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The British magazine was extremely popular with readers but not with the Irish censor. Its portraits of ireland are timeless, however

In his memoir thelong-time editor of the Irish Press Tim Pat Coogan recalls a story that the firms controlling director, Vivion de Valera, once told him.

It concerned Vivions schooldays at Blackrock College and how he had once been summoned to the college presidents office. There, the future Catholic archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid instructed Vivion to review a pile of newspaper cuttings of full-page adverts for Clearys department store. The adverts, Coogan recounts, included small line drawings of women modelling underwear of a design which reflected the modest standards of the Ireland of that era. To the somewhat baffled Vivion, McQuaid pointed out the insidious immorality of the drawings. Some of them, if one used a magnifying glass, indicated the outline of a mons veneris.

The hint was duly delivered by Vivion to his father, amon de Valera, then taoiseach and controlling director of the Irish Press. But ecclesiastical policing of the press extended beyond Irish newspapers: the presence of undesirable British newspapers, particularly the hugely popular Picture Post, represented a contagion of immorality, indecency and obscenity.

Published in London as a photojournalismmagazine between 1938 and 1957, it sold more than 1.5 million copies a week, and quickly attracted the ire of Irish clerics because of what the magazines historian David J Marcou has called the vitality, humour, and pathos of its reflections and dreams, as well as the intelligence of its layouts and interests.

The human interest aspect of its photoessays covered everything from swimwear contests to urban life, crime and art and would lead the Picture Post to be the most frequently banned British publication in Ireland. Less than three months after its launch came the first complaint to the censorship of publications board. In February 1939 the Rev JA Twomey protested against the indecent and suggestive pictorial matter contained in several editions of the Picture Post, which has a wide sale in each week in Cork.

The following month brought a letter from the Rev MJ Hennelly of Tuam, who lodged an official complaint with the censorship board on the grounds that the magazine was indecent and obscene. It seems that photographs of art were the source of this objection, with Hennelly declaring that such images may be alright for the art-lover, but for the ordinary boy and girl they are abominably suggestive.

But for a publication to be banned it had to be found to have been indecent or obscene over several sequential issues;isolated instances could not be punished. In an attempt to demonstrate the sequential indecency of the magazine, John Charles McQuaid, while still president of Blackrock College, lodged a lengthy and detailed official complaint with the censorship board. He alleged that obscenity and indecency had occurred 12 times in the issue of January 21st, 1939; eight times in the edition of January 28th; six times in the February 4th edition; 12 times in the February 11th edition; and eight times in the February 25th edition.

Among the items that McQuaid objected to in the latter two editions were a photograph of a woman model in a swimsuit; a photograph showing the lower legs of women roller-skaters; photographs of statues of the female form at Crystal Palace in London; photographs of women mud wrestlers; and a photograph of a painting of a nude woman sleeping on a couch.

Despite McQuaids complaint the magazine was not banned, though Picture Post was obviously informed of Irish sensitivities as it voluntarily removed two pages Painters of Paris from an April 1939 edition. Despite this attempt at sanitising the magazine for Irish readers, complaints continued.

In October 1939, Ellie Kelly, a Dublin newsagent, complained that the magazine had a huge circulation in the city and noted that its terrible to think this awful filth is in a Christian country. She also recorded how she had refused to stock the magazine and had refereed it to the priests of the parish.

Those priests would no doubt have been aghast at the description of Ireland in the November 4th edition. Drawing on his time in Dublin earlier in the decade, Orson Welles declared that censorship of books and controlled education have produced a crop of young men as blankly ignorant of the modern world as if they lived in the thirteenth century, mentally concentrated upon the idea of bringing the Protestant North under Catholic control in the sacred name of national unity.

Referring to the IRAs bombing of Coventry the previous August, Welles asserted that the attack had been carried out by young priest-taught men who purify their souls at mass and confession before they leave a bomb in a London underground station.

