Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Malusi Gigaba has approached the country's Law Reform Commission to ask whether a change in the law is possible. He has also had talks with the Justice Alliance for South Africa (JASA), a respected group which has written its own draft bill on the issue. Internet security experts have dismissed the idea as "madness". "Cars are already provided with brakes and seatbelts... There is no reason why the internet should be provided without the necessary restrictive mechanisms built into it," said Mr Gigaba.

May 20 (Bloomberg) -- Pakistan, home to the world’s second- largest Muslim population, blocked Google Inc.’s YouTube service and more than 450 Web links as the government widened a crackdown on Internet material it deems blasphemous. The sites and links were blocked because of the increasing level of sacrilegious and derogatory material, the Islamabad- based Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said in a statement today. The regulator, which shut access to Facebook Inc.’s website yesterday, may block other links with blasphemous content, Khurram Mehran, a spokesman, said. Pakistan began its censorship campaign after a Facebook user set up a page inviting others to draw caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, an act considered blasphemous by Muslims.

While we've been covering the ongoing back and forth about proposed new internet censorship rules in Australia we didn't quite realize that Australia already has internet censorship rules in place. Michael Scott points us to the news of Electronic Frontiers Australia (sort of an EFF for Australia, but with no official relationship between the two) challenging an attempt by Australian officials to censor a blog post EFA put together to highlight Australian censorship: In May 2009, EFA published this blog post discussing the current censorship regime in the context of the new filtering system soon to be introduced. As part of that discussion, we included a link to a page on American website abortiontv.com that we discovered was on ACMA's blacklist. Abortion being a sensitive political issue, we felt it illustrated the dangers of internet censorship in general and a secret blacklist in particular. Furthermore, since discussion site Whirlpool had received a notice instructing them to delete the link, we thought it highlighted the serious way in which internet content in Australia is already regulated. Shortly thereafter, EFA's web host at the time, Sublime IP, received a "Link Deletion Notice" of their own, for the link contained in the EFA post hosted on their servers. They contacted us, and given the fines involved, EFA complied. (The post in question is still redacted.) EFA helped its ISP, Sublime, challenge the deletion notice on two counts: (1) that it was a violation of the supposed freedom of political communication, especially since it was a discussion about the "political effects of censorship policy," and (2) that officials should have sent the notice to EFA directly, rather than its ISP (in fact, EFA had asked for a notice to be sent directly to it, rather than Sublime, so that it could take on the case directly... and officials refused).

Hot on the heels of revelations that there will be no legal repercussions for people that circumvent Stephen Conroy’s proposed Internet filter, it appears overseas virtual private network providers are wasting no time building a market for one-click filter circumvention. VPNSecure.me, a provider of encrypted Web proxy services, charges just $US8 per month for a service that will allow Australians to circumvent the filter’s access restrictions. Although the service has been around for some time, its Web page now reflects the company’s new marketing strategy with the top-page statement that the product will “Bypass the Australian internet censorship from conroy (sic)”.