The National Security Agency’s massive Utah Data Center, designed for communications storage and processing is already up and running, despite agency claims the center won’t open until September. Opening the facility — the largest of its kind in history — is the key final step that will allow the agency to collect and store massive amounts of data on United States citizens. The NSA has numerous other data centers, but the Utah facility will be the central repository, enabling data collection on an unprecedented scale.

And according to Russ Tice, a former NSA intelligence analyst who still maintains close ties with numerous colleagues at the agency, it’s not just metadata — which has been a key distinction in the administration’s defense of its intelligence gathering programs. The agency, according to Tice, is currently able to collect the full contents of digital communications. That includes the contents of emails, text messages, Skype communications, and phone calls, as well as financial information, health records, legal documents, and travel documents. This comports with statements given this week by a former senior intelligence official, claiming that NSA Director Keith Alexander’s ethos was to “collect it all, tag it, store it … And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.”

The NSA’s ability to collect and store such vast quantities of information is difficult to grasp. But so is the enormous footprint of the data center in Bluffdale, Utah, 25 miles south of Salt Lake City. The facility, which cost the government $2 billion, covers 1 million square feet, 100,000 of which is purely for computer servers and storage hardware. According to James Bamford’s Wired magazine article published last year, “The Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (10^24 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)”

One of the key problems that the Utah facility fixes is the sheer amount of electricity needed to run the machines. According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the facility requires 65 megawatts of electricity a day to run the facility. (By comparison, a single megawatt is enough to power 100 homes.) According to Wired, the facility has its own electrical substation built by Rocky Mountain Power — which, as a side benefit, makes it more difficult to monitor the usage of electricity, which can serve as rough guidance to the center’s computing power and usage. It is also highly energy efficient, built to meet LEED Silver certification.

The Utah Data Center, located on an Army National Guard base, also has its own water treatment facilities (it will use an estimated 1,210 gallons of water per minute, mostly for cooling), chiller plant, vehicle inspection facility, visitor control center, backup generators, and, of course, serious security with its own police force and perimeter security.

“Not all of the computers that are slated to be installed in the facility are there, and many more that are on site are not up and running yet,” Tice explains. “But enough capability exists right now to handle the collection that is needed right now.”

An NSA spokesperson located in Utah denies that the facility is operational, saying, “The exterior has been built, but the IT infrastructure is still being added.”

“The government is doing an awful lot of lying,” Tice says. “They are seeing what Snowden is throwing [out there] and are going back to the last line of defense in order to thwart it.”

Tice, who worked in government intelligence for two decades, became the prototypical NSA communications whistle-blower, leaking information about the NSA’s illegal wiretapping of United States citizens to the New York Times in 2005. He tried to go to the House Intelligence Committee but was told not to by the NSA. In 2006, he publicly testified before Congress.

In 2009, after George W. Bush left office, Tice came forward with more information that the NSA had access to the phone calls and computer communications of tens of thousands of Americans, including journalists; he revealed that it wasn’t just phone taps but credit card information and other financial records.

At that time the scope of the data collection was narrower, explains Tice. “The NSA didn’t have the processing, electricity, or storage capabilities,” he says. “That is Utah. The NSA dealt with its problems and now has the capabilities.”

Snowden’s revelations provided hard evidence supporting what Tice has been saying for years. It also emboldened Tice to come forward with more information based upon his firsthand experience at the NSA as well as information given to him last May by inside sources, including a high-level employee.

“I kept saying [in 2006 and 2009]: It is so much worse, but I can’t explain why right now,” Tice says. “Well, what I’m telling you right now, this is the rest of the story.”

While Tice was still at the NSA, he was able to see the identities of numerous targets of surveillance, which included high-level United States government officials. In the evenings, NSA analysts would be given handwritten notes on yellow legal-pad paper listing contact information for targets, including then-Senate hopeful Barack Obama, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, former CIA Director David Petraeus, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Republican Sen. John McCain, and Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein. Other targets include multiple three-star generals and admirals, lawyers, and members of the Senate and the House, including members of the intelligence committees and the armed services committees.

