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As regular visitors to the Westborough Library, we were appalled to witness the actions of one resident, at the town meeting where she voted against funding the library, due to her opinions about book content and demands to have it removed from the childrens section.

Defund the library because we dont like a book?

After the meeting with the Library Trustees, it became apparent this was never about relocating to another section. This was an attempt at censorship and its dangerous.

We need to Talk About Vaginas written for children 10-14, is meant to educate about anatomy and experiences during puberty. This is not a book written for teenagers.

As parents, its our responsibility to determine what our children can and cannot read, not another adults. If we dont want our children to read a certain book we can simply have them pick something else. You dont remove that choice from another parent.

For women, the relocation/removal of this particular book is deeply concerning. The underlying message is that girls should be ashamed of their bodies. Girls are taught to cover up their bodies because its distracting to boys. As a society we continue to perpetuate these messages through impactful transgressions such as removing a book from the library because it made some people uncomfortable.

If we begin relocating books for discomfort, the next step will be banning them. The argument now is no one wants to ban books, thats not what this is however its unclear where to draw that line. This is the beginning of censorship if allowed.

Consider the voices that arent as loud as the ones complaining and dont have the social capital to advocate. More importantly, think of the children that desperately need this book and the library to be a place for safe learning. These voices matter.

Staff of WPL, thank you. We have tremendous respect for how you handle the challenges you are placed in due to the harmful ideologies of a few residents. Those few do NOT represent the majority of this town.

Respectfully,

Sara McCabeBrandin TumeinskiWestborough

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'This was an attempt at censorship and it's dangerous' - Community Advocate

Artists and other cultural workers are deeply concerned about the politicisation of boards and leadership in their sector and its impact on their ability to do their work and the sectors ability to grow.

A report released this week by the Campaign for Free Expression (CFE), The State of Free Expression in the South African Cultural Sector: An Investigation, has highlighted how the Cultural Institutions Act of 1998 has given the minister of sports, arts and culture overarching power in selecting board members and chairpersons of arts funding agencies.

This is of great concern to cultural workers because the minister himself as well as the ministers who have preceded him have had little knowledge of the arts.

Culture workers said an environment has been created where many board members and chairpersons are appointed not because of merit, skill or knowledge, but through their proximity to and agreeability towards the minister. This has affected the sector as the needs of cultural workers have been neglected for the sake of power and money.

This has set the stage for decision-making over funding to be influenced by bias rather than through the lens of maintaining and encouraging growth and sustainability in the sector.

In 2020, the government introduced the Presidential Economic Stimulus Programme (PESP) fund through the National Arts Council (NAC). It was established during the peak of the Covid-19 outbreak to encourage economic growth in the arts and culture sector.

But what was meant to create financial security for many cultural workers and arts organisations during a tumultuous time became a maladministration saga embroiled in power dynamics and bad-faith practices. There were cries of outrage from cultural workers as the NAC was exposed for maladministration of the more than R300-million in PESP funds.

Read more in Daily Maverick: The National Arts Council of South Africa has become a secretive little shop of horrors

There were a significant number of successful applications to the PESP fund that benefited existing NAC board members (which created a conflict of interest), successful applications from the same individuals under multiple organisation names, as well as successful applications from deregistered organisations or organisations in the process of deregistering.

In March 2021, cultural workers conducted a two-month sit-in to protest against mismanagement and maladministration in the NAC. This resulted in an independent investigation in which senior officials were found to have mismanaged funds.

The sit-in and news of the NACs mishandlings raised further questions regarding the politicisation of boards in arts funding agencies and the subsequent impact it has had on the state of free expression in the cultural sector.

In the CFE report, cultural workers lament that the politicisation of boards and the lack of strategic leadership have created an atmosphere that breeds censorship. Respondents in the CFE research said there were genuine fears of intimidation, threats of violence, silencing and withdrawal of funds if they chose to speak out against the lack of transparency and mismanagement of arts funding agencies and other publicly funded organisations.

