AUSTRALIA’S COVERT WAR ON FREE SPEECH, ONLINE ANONYMITY AND INDEPENDENT MEDIA PLATFORMS

The Federal Government has outdone itself with the new “Social Media (Anti-Trolling) Bill 2021.

The Bill removes every inbuilt protection around privacy and free speech, contained in the original Act.

If passed, the new laws will force social media companies to unveil the identity of anonymous users when presented with a court order to do so.

This means social media companies like Facebook and Twitter will be compelled to collect and verify the “identity and relevant contact details” of all their Australian users, and disclose them to authorities when required.

And so will their much less connected or wealthy competitors in the independent and alternative media platforms, like Parler, Gab, Rumble and Telegram!

Another change will be the new requirement for foreign social media companies with more than 250,000 Australian users, to establish an Australia-based ‘entity’ or subsidiary; placing them under the direct control of our power-hungry government, and its ‘enforcement’ agents.

While Facebook, Google and Twitter may be happy to police its platforms on behalf of the Australian government, it is questionable whether independent platforms like Telegram and Gab, will be.

Telegram in particular, has built a loyal following worldwide for upholding the principle of free speech and protecting its users’ identity in the face of enormous pressure from elites everywhere.

As usual, the pretence for this latest intrusion on the rights and liberties of Australians, is that it is all being done for OUR benefit – as if we are children.

The PM waxed lyrical on the need to introduce these laws, to “keep our online world safe”, for “kids and families” to protect them from the “horrific abuse and harassment and stalking online”.

The hypocrisy is nauseating, especially given the Bill has nothing to do with ‘trolling’ – whatever that actually means – or online bullying.

Even the AG Department’s Defamation Taskforce secretary said that the term “anti-trolling” might be a tad misleading, given the bill’s contents are “about defamation”, NOT trolling, and “it is not intended to address broader types of online harm”.

The right to remain anonymous is fundamental to the right to free speech and to hold dissenting opinions.

It applies every bit as much in the digital world as it does in the physical one.

As the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brandeis said: “Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority.”

Anonymity protects the vulnerable citizen from reprisals by government, industry and individuals; reprisals that can take the form of job loss, financial penalty, legal harassment and even physical injury and danger to family.

Unfortunately, the right to remain anonymous has been under steady attack in Australia for two decades now.

This attack has turned into an absolute barrage since February 2020.

DIGITAL IDENTITY FOR DIRECTORS’ LAW, SERVES THE INTERESTS OF GLOBAL CAPITAL – NOT AUSTRALIANS

Last year, amendments to the Corporations Act were passed, requiring ALL of Australia’s 2.7 million company directors to obtain personal Digital IDs, by no later than 30 November 2022.

Penalties for non-compliance include fines of between $1.1 and $26.6 million, and even imprisonment in some cases.

The Minister for the Digital Economy, Jane Hume, said at the time, that the new system would help business owners by “saving them time and reducing red tape”.

To obtain a Digital Identity, every director MUST provide all their ‘ID verification documents’ through a myGovID account.

They will then be issued with a 15 digit Identification Number that belongs to them forever, wherever they work and wherever they go in the world.

The Director Identity Numbers are not issued domestically, but through the International Office of Standardisation, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

The ISO, along with its partners in the UN and WEF, promote Director IDs “as essential for global trade reasons, to ensure a global ‘level playing field’ of standards and metrics for all the worlds products, services and human capital”.

According to the World Bank:

“Digital ID will .. provide empirical evidence about the role of the board of directors as a strategic decisionmaker in the company’s contributions to the achievement of the SDG targets.”

“This includes board parameters, such as board size; diversity; independence; and the presence or absence of ESG committees that measure the relationship of directors with SDG and ESG metrics”.

So basically, not really about “saving time and reducing red tape” then!

The Director’s identity system, we are told by WEF, UN, the World Bank and countless other global bodies, falls under SDG Target 16.9, which requires ALL “human capital products”, to be tagged, measured and monitored.

The Director ID will be used for all sorts of ‘predictive profiling’ by world regulators, with every director in the world assigned a ‘risk rating’ based on the metrics assigned to their individual characteristics, habits and behaviour.

Information stored on the Digital ID will initially contain just the basics, but over time, ALL sorts of meta-data will be added, using the magic of blockchain technology.

Listen to Charles Hoskinson speaking on Cardano’s global partnerships:

“Blockchain” he says, “is about the state being able to identify if you are a “good actor” and worthy of having a job, whether in the public or private sector”.

It is all part of what the UN calls the new “Trust” architecture where the lives of every single human being are to become digitised, remotely-programmable and blockchained.

This is truly Black Mirror stuff, and yet it’s all really happening folks.