According to Tice, the NSA’s next practical challenge is to decode data it collects that has been protected by encryption. The computing power available in a fully operational Utah data center could be used to break such encryption. With sizable supercomputing resources and extremely large sets of data, the agency would be able to look for patterns at a staggering rate. The NSA has already made a huge breakthrough in its ability to crack encryption standards used by international governments and domestic citizens, according to Wired’s NSA top official source.

For now, though, collection is the name of the game.

“It is cheaper and more efficient to just collect and keep a torrent of information in the big bank and then go back and look at it later,” says Tice. “They are waiting for the processing capability to catch up and then [they’ll be able to] cull out the information. ”

Tice says others at the NSA want to come forward but fear retaliation and punishment. “The seasoned people are highly upset at what is going on,” Tice says. “We are taught that you don’t spy on Americans. It was against NSA policy, regulations, and a violation of the Constitution.”

Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/the-nsas-massive-data-center-is-coming-online-ahead-of-sched

The hacktivist group Anonymous claimed on one of its many Twitter accounts Wednesday that it had hacked into accounts belonging to various members of Congress and their staffers, publishing an online document that shows elected officials are not very careful in how they craft passwords to protect sensitive government emails.

The hack came in response to recent revelations of widespread Internet and phone surveillance conducted by the U.S. government. Anonymous included the hashtags #FISA, referencing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows for the spying, and #PRISM, the name of a secret government surveillance program, in its tweet.

The group removed some of the passwords from its online listing, and "shuffled the order of the remaining ones," it wrote in the document. "We reserve the right to spontaneously decide this restraint was unjustified," the group stated.

As the Atlantic Wire points out, this leaked information shows that members of Congress and staffers are pretty terrible at creating passwords. Passwords listed include state names, favorite sports teams, and even the classic "password" -- probably the worst thing to choose for security.

When asked on Twitter if "pissing off the House" is productive, Anonymous responded that "pissed off is exactly how Congress should be feeling. If it cannot wield the rod, it shall not be spared the rod."

This isn't the first time Anonymous has hacked the U.S. government. Last February, Anonymous claimed that it hacked the Federal Reserve computers to release thousands of bank executives' credentials. Anonymous also claimed that it hacked the U.S. Sentencing Commission's website in January. Many of Anonymous's government hacks in the past few months were said to be in honor of Internet activist Aaron Swartz, who took his own life in January while facing prosecution for allegedly stealing millions of online documents from JSTOR.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/18/anonymous-hacked-congress-email-passwords_n_3617039.html

On Thursday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will start accepting applications for new internet address suffixes that could come to represent industry sectors, hobbies, ethnic groups, corporate brand names and more.

Expanding the number of suffixes has been one of ICANN's missions since its creation in 1998 to oversee domain names. ICANN had two test rounds, in 2000 and 2004, and is now ready to expand the domain name system more broadly.

Up to 1000 domain name suffixes — the ".com" in an internet address — could be added each year in the most sweeping change to the domain name system since its creation in the 1980s. Suggested new domains may include ".sport", .sydney", ".melbourne", ".cameras", etc.

To some, the system will lead to ".cash." To others, it will mean ".confusion."

The idea is to let Las Vegas hotels, casinos and other attractions congregate around ".Vegas," or a company such as Canon to draw customers to "cameras.Canon" or "printers.Canon." The new system will also make Chinese, Japanese and Swahili versions of ".com" possible.

Some companies, including Canon, and entrepreneurs have already expressed interest in applying for a suffix and possibly earning millions of dollars a year from people and groups wanting a website that ends in that name.