According to cultural workers, censorship is not limited to issues of arts funding agencies but also affects artists work. Cultural workers who create provocative work that challenges the political or social status quo also face censure and discrimination by conservative leadership which often leads to self-censorship where workers fear a backlash if they produce politically disruptive art.

In the CFE report, the matter of self-censorship arose regarding the impact it has on artists, their work and the sector.

Respondents said the sector loses out on important opportunities of social and political commentary that might inspire or disrupt the stagnant social and political structures in the country by silencing themselves and by minimising the impact of their work.

Read more in Daily Maverick: While millionaires and politicians fiddle, South African art and culture burns

The practice and exercise of free expression is crucial for cultural workers and our greater society. Cultural workers in this country have historically disrupted the political status quo and should continue to do so, to challenge the issues of politicisation, maladministration and censorship in the arts and culture sector.

In challenging the wrongdoings of arts funding agencies and the Arts and Culture Department as well as continuing to create safe, expressive spaces where they can share knowledge, strategies, lessons opportunities and experiences, cultural workers can work towards a future where there is a large shift in the sustainability and growth of the sector.

Go to http://www.freeexpression.org to read more on the state of free expression in the South African cultural sector. DM

Thokozani Mbwana is a researcher-writer and poet working in human rights. Their interests lie in LGBTIQ+ rights, free expression, transitional justice and ethical research practices. They serve as Project Manager at the Campaign for Free Expression, a non-profit advocacy organisation that defends and expands the right of all to express themselves.

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Suppressing the arts: censorship in the cultural sector - Daily Maverick

The annual LSU Faculty Council Meeting held Monday allowed faculty and staff to express concerns and have open dialogue with LSU President William Tate IV.

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LSU faculty and staff raised concerns about censorship in classrooms, campus infrastructure and budgets Monday during the annual Faculty Council Meeting.

We as faculty, we as educators, need to be able to have the freedom to have these hard conversations that maybe people dont want to have, but its important because we are in higher education," LSU Librarian Randa Lopez Morgan said.

Morgan spoke on behalf of faculty members worried about not being allowed to teach or discuss topics like diversity and critical race theory with students and asked how the university plans to support them.

President William Tate said that censorship is currently a resolution that could make its way into legislative discussion, but that it is not yet a bill.

"There is no bill at this point," President Tate said. "Its a resolution, which obviously will generate lots of discussion. Our job is to keep that from happening in a bill format.

Faculty members also brought up budgeting, infrastructure concerns and a new tenure bill which President Tate said will be a focus this year.

"We laid out some of the matters that we are working with them on this year to secure faculty raises, to secure support for graduate students, more support for the physical infrastructure buildings, including the library," President Tate said.

President Tate said he is hopeful the Legislature will support legislation for a new library.

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Censorship, budgets and infrastructure: LSU Faculty Council Meeting - TigerTV

The enduring popularity of Bitcoin is largely due to the fact that no third party controls it, including governments. But even if that's the case, the currency's developers are constantly mulling over how powerful entities could poke holes in the technology, attack it, or bend the rules.

One potential attack vector on Bitcoin is that the nodes on the network communicate with each other via unencrypted traffic. Powerful interests like governments and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) could use this weakness to wage "man in the middle" attacks on Bitcoin nodes, where they can secretly gather information about sent transactions.

To combat this, BIP 324 is a long-standing Bitcoin Improvement Proposal to encrypt traffic between nodes on the Bitcoin network. This makes network metadata, like the location a transaction is coming from, more private, making it harder for snoops to spy on what users are doing.

The project was revived in 2021 by Bitcoin Core developer Dhruv Mehta, following up on work done by former Bitcoin Core maintainer Jonas Schnelli over the years.

And the project is nearing completion. Most of the code is already written and Bitcoin users are already testing the code on the main Bitcoin network. It just needs more developers to test and review the changes to get it fully over the line.

