The War on Satire

It's good to see the Australian High Tech Crime Centre fighting the "war on satire". It was undoubtedly important that they stomped on Richard Neville's johnhowardpm.org site before comedy sleeper cells across the country leapt out to do their evil deeds.

Just to show the battle aren't over, the comedians of Melbourne IT, notably CTO Bruce Tonkin claimed "that particular agency has damaged their credibility". Like all good comedians, Bruce has an element of truth in his spiel. The Feds have damaged their credibility, but nowhere to the degree Melbourne IT has.

The message is clear: No Australian can have confidence that Melbourne IT will not cut their website off without notice. All it takes is some nebulous "advice" from a government department.

The question remains why Melbourne IT didn't check the site was falsely registered themselves. Richard Neville claims he paid for the registration by credit card, so it would have been easy for them to check the name of the registration and the provided contact details. Melbourne IT's jumping the gun shows that their priority isn't to look after their customers.

A few more bigger and important questions are also raised by this. How many other Australian registrars would act without question on "advice" from the High Tech Crime Centre? Also, does the AFP have so many resources it can spend time investigating every suspicious domain registration, or does it only jump when it receives "advice" from an irritated drone in the PM's office.

The lesson though for Australian website owners is clear: Unless you absolutely need an address in the .au space, register it overseas. Not only will you save money, but you'll be a little less prone to the whims of Melbourne IT and the High Tech Crime Centre.