Others are skeptical, though. They worry that an expansion will mean more addresses available to scams that use similar-sounding names such as "Amazom" rather than "Amazon" to trick people into giving passwords and credit card information. Others worry that new suffixes could create additional platforms for hate groups or lead to addresses ending in obscenities.

Critics say ICANN is rushing to expand the naming system without putting enough safeguards in place. The new domains are not cheap, however, with application fees costing US$185,000 and the applicant needing to demonstrate how it will run the new domain as a registrar.

"You don't want a ship to have holes... and ask everybody to come on board," said Dan Jaffe, the chief lobbyist at the American Association of National Advertisers, which represents 400 companies and 10,000 brand names. "You should close the holes, then run a pilot project to see if the systems you put in place are actually effective."

There's also a question of how useful the new names will be, at least among English speakers. Alternatives to ".com" introduced over the past decade have had mixed success. These days, internet users are more likely to type "new Muppet movie" into their browser's search box than to know the official site is at "Disney.go.com/muppets."

ICANN will start taking bids for new suffixes on Thursday at 12:01am Greenwich Mean Time.

That doesn't mean people will be able to type in "Caribbean.vacation" or "iPad.Apple" right away. Initial bidding will stay open until April. After that, ICANN will accept challenges for trademark conflicts and other reasons. Auctions would be held should multiple bidders seek the same suffix. It could take months more for winning bidders to set up.

The new names won't appear in general use until at least the northern spring of 2013. Applicants facing challenges may have to wait until 2014.

Names will be restricted to the richest companies and groups, as it will cost US$185,000 to apply and at least US$25,000 a year to maintain one. A 10-year commitment is required. The fees do not include operational costs, such as computers and staff. By comparison, a personal address with a common suffix such as ".com" usually costs less than US$10 a year.

Despite the startup costs, suffixes could be lucrative to the winning bidders. A company called ICM Registry receives some US$60 a year for every ".xxx" registered, for instance. It's not just pornography sites interested. Colleges and universities have been buying names such as "KUgirls.xxx" to make sure others can't.

Although companies such as Apple and Canon aren't likely to make any suffixes they secure available to the general public, some may choose to allow their resellers to join in. Australian registrar Melbourne IT has said in the past that industry groups such as hoteliers, tourism operators or professional bodies could seek a domain such as ".hotels" or ".accountants" to share with members. But they won't be the only ones cashing in. Companies have formed specifically to sell names on behalf of those entrepreneurs, and ICANN gets a cut.

In recent weeks, members of the US Congress, the Federal Trade Commission and the Commerce Department have raised concerns.

"A rapid, exponential expansion ... has the potential to magnify both the abuse of the domain name system and the corresponding challenges we encounter in tracking down internet fraudsters," FTC commissioners said in a letter to ICANN.

ICANN plans to proceed with its schedule. ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said many adjustments have been made to address objections raised over the years. Although Jaffe said several other concerns were ignored, Beckstrom said he has heard nothing new in the recent critiques.

"There are parties that would like to see other protections, or want to see this or that," Beckstrom said. "These discussions are going to go on for a long time."

Beckstrom said many businesses and groups outside the US have been clamoring for more choices, and ICANN didn't want them to wait longer.

From a technical standpoint, domain names tell computers on the internet where to find a website or send an email message. Without them, people would have to remember clunky numerals such as "165.1.59.220," which is the underlying internet protocol address for "ap.org."

The monikers have grown to mean much more, however. Amazon.com has built its brand on its website address, while bloggers take pride in running sites with their own domain names.

Theo Hnarakis, CEO of Melbourne IT, said his organisation already has prepared more than 100 suffix applications for financial services, airlines, gambling sites and others. He declined to name any clients.

Although suffixes added over the past decade haven't been as popular as ".com," nearly all of the most desirable ".com" addresses have been taken. New businesses are often stuck with difficult-to-remember names such as "TheFloristInsideThePeanutShop.com." The expansion would allow "Peanut.florist."