Mehta's been heads down on bringing BIP 324 to life because he sees it as an important change for keeping Bitcoin out of the control of powerful entities. If powerful entities with access to what users are doing onlinesuch as ISPs and governmentscan passively figure out what nodes are up to and where transactions are coming from, they can be easily stopped or "censored," which Bitcoin was expressly designed to avoid.

He sees this sort of an attack as increasingly likely as Bitcoin grows. He explained that the "philosophical reason" for working on BIP 324 is because governments will try to figure out how to stop Bitcoin if it continues to gain steam..

One natural target would be Bitcoin "nodes,the thousands of computers run by volunteers around the world that run the Bitcoin software. These nodes are what make up Bitcoin behind the scenes.

"If they can attack nodes, they can make it very hard for you to use Bitcoin, Mehta explained.. They can eclipse your node. They can identify that you are running a Bitcoin Core node. They can identify the source of the transactions. They can make it very very hard to run the node.," Mehta explained.

Though it's not just governments he worries about, but any entity with enough resources to wage such an attack.

"I'm less interested in who might do it, I'm more interested in what's possible to do, he said.. If something is possible and there's an incentive to do it, then any entity might do it. It's easy to speculate about governments because they have seemingly infinite resources, but could it be ISPs? Maybe. If the shadow banks are impacted could it be them? Maybe," he explained.

That's not to say that BIP 324 will fully prevent these sorts of attacks will end full stop with BIP 324. Bitcoin is a permissionless system. Anyone can participate by running a node and connecting to other nodes in the network. "A man-in-the-middle attack just looks like another node. You can't really stop that," Mehta said.

But BIP 324 does make gathering this data much harder. The attacker would need to connect to, -- or "man-in-the-middle," -- every node that it wants to gather information from.

WNot to mention, without BIP 324, an adversary could collect information about these nodes without even being noticed. With BIP 324, it's easier to notice when an attacker is trying to collect this information, because they have to make explicit connections to each node that they want to gather information from.

"You're no longer a passive adversary who can do this covertly," Mehta said.

Making all these individual connections is alsomuch more expensive. "If you raise the bar from passive to active, then it takes a lot more resources to do these things, so what then happens is, there has to be a bigger reason to do it." Mehta said, adding: "Today [attackers] could go after very small amounts of Bitcoin because they can potentially be so targeted with it."

Implementing BIP 324, when implemented, will make Bitcoin stronger, even if it doesn't eliminatewipe out the attack vector completely. "I want the worst case scenario to be less bad," Mehtahe said.

See more here:
This Upgrade Could Make It Harder for Governments to Censor Bitcoin - Decrypt

ALA hopes to spark community action with the day, which will culminate with a virtual conversation,"Protecting Free Expression and the Right to Read,"hosted by Unite Against Book Bans coalition partners.

The American Library Association (ALA) has declared Monday, April 24 as Right to Read Day. Monday is the first day of National LibraryWeek.

The national call to action comes on the one-year anniversary of ALA launching its UniteAgainst Book Bans campaign. ALA offers suggestions for the public to act, including borrow a library book at risk of being banned, write a letter to the editor or to an elected leader, attend a meeting of local officials or library or school board, and stage a public event or peaceful protest in support of libraries.

In addition, Unite Against Book Banscoalition partners will host "Protecting Free Expression and the Right to Read," a virtual conversation at 7 p.m. Eastern. The event will feature ALA president Lessa Kanani'opua Pelayo-Lozada, PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel, NCAC executive director Christopher Finan, and Judy Blume Forever documentaryco-directors Leah Wolchok andDavina Pardoin a discussion of Blumes work and the surge of censorship across the country. It is free, but registrationis required.

Also on Monday,ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom will release the list of Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2022.

Read the press release below.

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ALA Announces Right to Read Day, a Call to Action to Protect ... - School Library Journal