Aussie minister hits back at 'net enemies' report

CANBERRA - Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has hit back at a new report listing his country as a potential internet enemy.

Press freedom advocacy group Reporters without Borders released their Enemies of the internet report last Friday, to coincide with World Day Against Cyber Censorship.

It found Australia should be kept "under surveillance" for signs that internet freedom may soon be curbed.

Similar concerns have been raised by other groups in New Zealand, where a voluntary internet filtering system went live last month.

Thomas Beagle, a spokesman for online freedom lobbyist, Tech Liberty told Computerworld he was "very disappointed that the filter is now running" and that service providers such as Watchdog and MaxNet had already signed-up to deploy the filter system, and that ISPs Telstra Clear, Telecom and Vodafone had said they will do so.

The manager of the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) Censorship Compliance Unit, Steve O'Brien, said the website filtering system prevented access to known websites containing images of child sexual abuse.

The NZ system employs the Swedish Netclean Whitebox content filter - website requests are filtered by Border Gateway Protocol against a blacklist held on a central server in the government Censorship Compliance Unit.

The list is maintained by the Independent Reference Group which actively reviews banned URLs each month to eliminate false positives.

In Australia, the federal government wants all internet service providers to ban refused classification material hosted on overseas servers.

Senator Conroy said listing Australia as a country that may be an "enemy of the internet" - alongside South Korea, Turkey and Russia - showed Reporters without Borders were seriously mislead about what Labor wanted to do.

"What we have indicated we will block is refused classification content," he told parliament on Monday.

"Material that is not currently available in a newsagent, in a bookstore, on a DVD, at the movies or on television.

- AAP