Customers might be able to find that florist through Google or Bing, but Hnarakis said merchants often have to buy ads to lure them. And an internet search might lead customers to a rival — such as the Cheaper Florist Outside The Peanut Shop.

The demand for new suffixes appears greater outside the US. That's because many of the ".com" names had been grabbed by Americans who got on the internet first. In addition, suffixes had been largely limited to the 26 letters of the English alphabet until now.

ICANN has already allowed two major expansions of the addressing system. In 2000, it approved seven new domains, including ".info" and ".biz." It began accepting new bids again in 2004. It added seven from that round, including ".xxx" last year. It also cleared others on an ad hoc basis, including ".eu" for the European Union and ".ps" for the Palestinian territories.

Under the new system, the application process will be streamlined.

Expanding the pool of suffixes was one of ICANN's chief tasks when the US government ceded oversight of domain names to the organisation in 1998. But progress was slow because of objections and concerns from government groups, businesses interests and others. ICANN is finally ready to implement the system, despite calls for further delays.

"This is a change, and whenever there's a change, there is anxiety," Beckstrom said. "We're doing our best to administer a fair and equitable system that the global community has designed."

The Applications: The system will open on Thursday at 12:01am Greenwich Mean Time (Thursday at 11:01am Sydney time). Applicants will have to answer 50 questions covering such things as what a proposed suffix will be used for and what kind of financial backing the company or organisation has. They'll also need to demonstrate they can administer the new domain, with some companies forming partnerships with registrars to fulfil this requirements. They'll have until late March to begin the application and until April 12 to finish it. The applicant must pay US$185,000 to submit the application, including a US$5,000 deposit.

The Challenges: ICANN will say in May what suffixes have been proposed. The public will have 60 days to comment on them. That is when someone can claim a trademark violation or argue that a proposed suffix is offensive.

The Review: ICANN will review each application to make sure its financial plan is sound and that contingencies exist in case a company goes out of business. Applicants also must past criminal background checks. If multiple applications seek the same suffix, ICANN will encourage parties to work out an agreement and hold an auction if they cannot. The review is expected to take at least nine months, meaning approval of the first batch won't happen until February 2013 or later. If there are challenges or other problems, ICANN believes the review could take up to 20 months.

The Launch: Once a suffix is approved, the applicant will have to set up procedures for registering names under that suffix and computers to keep track of them. Applicants might have all that already completed in anticipation of an approval. The application pays an annual fee that starts at US$25,000. The suffix is activated and becomes available for use. All that could take days or months.

source: http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/internet-address-expansion-begins-despite-concerns-20120110-1pu8n.html

According to Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency senior executive who blew the whistle on the agency’s reckless spending and spying in 2006, a previously unknown NSA surveillance program known as FAIRVIEW aims to “own the Internet.”

Last month, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked a series of PowerPoint slides to the Washington Post and the Guardian revealing that the agency was engaged in a large-scale Internet surveillance program, dubbed PRISM, that collects Americans’ chats, emails, photos, and videos. One of the slides, only later released by the two papers, made reference to a group of additional “upstream” collection programs, including two named FAIRVIEW and BLARNEY, but gave no further details about their function.

Drake, who was prosecuted under the Espionage Act for his whistleblowing, explained the upstream programs to the Daily Dot.

“Upstream means you get inside the system before it’s in the Internet. In its pure form,” he said.

About the slide, Drake said, “you’ve got programs and umbrella programs.” FAIRVIEW is one such umbrella. Drake referred to it as a “highly classified program” for tapping into the world’s intercontinental fiber optic cables.

“It’s just a name,” Drake said, “that at the highest level means to own the Internet.”

According to Drake, an article published this week in the Washington Post reveals one such instance of FAIRVIEW. The story describes a contract signed between the Asian telecom giant Global Crossing and the U.S. government. “The agreements,” the Post reported, “do not authorize surveillance. But they ensure that when U.S. government agencies seek access to the massive amounts of data flowing through their networks, the companies have systems in place to provide it securely.”

