Operation Centurion was triggered after a legitimate European web site was hacked into and 99 degrading and explicit images were placed on it.

In the 76 hours that the images were on the web site, it received an extraordinary 12 million hits from almost 150,000 different computers from 170 countries, including more than 2800 from Australia.

After sifting through the IP addresses from Australia, and discarding the addresses of other Australian Government departments and public computer terminals, the AFP identified the addresses of about 1,500 private PC’s.

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The Australian Federal Police have recently made headlines for detecting a couple of citizens who have been dabbling in child pornography. A number of Internet surfers have also been caught up in the AfP’s covert operation, because they stumbled across, or were directed to, an offensive web site. This group of people have been given the dubious charge of using a carriage service to access child pornography.

The AFP have a troop of secret police that pose as thirteen year old school girls, and lurk in Internet chat rooms. These snoopers, encourage men to chat with them about matters of a sexual nature and entice them into making sexual advances, when they do, they are traced and charged with grooming an under aged girl for sex. This is a prime example of police entrapment, as there is no underage girl involved, the men are actually communicating with a hairy arsed police officer!

The Australian Federal Government has allocated an additional AU$49 million to the AFP in the current year’s budget for this so called cyber safety program, which is promoted as an online child protection service. This group of secret police are constantly surfing the net to discover offensive web sites, and prowling chat rooms in order to coerce patrons into unwittingly, doing or saying things that can leave them open to criminal charges.

The web site portraying child porn, which brought about this recent spate of arrests, received 12 million hits in a few days and drew the attention of the AFP’s cyber snoop troop. After downloading the sites content, and deciding that it was in fact child porn, the officers then no doubt, shared the offending site’s URL with their fellow chat room members. The AFP then set about tracing the IP addresses of the people who visited the offensive site in order to charge them with various offences.

It has occurred to me that it was the sudden rise in popularity of this offensive web site that attracted the attention of the secret cyber patrol. Without the sudden notoriety this offensive site may have passed unnoticed. This story has also brought to mind the fact that an Internet user’s privacy is severely compromised, big brother can monitor any individual’s every move without permission, warrant or court order.

This odious state of affairs jeopardizes an individuals right to freedom of speech and allows the government of the day to censure any criticism that may be directed towards it.
Publishers of underground newsletters that promote political views contrary to that of the government of the day must surely be at risk of being intimidated by the secret police.

Satirical newsletters that attract a large readership could become a thing of the past, if feature articles that ridicule the government’s antics are continually published. When editors get a visit from the secret police to discus options of suicide, an accident, a vacation to Christmas Island, Guantanamo Bay, or to just abandon their journalistic talents and leave town, the latter may be the best option.

I used to enjoy reading the DailyDirt, which was abandoned a couple of years ago. I wonder if…

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Technorati Tags: Big Brother ,  Secret Police,  Cyber Safety