On January 18 many websites have gone, or will go, on strike voluntarily[1] to demonstrate against the threat of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) bills, pending US legislation that would restrict freedom of speech, negatively impact economies, and degrade internet security. Participation in the strike has been confirmed by Wikipedia[2], Reddit, Mozilla, and Free Software Foundation, among others. Many organizations, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, have expressed grave concerns over the bills[3].

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Results of Pirate Party Australia’s recent National Congress are in.

The annual National Congress took place on the last weekend of October this year, and the results of the week-long voting process are able to be announced.

Pirate Party Australia passed all motions with the exception of the proposal to change their official colours from blue to purple, which failed to achieve the necessary two-thirds majority.

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Pirate Congress 2011 is nearly over, all we need to do is vote!

A big thank you to those that attended or participated remotely in the debate on Saturday and Sunday, in Sydney. We hope that many more will attend in Melbourne, July 2012.

We have emailed out voting links to all our registered members to vote on the motions and National Council positions. There are thirteen (13) motions that need to go to a vote by all members and there are three (3) positions that are contested and require a vote. Voting will be open for seven (7) days.

The voting system we are using has been developed in house to use a blind signature scheme whereby we can’t determine who made a particular vote only that it is a valid vote.

In order to ensure the legitimacy of this election we are posting the public key for this election – only votes signed with this key are valid. We have posted the hash of a file that contains information that will ensure that in the event that the votes are disputed the election results can be validated. We are working towards a system where you can see for your self that the election is sound and when finished the information below will be used to prove this.

Poll public keys:
X: 9e4c0442226957f92f58b18ee490e3d8b77b3dcf635931db64cf843eb8993bd7
Y: 1b9ef4861cac86856b2fab9bbdb6d4204985eb678f611868f0a268ff4429c1f3

SHA256 of proof file:
77f02363c06599690f73c085418be9594efb097a8cd808171b69462da9490329

Since Pirate Party Australia highlighted[1] major flaws in the recently released discussion paper by the Attorney-General’s Department, it has come to our attention that the paper has been quietly changed to a very redacted version with no public notification. This is an unacceptably opaque attack on our civil liberties, and only further highlights the Government’s continual attempts to limit the public’s involvement in any governmental decision making.

There are significant changes to the redacted version. The title of the original paper is “Revising the Scope of the Copyright ‘Safe Harbour Scheme’ & The Process of Seeking ISP Subscriber Details in Copyright Infringement Matters” while the suddenly redacted version is entitled simply “Revising the Scope of the Copyright ‘Safe Harbour Scheme’”

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