Domestically, similar efforts to tap into the Internet were leaked by a former AT&T Computer Network Associate Mark Klein, who witnessed the agency attaching splitters to the company’s San Francisco office. “What I know of the splitters,” Klein said, “is that they get everything.”

According to Drake, beneath the umbrella of FAIRVIEW, programs like BLARNEY collect and analyze the data that is made accessible by secret arrangements like the one with Global Crossing. “BLARNEY is a key access program facilitated by these commercial arrangements that exploits the Internet data at these junctions,” Drake said. “BLARNEY is to the international Internet space as PRISM is to the domestic.”

Drake pointed out that FAIRVIEW is also the method through which the NSA receives the information it has collected, essentially co-opting the fiber optic cables to transmit the data back to the agency to be analyzed by data mining programs.

At this point, said Drake, “I don’t try to put too much emphasis on the names of the projects.” Their distinction, he said, is largely holdover from a time when the NSA’s reach was less broad. They were named to delineate one particular data gathering technique from another. Many carry different names simply because they are specific to a particular region or state. “The NSA has open season on anything foreign,” he said.

In Drake’s opinion, journalists have overlooked the significance of BOUNDLESS INFORMANT, which tracks the international intelligence gathering techniques of the NSA.

The Guardian reported that it “has acquired top-secret documents about [BOUNDLESS INFORMANT] that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.” According to Drake, the program indicates the incredible success of FAIRVIEW.

Of FAIRVIEW, Drake added, “I suspect a lot more is going to come out.”

Source: http://www.dailydot.com/news/fairview-prism-blarney-nsa-internet-spying-projects/

Currently on a speech tour in Brazil, Tobias Andersson, one of the original founders of The Pirate Bay, says the site should shut down to make room for something better. “The Pirate Bay in its current form must end. It’s not built and meant for what is coming. The future copy fights will need something better, safer, faster,” he says.

Those who have followed The Pirate Bay over the last decade know that it was founded by the Swedish pro-culture organization Piratbyrån.

Piratbyrån, which translates to Bureau of Piracy, was formed by political activists and hackers in the early 2000s, many of whom had already launched other web projects challenging political, moral and power structures. The group’s members were all friends of friends and in common with The Pirate Bay, there was virtually no structure.

A member who served as an early spokesperson of both Piratbyrån and The Pirate Bay is Tobias Andersson. While Tobias was not active in technical operations, he was a founding member of the site.

Tobias’s involvement has been on and off throughout the years and nonexistent for the last four, a period in which he and his wife had their first child and the focus switched to family life.

Last year he asked the current admins if he could use the front page of The Pirate Bay for an idea of his. That project soon became The Promo Bay, a platform which enables independent artists to expose their work to tens of millions of users from all over the world.

After years of relative anonymity, Tobias is now stepping into the light, not to take credit, but to announce his final “resignation” and to send the site a final message.

The Pirate Bay founder, who spoke last week at the 14th International Forum on Free Software in Porto Alegre, Brazil, tells us that he will also quit his volunteer work on The Promo Bay. At the same time he encourages the others to follow his lead and shut down the site.

Tobias believes that in the near future The Pirate Bay will no longer be able to fulfill the important role it has today. And for other technologies to be able take over, it has to go.

“No, I’m not kidding. I mean it. The Pirate Bay in its current form must end. It is not built and meant for what is coming. The future copy fights will need something better, safer, faster. Something that does not depend on a few persons’ will to sacrifice themselves. The world needs something that is impossible to take down, no matter what raids, laws and scare tactics they will throw at you,” Tobias says.

“I believe that The Pirate Bay hinders the creation of something new. Not actively, but it has made people too comfortable by always being there – by not giving in to threats and so on. If The Pirate Bay would decide to quit, I’m sure something new and better would spring to life quite soon. Sure there are other sites than The Pirate Bay, but it’s the biggest and hundreds of other sites depend on its torrents.”

