A BLOCK on student access to the Keep the Sheep website that categorized it in a group including explicit adult content sites P**nhub and Only Fans has been removed by Western Australia’s Department of Education.

But questions remain about how the website block via the Fortiguard web filtering service came about and why the department allowed it to continue for weeks and possibly months.

The department’s deputy director general, education business services Jen McGrath said the Keep the Sheep website has been reviewed and deemed suitable.

“Access will be allowed for those who wish to view it.”

Ms McGrath said the department’s fully-automated content filtering service – supplied by Fortiguard Labs — is consistent with other education jurisdictions in Australia and helps protect students and staff from online material that may be malicious or inappropriate in a school setting.

“This particular website was brought to the department’s attention recently,” she said.

“Sites that the filtering service deems unsuitable will not be routinely reviewed by the department due to the extensive number that are automatically and continuously categorised and filtered,” she said.

However, Ms McGrath has not answered how the block came about nor why the website’s categorisation was not reviewed sooner when department and college staff were first made aware.

Keep the Sheep grouped with adult content sites

An IT professional going by the pseudonym WS Gosset, familiar with major databases and the Fortiguard system, told Sheep Central his analysis showed the categorization of the Keep the Sheep site as an advocacy organisation put it in the same group as P**nhub and Only Fans – Adult/Mature Content.

“Absolutely it’s a Fortiguard decision – the categorization is a mess, this is really looking like a cock-up.

“It was being rated as a p**n site,” he said.

“P**nhub is ‘pornography’ and OnlyFans is ‘other adult material’ and Keep the Sheep is in the same group.”

WS Gossett said the Fortiguard Labs web filter tool allowed people to type in a URL and ascertain how the system categorised a website.

He said before the decision was made to remove the Keep the Sheep site block, it came up in the Fortiguard system as an advocacy organization, while its anti-live export opposite, Keep the Sheep Here, is categorized as a newly observed domain, the Australian Animal Alliance is ’business’, Animals Australia is ‘general’ and Stop Live Exports is ‘a political organization’ and The Livestock Collective, another industry live export lobby group, is categorized as ‘business.’

Keep the Sheep has been marked out separately, but actually the whole Fortiguard categorization is a mess, WS Gosset said.

Keep the Sheep could have been recategorised sooner

WS Gosset said he believed the Department of Education WA’s own IT people have had the ability to seek the re-categorisation the Keep the Sheep website via a Fortiguard web filter.

This was suggested by the Shenton College principal in Sheep Central’s first story on 12 March, but Department of Education consultants have persisted in claiming the subscription service categorisation of Keep the Sheep is automatic or fully automated and showed no willingness to correct the site’s treatment.

WA shearer Shane Argent, left, with Barnaby Joyce.

Shenton College ICT manager Simon Hawks told Sheep Central more than two weeks ago the Shenton College firewall “is supplied and configured by the Department of Education WA and subject to a set of firewall rules and filtering that they install, but with the possibility of us adding some additional site-specific rules.”

“In this instance, the category rule that has put the Keep the Sheep website into the advocacy organisation block comes from upstream of this site and is something that we can’t change.

“My suggestion is that you either contact DoEWA Central Office IT to discuss re-categorisation, or alternatively submit the website to FortiGuard Labs for re-categorisation,” he said.

WA ag college students have been aware of the block for at least six months and Sheep Central was made aware of the access block to the website for WA students and staff weeks ago.

Western Australian shearer Shane Argent who first reported the website block to WAFarmers said an ag college student first mentioned it to him about six months ago last year, but he believed a complaint was first made to WA ag colleges after Wagin Woolarama in early March.

Mr Argent said the categorization of Keep the Sheep with adult content and p**n sites was disgraceful.

He believed the website categorisation was not dealt with earlier because the Department of Education in Western Australia is run by the Labor Government and the federal Albanese Labor Government aims to phase out live sheep exports by sea.

Was the block a political move or a mistake?

The delay in action by the department on the access block via the Fortiguard subscription service, despite WA student and staff knowledge of the block for weeks and possibly months, has failed to quell industry concerns that there was political involvement because of Keep the Sheep’s activities to oppose the Albanese Government’s policy to phase out live sheep exports by sea on 1 May 2028.

WAFarmers president John Hassell said the WA sheep industry still needed answers.

“Someone’s been caught and they’ve rectified it, but there have been no consequences and I think there need to be consequences – the people responsible need to be embarrassed or kicked out.

“This is political activism is my opinion and bureaucracy should not be allowing political activism.”

Mr Hassell said the revelation that the Keep Sheep site has been categorized with adult content sites was “bizarre.”

Before he discovered Keep the Sheep’s categorization with the adult sites in the Fortiguard system, WS Gosset initially believed the message delivered to users trying to access the Keep the Sheep website and the delay in recategorisation indicated that a political determination had been made about the site’s content.

The IT expert believed that somehow Keep the Sheep had been placed on a ‘black list’ and that this would have involved some human interference.

“It is a human input, the only question there is whether they (Fortiguard or the department) outsourced the categorization.

“Or that they had outsourced it and then applied their own (categorization) on top of that,” he said.

“Even if it is an AI (function) running it then someone has to have configured the AI to block one site and not the other.”

“You’ve got asymmetric political treatment and whoever is doing it – the Department of Education or whoever, if you’re sitting there with your arms in the air that’s fine, but you need to correct it, because at the moment you are taking a political stance.

“You can pretend it is someone else’s fault but you have the responsibility, even if you have outsourced it, so you can and must override that treatment,” he said.

Fortiguard’s Australian office has been contacted for comment.

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