Oscar Grenfell
In an act of politically-motivated censorship, the organisers of CyberCon, one of Australia’s largest cyber security conferences, “disinvited” US whistleblower Thomas Drake and Australian academic Dr Suelette Dreyfus just days before they were to deliver presentations at the event.
Drake and Dreyfus had been scheduled to speak at the Melbourne conference, which attracts several thousand participants each year, since November 2018. They were told last week that their talks were “incongruent” with the conference and had been summarily cancelled. Drake was informed of the decision only shortly before he was due to fly from the United States for the event.
There is no question that the cancellation was a political decision, likely involving government agencies. It was undoubtedly motivated by the principled support of Drake and Dreyfus for persecuted whistleblowers and publishers, and their own records of activism in defence of internet freedom.
Drake is a former employee of the US National Security Agency (NSA), who spoke-out in the mid-2000s against what he described as the organisation’s wasteful spending and its turn to procuring technologies aimed at mass communication intercepts.
Drake was charged with 10 felony counts, which the Justice Department was later compelled to drop in 2011. He refused to cooperate with an FBI investigation into other whistleblowers and has continued to publicly denounce mass surveillance and other attacks on democratic rights.
Dreyfus, an academic at the University of Melbourne, is a computer and informations expert who has advocated for decades to improve whistleblower protections.
She was an early collaborator of Julian Assange and is one of the few Australian academics who has consistently condemned the US, British and Australian persecution of the WikiLeaks founder for his role in the exposure of American war crimes and global diplomatic conspiracies.
Drake and Dreyfus have both stated they were told by the Australian Information Security Association, which organised the conference, that the cancellation of their talks was at the request of a “conference partner.”
Partner organisations include the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), the country’s electronic eavesdropping agency, which collaborates closely with the NSA and other members of the “five eyes” spying network in mass surveillance operations.
Other government-funded bodies also participated in the event. The powerful Home Affairs ministry, which has been at the forefront of a broader campaign of online censorship, gave a closed-door briefing on its 2020 “cyber-security” strategy, which the media was barred from attending.
In comments to the Guardian, Drake condemned the censorship as “Orwellian.” “This is the first time ever I’ve been censored at a conference. How ironic it is here in Australia,” he said.
The former NSA employee explained: “If you are a whistleblower, you are persona non grata. I think there was significant pressure at the last minute at what appears to be a review of the entire agenda.”
Dreyfus placed the cancellation in the context of a broader assault on whistleblowers in Australia, telling the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): “There's now a culture of fear about speaking up. Nothing highlights this quite so much as disinviting speakers who have been confirmed.”
Drake’s planned presentation was entitled “The Golden Age of Surveillance.” An abstract of the talk, posted on a website created to oppose the conference’s censorship, stated: “What does it mean for our society to increasingly live in a virtual matrix where more and more of our lives are under the persistence gaze of the digital panopticon? What does it say when our post 9/11 world has turned surveillance into a global growth industry feeding the demands for data about us of all kinds, no matter where you live?”
The abstract continued: “Mr. Drake has already lived that future and will share his experience from the frontlines of freedom on just how deeply society has backdoored and buried itself in the insatiable appetite to know virtually everything about anybody at any time driven by fear and safety.”
No comments:
Post a Comment