The Pirate Party commemorates the memory of Aaron Swartz: hacker, activist, and Internet freedom fighter.

Today we commemorate the birth of Internet freedom fighter Aaron Swartz in Brooklyn, New York City on November 8th 1986. As co-founder of Reddit and contributor to the RSS1.0 web specification, he was immersed in computers, technology and internet culture from a young age. But It was his download of hundreds of thousands of academic journal entries in 2010 that became his greatest act of self sacrifice. For the crime of legally accessing journal articles through his JSTOR account granted by Harvard, he was punished with $1 million dollars in fines and a 35 year jail sentence that was never carried out after he died of suicide on January 11th 2013.[1][2] His fight for freedom of access to scientific knowledge is carried on by Alexandra Elbakyan, the founder of https://scihub.org/ [3]

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The Pirate Party renews its calls for greater transparency and participation in treaty negotiation, following the latest leaked draft of the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) that shows the agreement is likely to impose anti-privacy and anti-freedom of speech obligations upon Australia[1]. These provisions would benefit large multinational corporations and governments at the cost of the rights of the citizens, and are being negotiated behind closed doors.

“Democracy is under threat, not from terrorism or rising global tensions, but from secretly negotiated treaties like the Trade in Services Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” said Simon Frew, Deputy President of the Pirate Party. “Provisions too severe to be proposed domestically for fear of being summarily booted from office are being included in treaty negotiations to be swallowed as a bitter pill along with what might otherwise be sensible proposals. TISA is the latest in a long line of secret treaties that have adopted this strategy, and must be opposed as vigorously as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement before it.”

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Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, has recently called for the development of an “Internet Users’ Bill of Rights” as part of the “web we want” campaign[1]. Against this backdrop, Pirate Party Australia renews its calls for a global treaty to enshrine net neutrality, freedom from state control, and protection for private communication, free expression and unrestricted access to information[2]. In 2012 the United Nations Human Rights Council effectively declared that Internet access should be a human right, and that the same rights that people take for granted offline must be also enshrined online[3].

“Many of the rights we take for granted are being violated online because the Internet is still be treated as a dark and scary place,” said Fletcher Boyd, lead candidate for the Senate in WA. “The approach taken by governments and intelligence agencies is fundamentally misguided. The Internet is not separate to society, it is a key part of how our society functions. Our rights must be respected online just as much as they are offline.”

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After an announcement eight months ago that it would be trialling a system to reduce the speed of certain types of data, Telstra has confirmed it will be going ahead with a controversial network management trial. The telco has said it was conducting the trial to identify different options and pricing plans for its customers in an attempt to manage congestion issues[1].

Among the types of data being ‘throttled’ is peer-to-peer traffic, and participants in the trial will be asked about speed differences with applications such as BitTorrent. This raises concerns for the Pirate Party with regard to Internet traffic prioritisation.

Pirate Party Australia considers that ‘net neutrality’ — where types of traffic are not discriminate against — is essential for modern Australia. The Party’s policy pushes for a ban on screening and prioritising of traffic based on content, source or destination, with opt-in prioritisation if subscribers choose[2].

“Net neutrality is vital for a free Internet,” said Simon Frew, President of Pirate Party Australia. “Throttling certain services and promoting others will damage any new service or product coming online. Differentiated services is a slippery slope to a situation where companies could pay for their content to be prioritised. The next Google or Facebook, being a start-up would not have access to a comparable speed and would find it more difficult to compete with the more powerful incumbents purely because they could only afford access to the B-Grade Internet. For the Internet to remain a place of innovation any attempt to benefit some sections at the cost of others must be resisted.”

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Pirate Party Australia is alarmed at reports that Telstra plans to slow the speed of peer-to-peer traffic which may involve the use of deep packet inspection (DPI) to determine data prioritisation[1].

Peer-to-peer networks are decentralised methods of distributing content, making them robust against server outages, and spreads the responsibility of serving content across the network rather than being limited by a single provider.

Many different applications rely on peer-to-peer connections, such as the telephone software Skype, and the updating software for popular games such as World of Warcraft. Deep packet inspection (DPI) involves examining each segment of data that is downloaded and uploaded by a computer connected to the Internet, effectively wiretapping your Internet connection.

Pirate Party Australia objects to the plans on the grounds that an Internet service provider (ISP) should remain as impartial as possible to the types of traffic flowing through their network, and the potential privacy concerns that DPI raises.

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