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More than 100 staff members at State Library Victoria have written to its chief executive expressing anger at the postponement of a series of writing workshops, claiming the events were scrapped because of the pro-Palestinian views held by the writers hosting them.

The Teen Writing Bootcamps, which were to be conducted by six writers - four of whom had publicly expressed strong opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza - were suddenly cancelled last week without giving the hosts or attendees a clear reason for the move. A statement from the library at the time said the events were postponed due to concerns around the safety of participants, presenters and facilitators.

Three sources working at the library with knowledge of the events have told this masthead the workshops were postponed because of the political views held by the writers.

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The library’s head of audience engagement, Angharad Wynne-Jones, resigned last Thursday. Three library sources said her resignation was directly related to postponement of the events. Wynne-Jones did not respond to questions, and the library said it did not comment on individual staff.

Library staff who spoke to this masthead, speaking anonymously because they were fearful of their employment being placed in jeopardy, said they were concerned and frustrated by the lack of transparency shown by management, pointing to conflicting internal statements and inconsistencies between internal and external communications.

In response to growing internal backlash at the decision made by library management, staff began circulating a letter criticising the way the writers had been treated. The letter accuses the chief executive, board and executive team of undermining the institution’s values and sending a message of “discrimination and censorship”.

Freedom of opinion and expression, academic freedom, even freedom of conviction and belief are in grave danger when governments adopt chauvinistic legislation that demonizes other nations and cultures and pretends to divide the world into “democracies” and “autocracies”, into the “good guys” and the “bad guys”.  This kind of epistemological Manichaeism encompasses what we call “exceptionalism”, with its brazen double standards.  The US sets the rules, the so-called “rules-based international order”, which it applies arbitrarily, notwithstanding the existing order established in the United Nations Charter.

This epistemological chaos is aggravated when criminal legislation is adopted that criminalizes dissent, even in social media, even in private exchanges. Over the past thirty years we have witnessed a steady exacerbation of Russophobic and Sinophobic tendencies that have been instrumentalized by governments to fan the flames of hatred and increase the cacophony of the drums of war.  The logic of fanaticism has its own dynamic, as hatred feeds on hatred.

Fear-mongering and hate-mongering has been used to justify provocations and ultimately the use of force, both militarily and in the form of unilateral coercive measures UCMs, wrongly referred to as “sanctions”.  Here again we find ourselves caught in the web of our own propaganda and ready-made prejudices.  We put labels on our perceived rivals, and call them undemocratic, dictators, tyrants, murderers.  We misuse the term “sanctions”, because we want to convey the impression that we possess the moral or legal authority to punish other States, individuals, and enterprises.  We behave as prosecutors, judges and juries.

According to international law, only the Security Council possesses the authority to impose sanctions.  Everything else entails the illegal “use of force”, specifically prohibited in article 2 (4) of the UN Charter.

 As they hyperventilate about TikTok, US politicians are so eager to appear “tough on China” that they’re suggesting we build our very own Great Firewall here at home. There is a small but growing number of countries in the world so authoritarian that they block popular apps and websites entirely. It’s regrettable that so many US lawmakers want to add us to that list.

Several of the proposals wending their way through Congress would grant the federal government unprecedented new powers to control what technology we can use and how we can express ourselves – authority that goes far beyond TikTok. The bipartisan RESTRICT Act (S. 686), for example, would enable the Commerce Department to engage in extraordinary acts of policing, criminalizing a wide range of activities with companies from “hostile” countries and potentially even banning entire apps simply by declaring them a threat to national security. 

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The law is vague enough that some experts have raised concerns that it could threaten individual internet users with lengthy prison sentences for taking steps to “evade” a ban, like side-loading an app (i.e., bypassing approved app distribution channels such as the Apple store) or using a virtual private network (VPN). 

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A ban on TikTok wouldn’t even be effective: The Chinese government could purchase much of the same information from data brokers, which are largely unregulated in the US.

The rush to ban TikTok – or force its sale to a US company – is a convenient distraction from what our elected officials should be doing to protect us from government manipulation and commercial surveillance: passing basic data privacy legislation. It’s a matter of common knowledge that Instagram, YouTube, Venmo, Snapchat and most of the other apps on your phone engage in similar data harvesting business practices to TikTok. Some are even worse. `

The relatively measured tone adopted by top intelligence officials contrasts sharply with the alarmism emanating from Congress. In 2022, Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., deemed TikTok “digital fentanyl,” going on to co-author a column in the Washington Post with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., calling for TikTok to be banned. Gallagher and Rubio later introduced legislation to do so, and 39 states have, as of this writing, banned the use of TikTok on government devices.

None of this is to say that China hasn’t used TikTok to influence public opinion and even, it turns out, to try to interfere in American elections. “TikTok accounts run by a [People’s Republic of China] propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022,” says the annual Intelligence Community threat assessment released on Monday. But the assessment provides no evidence that TikTok coordinated with the Chinese government. In fact, governments — including the United States — are known to use social media to influence public opinion abroad.

