The Federal Government has announced it will proceed with controversial plans to censor the internet after Government-commissioned trials found filtering a blacklist of banned sites was accurate and would not slow down the internet.

Legislation to enable mandatory censorship legislation will hit Parliament next month. The blacklist, featuring material such as child sex abuse, sexual violence and instructions on crime, would be compiled using a public complaints mechanism, Government censors and URLs provided by international agencies.

An earlier version of the Government's top-secret list of banned sites was leaked on to the web in March, revealing the scope of the filtering could extend significantly beyond child porn.

About half of the sites on the list were not related to child porn and included a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.

To highlight the issue during the week of Australian Day, Electronic Frontiers Australia is backing a ‘blackout’ campaign encouraging people to darken their social networking profile pictures and web sites.

Help turn the lights out on the proposed Internet filter by joining the Great Australian Internet Blackout.