Source: Kathy Marks, The Independent
Australia is poised to introduce some of the most severe internet restrictions in the democratic world – and the hackers don’t like it.
Yesterday they vented their ire on government websites, shutting them down in co-ordinated attacks and plastering the Prime Minister’s home page with pornography. Kevin Rudd’s site became the home, temporarily, of “Operation Titstorm”, part of an assault targeting a range of government servers.
The Australian parliamentary website was crippled for almost an hour; among the ministries affected was the Communications Department, which is pressing for a compulsory internet filter for pornography. One cyber security expert, Alastair MacGibbon, described the attacks as “the equivalent of parking a truck across the driveway of a shopping centre”.
“Operation Titstorm” hackers declare cyber war on Australia
Published: February 12, 2010
Actually, the proposed mandatory censorship won’t filter ordinary X-rated porn. This is a common misconception. It will block a category of material called ‘Refused Classification,’ which is as broad as it is nebulous. It will encompass ‘fetish’ porn i.e. bondage, watersports and other things which are completely legal to do in Australian bedrooms. ‘Operation Titstorm’ was so named due to the Classification Board’s bans on ordinary porn featuring small breasted adult women, since the CB claims small breasted women appear to be under 18 (apparently well developed 13 year olds will escape the ban). It will also block information about voluntary euthanasia and anything else the Australian Government does not agree with. Worst of all, the block list will be kept secret and is unappealable. If a site is blocked in error (and it has already happened), the siteowner will not be notified of the block and cannot demand its removal from the list.
The Australian Government have repeatedly insisted that the WWW censorship filter is necessary to protect children and to stop trade in child porn. However, the filter will be trivial to circumvent- any proxy or Tor will go right around it. Use of proxies is already a technique familiar to high school kids blocked from accessing MySpace and Facebook from their school’s networks. Australian law enforcement acknowledges that very little if any child porn is posted on WWW sites; rather, it is traded via peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent and other avenues like email which the filter will not address.
Censorship will cost millions of dollars, will not stop children from seeing anything they want to see, will not stop paedophiles from trading child porn and given the secret nature of the blocklist, is ripe for abuse by government to block political speech with which they do not agree.
Just to be clear: It’s not about porn!