The concept of centralized BitTorrent sites is vulnerable to pressure from outside, and with increasing enforcement efforts it becomes harder and harder to maintain. New domains are still easy to come by, but the hosting situation is already getting problematic.

Tobias believes that the problems only will get worse when other industries start to feel threatened as 3D printing matures.

“With the MPAA and the RIAA and their likes, there haven’t been any serious problems. There’s actually been more downtime for the site due to drunk admins, than downtime due to raids. But when car manufacturers, oil companies and nations start feeling threatened, we’re going to need something better. Something that is independent and that holds ground, regardless of raids and repression.”

The Pirate Bay founder stresses that he believes that The Pirate Bay has done a lot of good things, from offering support to artists to providing a library of information for people in oppressive regimes. However, this doesn’t mean that the site should continue down the same path – quite the contrary.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love The Pirate Bay. The memories I bring from working with it will last forever. And I DO believe the site have been bettering the world – and still is. But if The Pirate Bay is this important now, you understand why we need something better soon,” Tobias says.

Whether the current admins of The Pirate Bay agree with Tobias remains to be seen, but it’s not the first time that one of the founders has called for the site to die. Three years ago Peter Sunde came out with a similar message.

“We need some form of new technology. So, that’s kind of the future for The Pirate Bay, hopefully dying, and being replaced with something better of course, because the Pirate Bay really sucks,” Sunde said at the time.

So is the end near for the almighty Pirate Bay? Time will tell….

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/shut-down-the-pirate-bay-founder-says-130708/

We were going to bring you a report on the coup d'etat in egypt, but our editing program (Weebly, running on Google chrome, in turn running on windows 7), keeps crashing. we suspect attempts by Google to suppress anything that goes against American Mainstream opinion. 

The international hacktivist group Anonymous have declared war on the EDL.

The hacking group became known worldwide for a series of well-publicized hacks and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government, religious, and corporate websites.

Following the brutal murder of Drummer Lee Rigby the EDL have ramped up their attempted persecution of innocent Muslims in the UK.

Launching #OpEDL in response Anonymous said "“[You] have used this as another excuse to further spread your campaign of hate, bigotry, and misinformation. Under the guise of national pride you have instigated crimes against the innocent and incited the subjugation of Muslims,”  

They added “We will not allow your injustices, your lies, and your stupidity, to further radicalize our youth into fearing and despising their fellow man.”

And in a chilling finale Anonymous warn the EDL "We do not forgive, we do not forget. Expect us ! 

Source: http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/blog/insider

Australia's government is under fire after it appears to have introduced web censorship without warning and expanded already controversial powers to block access to child pornography into a wider web filtering system.

The reluctance of the government to release information about who has requested sites be blocked, and lists of those sites, has also alarmed many Australians. Two convenors from Melbourne Free University (MFU), whose site was blocked without warning or explanation on 4 April, have described it as a "glimpse [of] the everyday reality of living under a totalitarian government."

For a country that perhaps has a reputation for taking it easy, Australia's governments have been particularly keen on web censorship. In 2008 a web filter was proposed that would have potentially blocked as many as 10,000 sites by placing them on a blacklist. Years of criticism from industry, political and public groups—including Anonymous "declaring war" on it, and Wikileaks publishing the confidential blacklist to show it included some sites that were only, contrary to government assurances, subjectively offensive—led to the idea being dropped in November 2012.

