Stephen Conroy: Minister For Fascism 

Due to other commitments our News Coverage has been a little behind over Febuary. We're in the process of updating it now and it should be all current sometime in the next few days. It's interesting to note that just in the course of the last month alone...

• The failed NBN tender process Senator Conroy presided over was revealed to have cost taxpayers $17m HERE.
  
• He approached, and was rejected by, Google requesting that they apply filters to Australian YouTube search results HERE.
  
• He went skiing and held secret meetings with TV boss Kerry Stokes directly before handing the industry a $250m licensing reduction HERE.
  
• Finally, it's been revealed that his Govt. website intentionally hides references to the filter HERE.

Curiously, right about the time we were posting about the SA Labor Government's move to stifle open political discourse in their state they were in damage control over the issue. Following a furious public reaction, Attorney-General Michael Atkinson today publicly announced that if re-elected his government would repeal the law.

He spoke with Leon Byner on radio 5AA about the issue and his government's decision to back away HERE.

A recurring theme through the interview is Atkinson's relation to a time where 'letters-to-the-editor' had to be signed by their author. This is the same guy who is on the public record vehemently opposing a R18 rating for computer games in Australia. It seems the poor fellow has been on another planet for the last little while...

We've thus-far generally attempted to steer clear of posting anything not directly related to Conroy's Clean Feed here. However, earlier today a story was published in Adelaide paper The Advertiser under the headline Labor gags internet debate that rightfully raised eyebrows:

"SOUTH Australia has become one of the few states in the world to censor the internet. The new law, which came into force on January 6, requires internet bloggers, and anyone making a comment on next month's state election, to publish their real name and postcode when commenting on the poll."

To summarise: the South Australian Labor Government has passed legislation which directly targets anonymous free speech where it relates to the electoral process. An article in the same publication under Censoring free speech in the secret state criticises the law, saying:

"South Australia is a state that grants more suppression orders than any other, it is a state where it is acceptable to leave hundreds, if not thousands, of parliamentary questions unanswered for years at a time, where pursuing Freedom of Information requests is nothing short of a battle."

Unfortunately Australians don't have an explicit or protected right to free speech, as examined HERE. The only way we can prevent governments from introducing these sorts of draconian measures is to shout them down in publiclc and by voting against them in the polls. We strongly urge you to do so.

Interestingly the highest volume of traffic originating from .gov.au domain to this site is from httpgate.sa.gov.au, a government proxy... So, Mike Rann, hopefully this sort of behavior is the final nail in your party's long overdue political coffin. Maybe once you've been defenestrated from parliament you'll be less burdened with such annoying trivialities like, well, good governance.

International media coverage of the censorship problem has been vast since our last update, with Google becoming involved in a public war-of-words with China over their censorship apparatus. For all intensive purposes this seems like a good thing for us as it's provoked increased local media coverage of Conroy's plan.

We haven't been directly linking media coverage of the China issue except where it's particularly relevant to the Australian debate. For those who are interested (that's all of you, right? ... ), Google has vast news resources available HERE.

The EFA this week launched a public petition against the Australian filter. They are planning to present this to the Senate of the Parliament of Australia and claim to be receiving upwards of 100 signatories per hour, which is a great result. We strongly urge all of you to take a look at it HERE. They also announced that they will be dropping the 'No Clean Feed' campaign and re-launching it in a format more friendly to the non-tech public.

Last week Jim Stewart from Stewartmedia kindly gave us some SEO tips which we implemented on the site a little while ago. As a result we're now #2 and #3 in the Google search results for 'Stephen Conroy', cheers Jim!

Finally, Happy Australia Day for this Tuesday. We hope all you other censorship opponents can find a little time between raping children and watching beastiality films to celebrate appropriately!

We've had a busy week here at SC! At the start of the week our .com.au domain space was regained, check the auDA Takedown page for more details. Make sure you check back over the coming week or so as we'll be in the process of updating the site and publishing much more comprehensive information for people looking to take action against the filtering plan.

Our friends over at EFA have been making some good progress this week, see articles HERE and HERE.

Finally, we had a huge response to our last poll, thanks to everyone that voted...

Will you punish Labor at the next Federal Election if they persist with mandatory internet filtering?
Yes Votes: 10095 | 96.34%
No Votes: 381 | 3.64%

Merry post-christmas return to the cube everyone!

We've made a few small changes to the format of the site again and moved all of the auDA correspondence which was previously posted here on the main page to it's own area. Please follow the auDA Takedown links at the top of the page to view our information page, open correspondence, and press releases.

Filtering news coverage has been sparse over the break period but we're still actively updating the News Coverage page as news trickles out. If you come across any filtering news we haven't linked please send it to us at info@stephen-conroy.com.

Thank you once again for the continued messages of support we have been receiving, especially in relation to the auDA takedown issue - Keep on fighting!