“The problem with TikTok isn’t related to their ownership; it’s a problem of surveillance capitalism and it’s true of all social media companies,” computer security expert Bruce Schneier told The Intercept. “In 2016 Russia did this with Facebook and they didn’t have to own Facebook — they just bought ads like everybody else.”`

In 2014, the Religious Right’s morale reached its lowest point. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed in 2011. Same-sex marriage looked inevitable as court after court struck down ban after ban behind a wave of rising public support. Time magazine had declared a “transgender tipping point.” It was here that the Right made a decision to shift their culture-war focus to transgender people. Simultaneously, they began funding ostensibly feminist anti-trans groups like the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), which took $15,000 in seed money from the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Religious Right legal group dedicated to basing U.S. law on the Bible.

At the 2017 Values Voters Summit hosted by the Family Research Council, Meg Kilgannon outlined the religious right’s plan to co-opt anti-trans feminist groups, and use their feminist-sounding language to seem more secular while hiding the true motivation behind their animus. Ultimately, they would loop back around to finish off LGB people once the trans community had been dealt with.

“For all of its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile, and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them. Gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far. If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success.”

US senators have defeated a measure, introduced by Bernie Sanders, that would have made military aid to Israel conditional on whether the Israeli government is violating human rights and international accords in its devastating war in Gaza.

A majority of senators struck down the proposal on Tuesday evening, with 72 voting to kill the measure, and 11 supporting it. Although Sanders’ effort was easily defeated, it was a notable test that reflected growing unease among Democrats over US support for Israel.

The measure was a first-of-its-kind tapping into a decades-old law that would require the US state department to, within 30 days, produce a report on whether the Israeli war effort in Gaza is violating human rights and international accords. If the administration failed to do so, US military aid to Israel, long assured without question, could be quickly halted.

“I thought it would be really funny if a stranger came over asking to do a poo,” explained Will. They never did, and about a year ago Will moved out.

Recently, Will had a look to see if Big Dumpers was still marked on Google Maps. It was. He was getting monthly emails about the performance of his business with information on how many people had viewed it or clicked to see its phone number.

But looking at the app’s listing for the “business”, Will spotted something that he didn’t find as funny. Like many other businesses, Google Maps showed a “Popular times” graph depicting how popular the location is using information provided by Google users who’ve agreed to let the app access their geolocation data. 9AM on Thursday was a busy time for Big Dumpers, according to Google Maps, but completely empty later in the day. 

What clicked in Will’s mind is that he had inadvertently created a public tracker of when people were in his share house — almost certainly without their knowledge. Will quickly voluntarily “closed” his business on Google but the listing remained up afterwards.

After being informed of the exploit by Crikey, founder of Australian information security company DVULN Jamieson O’Reilly said that his review of Google’s technical material corroborated Will’s understanding of the situation.

“My gut tells me you could list any place as a business then if the residents had opted in to location services you could totally use it to measure someone’s patterns,” he said.

In May, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and LA Metro launched the biggest Universal Basic Mobility experiment ever attempted in the U.S., giving 1,000 South Los Angeles residents a “mobility wallet” — a debit card with $150 per month to spend on transportation.

The catch? Funds can be used to take the bus, ride the train, rent a shared e-scooter, take micro-transit, rent a car-share, take an Uber or Lyft, or even purchase an e-bike — but they can’t be spent on the cost of owning or operating a car.

The year-long pilot, ending in April, has the dual goals of increasing mobility for low-income residents and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s a radical experiment based on a simple idea: People know what they need. Give them the money to go where they want to go, and they will improve the quality of their lives.

It’s the biggest experiment in Universal Basic Mobility in the U.S., but it is not the first. 

“I’m scared to death” about the level of voter distrust heading into 2024, said Mark Earley, the supervisor of elections in Leon County, Florida, which includes the capital of Tallahassee.

Earley’s comments were echoed by dozens of others among a crowd of nearly 100 local election workers who gathered in Crystal City, Virginia, last week for an annual confab hosted by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

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The two-day event was supposed to be a forum for local officials to review and rehearse often mundane election administration practices, like handling mail safely or responding to severe weather events.

But concerns about voter distrust and conspiracies cropped up repeatedly even though they claimed no formal place on the agenda. During group breakout sessions, hallway conversations and coffee breaks, attendees expressed both alarm and exasperation about how difficult it was to convince some Americans that the vote could be trusted.

“It doesn’t matter what you do, what we say or how much we educate the skeptics,” Kellie Harris Hopkins, the director of elections in Beaufort County, North Carolina, said during a roundtable. Roughly a dozen other officials nodded their heads, snapped their fingers or murmured in agreement.

While federal officials and state leaders often act as the face of election integrity at the national level, it is local election workers who actually run U.S. elections, doing everything from processing ballots to checking in voters.

That also means they’re the ones who most directly confront election conspiracy theories — and the violence and intimidation they increasingly fuel.

One in six election workers have experienced threats because of their job, and 77 percent said those threats had increased in recent years, according to a March 2022 study from NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, capturing the impact of false election fraud claims by Donald Trump and his allies since 2020.