[LINK] Possible Letter to Conroy (the real one) - Australian Internet censorship banned site list

[Robin Whittle]

Hi Roger,

Regarding:

http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/2009-March/082281.html

and, now with a bunch of comments - and the comments closed . . .

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/03/19/2520591.htm?section=justin

Before you fire off the letter:

Jan wrote:

> Nope. Doesn't connect. Someone's put up a block, it seems.

Before panicking and thinking the government is pulling the shutters
down on Oz . . .

   http://www.wikileaks.org = 88.80.13.160 and I can't ping it from
   Australia or the USA.  Occasionally the response is:

   From 88.80.5.3 (ge0.tr0.sth3.prqinet.net) icmp_seq=185
   Destination Host Unreachable


   The server of the ISP it is at is OK.  Pinging http://prqinet.net
   = 88.80.8.85 AKA www0.prq.se is fine.

       http://prqinet.net/?p=company&intl=1

          We are firm believers in freedom of speech, commerce, and
          the right to privacy and anonymity, and this is reflected
          both in our terms of service and in our actual actions.
          Unlike most providers, we will not disable your service
          under any circumstances unless it's either not paid for,
          used for spamming, DoSing or other activities harming the
          network, is used for publishing very obviously illegal
          material like c   d p  n, or if we're ordered to by a
          Swedish court. We are not sensitive to pressure in the form
          of legal threats (we even have our own legal staff), bad
          press, campaigns, organized boycotts, angry mobs, etc. We
          host several very controversial websites, and have a
          spotless track record in regard to this.

   Tracerouting in both cases gets to:

     vlan401.ge0.cr0.sth3.prqinet.net

   which is one hop away from 88.80.8.85.

   The next hop for 88.80.13.160 is ge0.tr0.sth3.prqinet.net and then
   nothing comes back after that.

   I can ping 88.80.13.161 but trying to traceroute to it produces
   the same results as for 88.80.13.160.

. . . you might like to think that the government has spooked someone
in Sweden into closing down the server.  Who knows?  But for now I
would guess it is more likely a technical problem, or just the server
being over-busy with curious folks wanting a peek at the list.

Is it verboten to link to where the banned list is?

It does seem a curious - not being allowed to link to a URL, but how
can the regulator tell everyone about this so they can comply with
the law?

Also, the banned URL is linked to from any number of pages in a way
which can change second-to-second, and it not practical or reasonable
to prohibit linking to the URLs of those secondary pages.

Likewise, what about giving the http://www.wikileaks.org URL with an
observation that when I last was able to view the page there, that
there was a link to the Australian banned sites list.  Did I just
break some regulation?

What if I correctly state that that site is not accessible now?

  - Robin