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studies
This note considers studies of government responses to
seditious speech and seditious content on the net.
Literature on 'cyberterrorism' (variously defined), cyberwarfare
and 'hate online' is now a minor genre, with a large number
of works (albeit of distinctly uneven quality). We have
highlighted particular studies in discussing online security
& infocrime and hatespeech.
These range from Cyberwars: Espionage on the Internet
(Cambridge: Perseus 1999) by Jean Guisnel, Terror
on the Internet: The New Arena, the New Challenges
(Washington: USIP Press 2006) by Gabriel Weimann and Netspionage:
The Global Threats To Information (London: Butterworth
2000) by William Boni & Gerald Kovacich to Information
Security Management: Global Challenges in the New Millennium
(Hershey: Idea 2001) edited by Gurpreet Dhillon, Cyber-Threats,
Information Warfare & Critical Infrastructure Protection
(Westport: Praeger 2002) by Anthony Cordesman, Information
Warfare & Security (New York: Addison-Wesley 1999)
by Dorothy Denning and Islam in the Digital Age: E-jihad,
Online Fatwas and Cyber Islamic Environments (London:
Pluto Press 2003) by Gary Bunt. Government studies include
the US Department of Justice report
on The Electronic Frontier: The Challenge of Unlawful
Conduct Involving the Use of the Internet.
In contrast to the growing literature on cyberwar and
contemporary terrorism there is surprisingly little recent
writing about responses to sedition. Much of it is narrowly
historical or concerned with the development and reception
of particular ideologies.
Janet Coleman's Against the state: studies in sedition
and rebellion (London: BBC 1990) is a point of entry
to the substantial historical literature on sedition in
pre-industrial and industrial Europe.
Past practice in Australia is explored in Roger Douglas'
2002 study
Saving Australia from Sedition: Customs, the Attorney-General's
Department and the Administration of Peacetime Political
Censorship. For the 1949 Sharkey and Gilbert cases
see Stuart Macintyre's The Reds: The Communist Party
of Australia from origins to illegality (St Leonards:
Allen & Unwin 1998), Robin Gollan's Revolutionaries
& Reformists: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party
of Australia, 1920-1955 (Canberra: ANU Press 1975),
Ross Fitzgerald's The People's Champion: Fred Paterson,
Australia's Only Communist Member of Parliament (St
Lucia: Uni of Queensland Press 1997) and John Murphy's
Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political
Culture in Memzies' Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press
2000).
There has been no wide-ranging study of sedition in New
Zealand. Particular case studies are highlighted on the
final page of this note.
For pre-1950s anti-sedition and subversion regimes in
the US see John Miller's Crisis in Freedom: The Alien
& Sedition Acts (Boston: Little Brown 1951),
Library of Congress page
on the federalist era legislation, the Montana Sedition
Project site
and associated Darkest Before Dawn: Sedition and Free
Speech in the American West (Albuquerque: Uni of
New Mexico Press 2004) by Clemens Work. For a perspective
on more recent times see It Did Happen Here: Recollections
of Political Repression in America (Berkeley: Uni
of California Press 1989) by Bud Schultz, Ruth Schultz
& Victor Navasky
More recent perspectives from China and Malaysia are the
RSF report
on Chinese censorship of chat rooms, the 2003 Information
Control and Self-Censorship in the PRC and the Spread
of SARS report (PDF)
by the US Congressional Executive Commission on China,
2003 Memorandum on the Malaysian Sedition Act 1948
(PDF)
by Article 19 and Davidson, Friesen & Jackson's 2001
'Lawyers and the Rule of Law on Trial: Sedition Prosecutions
in Malaysia 'in Criminal Law Forum 2001.
next page (Australia)
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