NOCENSORSHIP.INFO

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!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 11:08 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.