orwellian contempt for the people and in a country which has a fairly free media, it's also a bit disturbing to suddenly start pulling the strings on one form of media. What next? A Ministry of Truth to ensure that all of our media is "factually correct"?

More interesting to note is that the only countries currently censoring any individual pages from Wikileaks are China and the united Arab Emirates. Wow, we really are at the forefront of human rights violations now.