Bob Turner and I have always promoted Transparency of Filter Lists.

Transparency of a filter list means that it must be clear what specific sites are blocked or filtered.

Transparency means that filter lists can be verified by any third party to be correct and be verified to not contain sites that a blocked due to politically motivated reasons.

Porn Filters that do not have transparent lists have been found to intentionally block content that was not porn but politically or economically motivated.

For instance, one filter blocked time magazine because it had an article critical of it, another filter was blocking the Ontario Center for Religious Tolerance, yet another filter blocked access to the website of the Quakers. Thanks are given to Bennet Haselton from peacefire.org for this list.

Our Internet Filter product's entire URL database of almost half a million known bad porn URL's has been available at http://research.internetfilter.com/ since 2004.  Before we published the list on the web, the list was always visible and un-encrypted in our software. Since then people have contributed to our list, either by adding new sites to it, or by removing sites that are no longer worthy of being filtered.

For instance, sometimes a domain name with porn on it expires and a new owner purchases the domain name and makes a non-porn site. When the new domain owner searches for pages linking to their new site and they find their site listed in our transparent filter list they notify us of the change and we remove the domain from our list.

Transparency in filtering helps everyone involved unless the people maintaining the list have ulterior motives to either keep their list as "Intellectual Property" or as a "Political Tool" to manipulate information under the guise of fighting pornography.

Denmark has a filter for their entire country.  They have a secret list of URL's that are not allowed.  This list was recently leaked to wikileaks.org:

• Denmark: 3863 sites on censorship list, Feb 2008

Then Australia, who has been wanting to set up a secret list of URL's to block from access by any one in Australia, didn't like the fact that Wikileaks had published Denmark's list, so Australia added Wikileaks to their blacklist. If Australia has a country-wide filter set up, wikileaks would be censored:

• Wikileaks Pages Added To Australian Internet Blacklist

Australia is "serious" about their blacklist. If you live in Australia and just publish a link to wikileaks, you can be liable for a fine $11,000.00 per day!

• Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11,000 a day

Remember that Filtering Is Power Over Another.

-- Jeff Koftinoff

• <snip>

A chilling effect - Wikileak's German owner of wikileaks.de was arrested for publishing the Australian and/or Denmark's banned list:

see: http://file.sunshinepress.org:54445/wikileaks-de-raid-2009.pdf

and: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Police_raid_home_of_Wikileaks.de_domain_owner_over_censorship_lists

So we have decided to remove the verbatim copy that was listed here on this blog.

The question for "Those in charge" in Denmark, Germany, and Austrailia is:

How can we here at www.internetfilter.com get to legally know the contents of their secret list so we can block these sites as well? Are these sites even working sites? How can this list be verified if it is illegal to know and discuss?