From Mercury News:

‘China’s premier Tuesday offered a defense of his nation’s Internet censorship and exhorted private companies to “exercise more self-discipline” if they want to operate in the huge market here. Premier Wen Jiabao, meeting the press in a once-a-year news conference, said sites available to China’s 111 million Internet users “should be able to convey the right message and information.”’

Evidently several of said users were unable to exercise quite enough discipline, with three Chinese websites just last week launching a phishing attack against Australian users. The websites attempted to trick clients of the National Australia Bank (‘NAB’) to divulge internet banking access details. Fortunately, NAB’s security response team was able to shut down the sites before any damage could be done.

It also seems increasingly difficult for Chinese internet users to ‘convey the right message and information’, with a so-called ‘cyber-dissident’ sentenced to ten years in a Chinese jail for publishing a controversial essay on the internet. Ren Zhiyuan, from the Shandong province, was sentenced by the Jining City Intermediate Court for ‘subverting state sovereignty’.

With stories of phishing and cyber-dissidance, it’s little wonder this site is blocked in China.

Update: But that’s not all. It looks as if Australia has some defending of its own to do. It seems that the Prime Minister’s office has ordered the shutdown of an Australian website featuring a political satire of John Howard:

A spoof John Howard website that featured a soul searching “apology” speech for the Iraq war has been shut down under orders from the Australian Government. Richard Neville, an Australian futurist and social commentator was mystified to discover his satirical website johnhowardpm.org had been blocked on Tuesday with no explanation from either his web hosting company, Yahoo or the domain name registrar, Melbourne IT. He said that after two days of silence, a customer service representative from Melbourne IT today informed him by telephone that the site had ‘been closed on the advice from the Australian Government’.

From what I can gather, the website was pulled (at least ostensibly) on the basis that it infringed copyright in the Prime Minister’s actual website — whose visual appearance the satire website replicated. Nonetheless, this raises a few thorny constitutional law issues (most obviously the implied freedom of political communication). Also troubling is Melbourne IT’s apparent capitulation to the government’s request that the site be taken down.

With all due credit to Melbourne IT, they probably would not have maintained the protection of ISP safe harbour provisions had they left the website online. However, when unqualified private entities are forced to become independent, ex parte and pre-emptive arbiters of copyright infringement, this raises serious questions about the rights of their customers — and, in this context at least, conflict with the paramount interest in political free speech created by Australia’s already limited constitutional protections.