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Censor board hacked

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censors hacked

The Australian Government’s Classification board website has been hacked. The text:

Welcome to the Classification Website

“This site contains information about the boards that have the right to CONTROL YOUR FREEDOMZ. The Classification Board has the right to not just classify content (the name is an ELABORATE TRICK), but also the right to DECIDE WHAT IS AND ISNT APPROPRIATE and BAN CONTENT FROM THE PUBLIC. We are part of an ELABORATE DECEPTION from CHINA to CONTROL AND SHEEPIFY the NATION, to PROTECT THE CHILDREN. All opposers must HATE CHILDREN, and therefore must be KILLED WITH A LARGE MELONS during the PROSECUTION PARTIES IN SEPTEMBER. Come join our ALIEN SPACE PARTY.”

More at Somebody Think of the Children.

A bit juvenile? Nos. Not particularly helpful? Sure. Illegal? Yup.

But I can’t help but have a leetle soft spot lurking in my heart for humorous, non-destructive civil disobedience in the face of bulldozing authoritarianism. This is the government that assured us that they knew what they were doing, and that the ACMA blacklist could never leak; and that has sneered at the techies who have told them, over and over, that they were wrong wrongitty wrong about pretty much everything.

At some point, they’re going to have to suck it up and make a decision: start learning from folks who know more about the internet than they do, or keep on looking like bumbling, twentieth-century fools.

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Categories: ethics & philosophy, law & order, technology

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5 replies

  1. Lauredhel
    2009-03-27 • 12:42 AM

    I’ve just finished watching tonight’s Q & A show on the ABC, with Minister Conroy one of the panellists. It started off somewhat pleasing in that Conroy was so obviously in the minority – only Andrew Bolt was on his side – but this devolved into really quite disturbing when I realised one thing: Our Government’s Minister for Communications, Broadband and the Digital Economy laughs mockingly every. single. time anyone mentions anything to do with “freedoms” or “freedom of speech”. It’s not just tonight – the pattern goes right back to his previous conversations with Senator Ludlam months ago.
    Brrrrr.
    I’m a little pissed off at the questions they selected (of thousands pose) to put to him; about half were ill thought out and pointless as direct questions to a Minister. And I’m also annoyed that they chose an Anonymous douchebag as one of the two video questions to display. We really don’t need to give those folks any media oxygen.

  2. Beppie
    2009-03-27 • 3:47 AM

    Hahahahaha. I too am rather fond of this form of civil disobedience — no one gets hurt, a point gets made, we get a laugh.
    That’s scary about Conroy laughing so dismissively at the idea of freedom of speech, however.

  3. Lauredhel
    2009-03-27 • 3:02 PM

    The transcript of the Q&A show is now up here. Louise Adler was terrific, by the way. Excerpt:

    LOUISE ADLER: I feel completely surprised to be sitting here hearing you use the language – a Labor Minister for Communication using such terminology as blacklists, banned material. I thought that we shared a value in Australia around free speech, around our democratic capacity to see this material and to think about it ourselves and that all I’m hearing – the last time I heard about blacklists was Joe McCarthy’s senate hearings, and I feel extremely uncomfortable and disturbed that you are actually, and with great ease, talking about blacklists–
    ANDREW BOLT: (Indistinct)
    LOUISE ADLER: Just let me finish. Just let me finish. Sorry. And that you’re really comfortable with secret lists that people can complain, with all of their vested interests and all of their – you know, and lobbying instincts, can come to ACMA, complain and that there’s a secret kind of process so we neither know and have an open discussion about these sites, about the problem for example, of paedophilia. We don’t have an open debate. We have a secret process and then you’re going to say, “I’m going to manage to control the internet. I’m going to manage what comes into your home,” and I think your story about the dentist is a paradigmatic story about how you failed to control it.

    When Bolt started ranting apropos of nothing about how “jihadist material” should be compulsorily censored, while sitting next to Susan Carland… cringe moment. He didn’t succeed in stirring her up, though.
    It’s a tiny bit jarring the way the Q&A Panellists tab lists the three men first, then the two women, instead of putting them in the order they were on the panel. I hope that was random.

  4. Jetty
    2009-03-27 • 4:13 PM

    Next on the blacklist, health care information from “disapproved sources”. We wouldn’t want consumers making decisions based on facts now would we? Cesareans are safe and so are stints!

  5. tigtog
    2009-03-27 • 10:50 PM

    ’Caching error’ caused Henson blacklisting:

    The Australian Communications and Media Authority said in a statement that a link to innocuous PG-rated artistic photographs taken by Bill Henson was incorrectly included on the list in the period December 1, 2008 to February 19, 2009 as the result of a “computer system caching error”.
    Greens Senator Scott Ludlam said it wasn’t good enough for ACMA to blame a computer error for sites being accidentally added to the blacklist.
    “Lets stop the conversation about mandatory net filtering right now and have an overhaul of the current system because clearly there’s been a breakdown that we wouldn’t have found out about without the work of people whom the [Communications] Minister [Stephen Conroy] has described as malicious,” Senator Ludlam said.

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