Parts of Wikipedia blacklisted in Australia

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has added whistleblower website Wikileaks to its secret website blacklist. This comes after Wikileaks published a recent version of the blacklist, which includes Wikipedia pages, in addition to various religious websites and the site of a Queensland dentist.

In February an anti-censorship activist submitted a Wikileaks page (containing a copy of Denmark's secret blacklist!) to ACMA's online complaints facility, as a test of ACMA's guidelines. ACMA blacklisted that page, satisfied that it was "prohibited content" or "potential prohibited content" under the relevant legislation. However Wikileaks then published details of the report, including the correspondence, and then published a leaked copy of the ACMA blacklist from last August. Following this, ACMA blacklisted the entire Wikileaks site.

As of the time of writing, it does not seem possible to access Wikileaks from Australia, so I do not know what is on the leaked blacklist. But media reports indicate that, in addition to the intended targets of child porn sites, there is a substantial minority of other sites blacklisted, including some Wikipedia pages, YouTube videos, and online gambling sites, as well as a few bizarre examples in a tuckshop management company and an animal carer group.

The responsible minister, Senator Stephen Conroy, has denied that Wikileaks' list is the real thing, and one of the ISPs involved in the mandatory internet filtering trial has backed that up, saying that it is not the same as the list supplied to them recently.

Yet whether Wikileaks' list is accurate or not, the attention now being paid to the practices of ACMA in relation to the blacklist has at least exposed the risk to educational sites like Wikipedia posed by similar censorship systems. The ACMA blacklisting scheme is designed to dovetail with Australia's existing content classification system (for films, television etc) by defining "prohibited content" to mean content classified as RC (refused classification) or X 18+ by the Classification Board (and also R 18+ content to which unrestricted access is allowed, and under certain circumstances, M 15+ content).

This system has been criticised in a number of ways, not least because Internet content is subject to the film and television classification rules, rather than the rules for publications (with the result that, for example, a printed newspaper and a newspaper website showing the same material will be treated differently, depending on which version is classified first). Nevertheless, the Classification Board has extensive experience in content classification, and, as it is a singular organisation whose decisions are subject to review, is at least broadly consistent in its application of the guidelines.

The blacklisting scheme goes further, however, and allows ACMA to blacklist not only content which has actually been classified, but also "potential prohibited content", that is, unclassified content which it believes would ultimately be prohibited if it were classified. In practice, this means that ACMA bureaucrats - whose decisions are not subject to the same process of review, and are not even guaranteed to be made in the same way and applying the same process as the Classification Board - can blacklist sites if they think there is a "substantial likelihood" that the content would be prohibited.

Under the National Classification Code (PDF), classification not only depends on what the content depicts, but on the manner in which it is depicted. Relevantly for Wikipedia, educational materials covering subject matter like sexuality will likely be treated differently than other genres of material depicting the same subjects. With this parallel ACMA scheme, there is no guarantee of consistency, no guarantee the code will be correctly applied and no prospect of review. Thus, the public's access to legitimate educational content, such as Wikipedia articles, is subject to the whims of ACMA bureaucrats.

A related problem is that the ACMA blacklist is the basis of the aforementioned proposed mandatory internet filtering scheme in Australia, which aims to filter the Internet at the ISP level. Depending on the way such a scheme (if it is actually instituted, which seems unlikely at this time) is actually implemented by ISPs, we may end up with a situation in which access to Wikipedia is widely blocked, as happened recently in the UK.

Wikipedia is not Thermopylae

The HD DVD encryption key controversy rages on, and while Digg goes out on a slender limb, other user-generated content communities, including the Wikimedia family, are still deciding what to do.

The good news is that the community seems, for the most part, to be taking a sensible course of action and rejecting attempts to put the contents of the key into Wikipedia. There are a few dissenters though, most of whom are beating the "censorship" drum and complaining about oppression of the masses and their rights to free speech.

There's a section in what Wikipedia is not entitled "Wikipedia is not censored", which is often clung to by these people who rail against "the Man". If memory serves me correctly, the section used to be titled differently; "Wikipedia is not censored for the protection of minors" at one stage, and "Wikipedia is not censored for good taste" at another. The latter of these is the better, in my opinion, because the point of the statement is to explain that we can neither guarantee that all content will comply with some standard of good taste, nor will we exclude content that some people find objectionable (encyclopaedic material about sex, for example).

The problem is that some people try to boil that down to a slogan, "Wikipedia is not censored", and get themselves confused. While it's correct to say that we generally don't exclude content for reasons of taste based on social or religious norms, we undoubtedly do exclude content based on our policies and based the laws of Florida and of the United States, where the projects are based.

It also needs to be remembered that while Wikipedia is not censored (for good taste), it is not a whole bunch of other things too. It's not a soapbox, for starters, nor is it an experiment in democracy, or anarchy. It's especially not a tool for experiments in civil disobedience. It's an encyclopaedia.

United States District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan put it well in the case of Universal v Reimerdes:

"Plaintiffs have invested huge sums over the years in producing motion pictures in reliance upon a legal framework that, through the law of copyright, has ensured that they will have the exclusive right to copy and distribute those motion pictures for economic gain. They contend that the advent of new technology should not alter this long established structure. Defendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located. Less radically, they have raised a legitimate concern about the possible impact on traditional fair use of access control measures in the digital era. Each side is entitled to its views. In our society, however, clashes of competing interests like this are resolved by Congress. For now, at least, Congress has resolved this clash in the DMCA and in plaintiffs' favor."

So to all the geeks itching to fight the Man, go write to your Congressman (if you live in the US and have a Congressman of course - if you don't, then I suppose you'd better nag your American friends to do so). And if you want to engage in civil disobedience, don't abuse Wikipedia in order to do so. It's not your farm to bet.