NOCENSORSHIP.INFO

Three months ago hundreds of us marched on our nations capital, Canberra.  Given the pass-the-hat budget, and the mainstream media driven publicity we attained to the cause of free speech in Australia, this was a mamoth achievement.  Three months ago we also could not foretell what was to come on the day we scheduled our next series of national rallies across the nation.

Two days ago several large unions answered the call of a large push online to demonstrate in all capitals regarding the situation in Iran, as this is an emergent issue and was unexpected, and given the climate that the police in all capitals will be dealing with  having so many people demonstrating it has been decided that the 27th protest shall be called off out of respect for those who have died in Iran and those who support the democratic process.

As the dust clears from these rallies we will, of course, regroup and recommence rallying.  In the interim ongoing lobbying has been underway at all levels, from the street, to Canberra itself.  The pro-censorship lobby have been awfully silent though, but we all know they won’t accept rationalism that easily.

From news.com.au

AAP

March 30, 2009 01:35pm

The media this week has been awash with articles regarding Internet censorship, the ACMA Blacklist and proposed Internet filter.

Following are artlices from www.news.com.au regarding these issues.

Website watchdog ACMA says it wasn’t behind German police raid of Wikileaks.de, 26 March 2009

Telstra worker Leslie Nassar hasn’t been sacked for Fake Stephen Conroy - yet, 26 March 2009

Rudd Net filter ‘a shambles’, 25 March 2009 Thank you Senator Minchin for your comments, we most definately agree with you. - ” “I don’t think (Communications Minister) Senator (Stephen) Conroy thought the policy through at the time,” he told ABC Television. “It’s been a shambles from the outset.” ”

New ‘ACMA blacklist’ leak claims banned websites list was recently edited, 24 March 2009

Whilst many members of Anonymous have shown undying support for the free speech posse of the Digital Liberty Coalition, their international brothers and sisters have released a call to arms.  Offers of support have flooded in from the ‘hackers on steroids’ from ebaumsworld, with bold rhetoric threatening to thwart any attempts to censor Australia.

“The Internet is a medium founded on free speech and anonymity. What they are doing threatens that. Information is supposed to be free. Knowledge is power. And they are seeking to remove that power from us. It is well known that Australia is being used a test ground for this idea to spread it to the rest of the world. ISP bans such as this one have already been implemented in various nations such as China, Thailand, and some Scandinavian countries such as Sweden. We cannot let this happen. Everyone has the right to information. The criminals responsible for the illegal material should be brought to justice to remove this problem, the Internet users themselves should not be censored from this as well as things that do not fall into this illegal category. This must not be allowed to be spread to the rest of us. If we don’t stop it now, it will come for us.”

The 21st of March marked the first meeting of all stake holders from all states who have come together to form the Digital Liberty Coalition. Speakers included Colin Jacobs, Jim Stewart, John Kaye, Fiona Patten and the DLC’s very own Jeremiah Hutchinson, with entertainment on the day provided by A.COE, Super Best Friends, and Dave the Happy Singer.

The day started slow, with small clusters of the great unwashed brothers and sisters of the digital realm milling about in the shade, distributed like a peer to peer network, eyes catching packets exchanging, confusion rife. As soon as the PA’s crackled to life the crowd began to form, a brief head count revealing that the trickling distributed masses numbered into the hundreds.

We wish to thank everyone who came out on the day to show your support for free speech, and equality for internet users. The government would NEVER use an arbitrary heuristics driven pithy program to filter print medium, or television, so it follows that it is illogical for the internet to be subjugated to Stephen Conroy’s cut down version of Windows 3.11 1984.EXE and the horrific effects it would have on internet speed across our great nation.

“This is a digital generation, this is a digital century, to slow down the internet is to give our economy a lobotomy,” said John Kaye, before suggesting that a one size fits all internet filter is an open door to censorship and dictatorship suggesting an alternative of taking the $44,000,000 the Government plans to waste on censoring the internet and instead provide half to the federal police to stop child pornography at its source and the other half to an education program to ensure children and parents are net savvy.

Jim Stewart addressed the fact that with the Google adaptation of the Gutenberg project, arbitrary censorship using filtering technology would yield to utter irony with the most likely censoring of George Orwell’s 1984, “I don’t care about these surveys out there that say 80% of teenagers stumble upon porn while doing their homework, rubbish, that’s what I tell my mum too!”

It is worth noting that Canberra is quite an abhorrent city to navigate, and whilst we’re thankful to all the wonderful netizens (and even the IRL mobs) that showed up and made the trek to convene on our nations capital, it goes without saying that clearly seeing the brain numbingly poor road network and complete lack of public transport we can see why parliamentarians would be foolish enough to think censorship, in any form, is an acceptable way to stop any action. Their minds are clearly addled by the hot days, cold nights, and horse shoe’s being passed off as ‘circles’ with hidden slip roads marked ‘heavy vehicles only’ usually being the only way to get where you’re going.

We’ll leave you with YouTube videos of some of the wonderful speakers who graced us with their orations thanks to an unknown videographer; the Digital Liberty Coalition had two broadcast quality cameras running at the event but as volunteers are in short supply getting the film edited and put together takes a little while, that footage will be up soon!