The list, containing 2395 Web sites supposedly to be to banned under the new Australian national Clean Feed initiative, was apparently leaked earlier this week.

Read the full story at TECHLifePost.com.

Net Neutrality has more to do with network traffic management than content censoring, but the two concepts do overlap.

Read the full story at TECHLifePost.com.

The censorship plan allows users to opt out of one level of filtering, designed to protect children from objectionable Internet content and predators, but forces all users to take a feed sanitized of content that the government deems ‘illegal’ under Australian law.

Read the full story at TECHLifePost.com.

Visit the About HOMN pages (menu at right) for full details on the campaign and to sign our petition.

Visit this page daily for the latest Internet censorship- and security-related news, plus updates on the HOMN campaign.

He’ll be discussing, in depth, the growing spectre of Internet censorship which threatens our fundamental rights to freedom of speech and opinion.

Find out more about Internet censorship at Hands Off MY Net! the campaign against Internet censorship.

…many authoritarian states block the access to Web sites, filter search engine results and intimidate Internet users. While it is the duty of every government to ensure that the media respect legitimate rules pursuing objectives of public interest such as the protection of minors, restriction of free speech must be exceptional and legitimate. The principle must be freedom of speech.

Read the full story at TECHLifePost.com.

On our Facebook page, you’ll find all the latest HOMN news headlines with links back to this site. And you can send us feedback by writing on our Facebook Wall.

When you’re here at HOMN headquarters, remember that we’ve added links to all the most popular social networking sites at the bottom of each story post and information page. Find something here you want to share? Go directly to your favourite online meeting place and tell all your friends. There’s also a handy link to let you e-mail any HOMN news story to a friend.

See you on Facebook!

In Korea, as in Latvia, publishing information the government deems false is a federal offense.

Park Dae-sung, writing under the pen name ‘Minerva’, blogged for months last year, predicting a number of financial community events many others would have considered unlikely, including the collapse of the Korean currency and the demise of U.S. commercial banking giant Lehman Brothers.

But, when Park predicted the crash of Korea’s stock market, federal officials stepped in to silence him.

The liberal Korean newspaper Hankyoreh Daily denounced the government action against Park as an attack on freedom of speech: “The prosecution hurriedly went ahead with its investigation and a court readily gave prosecutors a permit to conduct a witch-hunt.”

Since his arrest, legal experts have publicly debated whether the charges against Park are, in fact, legal under Korean law. As it stands, now, Park faces up to five years in prison if convicted.

Dmitrijs Smirnovs, a 32-year-old university lecturer, told The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), “All I did was say what everyone knows.”

Nevertheless, Smirnovs was interrogated for two days before being released. No charges were ultimately laid but his computer was confiscated.

Smirnovs explained that it’s a federal offense in Latvia to disseminate “untrue data or information” about the financial system, an activity that’s officially considered subversive.

Latvian Finance Ministry State Secretary Martins Bicevskis calls the police action, “a form of deterrence”.

The WSJ notes that this is not first time the Latvian authorities have recently moved to silence digital and conventional criticism of the national banking system:

…When the global financial system began to buckle this [past] autumn, Latvia’s Security Police mobilized to combat destabilizing chatter about banks and exchange rates. Agents directed their attention to Internet chat rooms, newspaper articles, cellphone text messages and even rock concerts. A popular musician was taken in for questioning after he cracked a joke about unstable Latvian banks at a performance.

Just one problem: Much of the speculative buzz now turns out to ring true.

Smirnovs notes that his opinions about Latvia’s fragile economy were already well known to his friends and students before the police raid and he stands by them. But he also admits he will be more careful about voicing his opinions in public in the future.

The Hands off MY Net! (HOMN) campaign believes that allowing governments and Internet service providers (ISPs) to filter Internet access facilitates censorship on an unprecedented scale and threatens the fundamental human right to freedom of opinion and expression as entrenched in Article 19 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The HOMN campaign asserts that all Internet end-users — those who ultimately pay for the Internet — have a right and an obligation to decide, for themselves and for those who use the Internet access they pay for, what information and services will be available in the homes, businesses and institutional environments for which they are responsible.

The TECHLife Post believes that, together, we can stop Internet censorship and preserve the right of end users to choose the Internet content they wish to access.

TECHLifePost.com is the founding partner of the Hands off MY Net! campaign.