That might have been the end of it, but instead of going through legislative channels, it looks like web censorship is back and taking advantage of a legal loophole. On April 4 more than 1,200 sites were suddenly unavailable to Australian web users

One of those sites that was blocked was that for the MFU, which is a nonprofit organisation that runs talks and workshops about "radical equality" and other activist topics. Jasmine-Kim Westendorf and Jem Atahan, convenors at MFU, wrote a blog post about their Kafkaesque experience of finding their site blocked for nine days and struggling to find any kind of answer why:

"After persistent questioning, our local internet supplier reluctantly told us that the internet address of our website had been blocked by the 'Australian Government.' Even more alarmingly, they said they were legally unable to 'provide the details regarding who has blocked the IP or why.' Our first thought was, what have we done to draw the eye of the authorities? Who have we had speak at the MFU that might be on a blacklist? In that instant, we glimpsed the everyday reality of living under a totalitarian government."

The fact that someone, somewhere in the Australian government has been blocking websites didn't go unnoticed because journalists and advocacy bodies like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and even politicians began demanding answers. Eventually Aussie tech website Delimiter broke the story that the sites had been blocked at the request of Australia's financial regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

The issue relates to the Telecommunications Act 1997, clause 313 of which describes the "obligations" of service providers "to prevent telecommunications networks and facilities from being used in, or in relation to, the commission of offences against the laws of the Commonwealth or of the States and Territories."

When the more draconian web filter was dropped last November its main proponent, communications minister Stephen Conroy, instead switched attention to the Telecommunications Act. He described a "voluntary" filtering system that he would like ISPs and other service providers (like Vodafone) to sign up for, and the system would only seek to block sites which had been blacklisted by Interpol—the vast majority of which host child pornography.

However, it appears that using clause 313 of the Telecommunications Act in this way has set a worrying precedent (something that had been foreseen by some experts at the time). ASIC has been submitting lists of sites to the filter blacklist to try and crack down on financial scams. One of those sites was hosted on an IP address shared by those 1,200 other sites that were blocked in early April, alerting Australian web users to the silent creep of internet filtering proceeding on without their knowledge.

Government ministries being able to ask ISPs to take down sites without any kind of legal or regulatory oversight has, unsurprisingly, angered a lot of opposition politicians. Australian Greens senator Scott Ludlam told the Australian Financial Review: "It's extraordinarily difficult to find who has issued these notices and on behalf of whom, for what categories of content, or what you do if you find yourself on a block list. We've got a very serious problem and it's not at all clear whether the government knows what it's actually doing."

Australians will now have to petition their government to get this situation under control.

RIP Freedom of Speech, Australia, 2013. A little known policy slips quietly under the radar in January 2012 as our friends at Twitter announce they will censor tweets, if a country’s government requests them to do so. A year later, Australia becomes the first modern democracy to identify, filter and ban free speech whilst not in a state of War.

In recent weeks, the censoring of tweets by Australian conservatives, or, indeed anyone who dares to either engage in political debate or offer opinion on the ruling Labor-Green alliance, has become so pervasive many have thought it was a bug with Twitter. You can read Twitter’s well hidden censorship policy here.

But now I can reveal that Twitter is actively censoring Australian tweets at the direct request of the government.

The evidence is in Twitter’s own censorship policy. Released to the press on 26 January, 2012, the company says:

This was followed up, extensively, in on-line marketing specialist site MarketingLand (read the article) and tech guru site Gizmodo (read the article), but received very little main stream media play. Most probably because the limited imagination of journalists would not allow them to envision such a thing happening in industrialized democracies.

Australia, it turns out, has turned its back on the rest of the first world, deciding to embrace the culture of its banana republic regional neighbours, such as Fiji and Mobutu of the Congo.

Since I originally suffered suspension and the threat of being terminated by Twitter for asking a simple, open, non-abusive question of the Greens political party (read the story), literally dozens of others have come forward to tell of how they too have been suspended.

More common, now, is active “filtering” of content: where certain terms or certain tweets sent to certain people are banned from the Australian public.

And herein lies the definitive proof that the Australian Labor-Greens Government has requested this censorship.

The content is only blocked from Australian sites, and can be seen when viewing Twitter from the US or anywhere else in the world. This is exactly in line with Twitter’s publicized policy.