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Report: Fear of 'Internet Vigilantes' Holds Back Austrialian Internet Filtering Initiative

BY Nick Judd | Monday, June 27 2011

Telstra, one of Australia's biggest Internet service providers, has not yet made a final decision on whether or not to cooperate with the federal government there to block access to websites that purvey material depicting child sexual abuse, The Australian reports — and The Australian's Andrew Colley writes it's because the ISP is afraid of retaliation from "Internet vigilantes:"

It is understood Telstra was last night still grappling with the decision as to whether to commit to the voluntary filter because of fears of reprisals from the internet vigilantes behind a spate of recent cyber attacks.

It is understood the unstructured collective of hackers that identifies itself as Lulz Security, which has an agenda to wreak havoc on corporate and government cyber assets, claiming this is to expose security flaws, is one of Telstra main concerns.

Colley also seems to "understand," so to speak, that Anonymous is Telstra's other worry. Anonymous has attacked Australian goverment websites because of the government's support for Internet filtering to block out child pornography, he notes.

LulzSec announced over the weekend that they would be winding down. Why? A member — who, in what is emerging as a standard for verifying identity online, proved his membership by posting a pre-arranged message to LulzSec's Twitter account — told the Associated Press that it was because they were "bored." LulzSec has posted a statement to Pastebin and a final data release it says contains internal data from Aol and AT&T, as well as a smattering of internal scans of networks, emails from private investigators, and more. A teenager in the UK accused of being a member of LulzSec, 19-year-old Ryan Cleary, is now on trial.

(Via Censorship in America and WSJ.com.)

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