Australia's telecom regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), has the authority to blacklist Internet sites, authority used almost exclusively to address childhood sex pictures (children's rights groups don't like the "child porn" label, which suggests a degree of agency that children involved in the practice don't have). But it also came to light recently that ACMA is willing to blacklist pages that simply list the censored websites, even though they contain no offensive images.

The Sydney Morning Herald noted today that ACMA's blacklist even includes certain Wikileaks pages, including a list of Denmark's censored websites (3,863 blocked). The page is apparently included on the theory that a massive list of sites with "lolita" and "youngyoung" in the their domain names is basically an invitation to Australians who might not otherwise know where to go to get an underage fix.

If that's true, ACMA will have to keep blocking. Wikileaks also hosts the leaked blacklists from countries like Thailand (11,329 blocked) and Finland (797 blocked).

All three of those lists are largely concerned with sex, but the size difference can be chalked up to the fact that Thailand appears to be banning all sorts of porn websites (along with proxy services), while the Nordic countries are exclusively concerned with sexual images of children.

The ACMA blacklist will be used as the basis for the government's nationwide Internet filtering system—should that system ever be put into place (it's currently facing serious opposition from ISPs and even from the Australian Senate). For now, though, the blacklist can be used by ACMA to go after websites that link to the censored content; those that don't remove such links after a day or so face fines of $11,000 per day.

The blacklist itself is secret, as it is in most countries that censor content. This angers some activists who believe that secrecy lends itself to abuse. In Finland, for instance, a man who runs a website arguing that the blacklist approach is ineffective was called in for questioning last year after publishing "a list of a few hundred censored sites." His own site was then placed on the blacklist, which means that visitors from Finland are greeted by a message saying that the site they are trying to reach contains illegal images.

Those in favor of keeping the lists secret claim that publishing them is simply providing a centralized resource for those interested in child sex abuse, but without any real way to see what's on the list or to challenge its contents, the list makers will always invite charges of incompetence or arbitrariness (indeed, one Finnish site claims that most of the domains on the blacklist appear to be legal pornographic sites).

This was the case recently in the UK where the censorship list creator (which is not a part of the government) added a Wikipedia image of an old Scorpions album cover to its block list and later retreated after protests.

Right or wrong, the first worldwide rule of Internet censorship currently seems to be "you don't talk about what's being censored."

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