The Fuller Picture – The invisible war: Civil disobedience and the internet
As the US Senate debates the Patriot Act this week, we are at a crossroads for civil liberties and protest freedoms around the world.
‘Tis but a modest part of my 2014 calendar project to raise money for defending and supporting whistleblowers. As part of that campaign I also did an interview with the show Lorax Live on Anonymous Radio. I’d had to stay up to the wee hours to do this little talk, and I remember checking back a few weeks later to see if it had ever been posted in the online archives. It hadn’t – just the kinds of thing people get behind on, I’d figured at the time – and I promptly forgot about it.
Only months later did I learn that Lorax – real name Adam Bennett – had been arrested and that “the majority of LoraxLive shows are held by Australian Federal Police and have not been placed in the public domain”.
Not only has Lorax been barred from using the internet for political activity, he has been subjected to an ever-rotating number of charges over the past year, relating, among other things, to testing his workplace database (Cancer Support) for Heartbleed vulnerability and defacing an Indonesian government website. The Australian government’s interest in prosecuting for either event is a bit obscure, but perhaps most concerningly of all, efforts to raise funds for Lorax’s legal defense have been thwarted because crowdfunding sites have simply refused to host it.