Describing the Catholic Church as that clumsy system of frustration, that strange compendium of ancient traditions and habit systems, he declared it as the most formidable single antagonist in the way of human adjustment.

Unsurprisingly, complaints flooded into the censorship board: one letter described it as nothing short of a national scandal that such journals should be allowed to enter Irish homes; another described Welless article as highly blasphemous; yet another described Picture Post as not fit reading for the family in our Catholic state.

The Rev Thomas Burke from Connemara asked: in the name of God and Ireland, why has this indecent, blasphemous production even been allowed to enter this country? He hastened to add that the edition that he had read was given to me recently by a friend.

Official complaints also flowed in, with Francis OReilly, secretary of the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, itemising content from four sequential editions as being indecent or obscene. Similarly, McQuaid lodged an official complaint itemising content from three sequential editions as indecent or obscene. On this occasion, Picture Post was, on the advice of the censorship board, banned by the minister for justice, Gerry Boland, for three months.

The date of the ban was December 16th, 1939, but, at the request of the magazines distributor, Eason and Sons, the justice department held back publishing the official notice in the government gazette, Iris Oifigiuil. This allowed Easons to distribute the edition of December 20th, 1939, which had already arrived in Ireland. However, a request that the December 27th edition 26,000 copies of which were in Liverpool awaiting dispatch to Dublin be allowed to circulate in the State, subject to the justice department clearing its content, was denied.

The ban prompted a rare protest from members of the public. In January 1940 a petition signed by 35 people from Waterford, Kilkenny, Louth and Dublin was sent to the censorship board. Describing Picture Post as one of the most human, impartial, and democratic papers recently circulating in Eire, the petition argued that an occasional representation of nudity or semi-nudity, in a periodical which aims at giving a comprehensive view of modern life, does not constitute a general tendency to indecency. It concluded by noting that any action whose chief effect is to hinder the free circulation of varying opinions is detrimental to the moral and intellectual interests of the country.

The three-month ban expired at the end of March 1940 and in an attempt to mend fences Picture Post decided to do a special issue The Story of Ireland in July 1940. Writing to taoiseach amon de Valera, editor Tom Hopkinson noted that the special issue tried to treat the whole subject in a way that would be at once friendly and impartial.

However, as if to prove the maxim no good deed goes unpunished, the issue was immediately banned under wartime censorship regulations. It had unfortunately referred to a news item that the censorship authorities had prohibited Irish newspapers from revealing:the capture of a boat off the Irish coast containing two Germans and a cargo of explosives.

Subsequent complaints by members of the public to the censorship board centred on adverts that one reader viewed as selling filthy contraceptives. Despite this, Picture Post continued to circulate in Ireland. Writing a profile of the state for New Statesman in 1941, Elizabeth Bowen noted that English newspapers and periodicals can be obtained on order. Picture Post is in constant demand.

In its final years it was banned numerous times: between July 1948 and June 1956 it was banned no fewer than 10 times, with each ban being lifted on appeal or following assurances given the censorship board. But perhaps Picture Post had the last laugh. Its January 1957 edition carried a feature, This is Ireland, in which it noted that the most delightful thing about Ireland is that in many ways it is foreign, but it is still British in quite a few others... You can understand the language unless the peasants talk Gaelic at you; the pubs are open all hours and the churches are crammed full on Sundays.

The visitor also took delight in the native sport of hurley, a dashing form of hockey, and the fact that nobody is really expected to be strictly on time for an appointment.

Five months later Picture Post ceased publication. A row in 1950 between publisher Edward Hulton and long-time editor Tom Hopkinson over Hultons spiking of an article on atrocities committed by the South Korean army had led to Hopkinsons departure. The magazine never recovered.

On its demise one reviewer from this newspaper noted that while Picture Post had begun as a vigorous weekly picture paper with a serious interest in social and economic problems, by the late 1950s it was aiming at a fairly low common denominator which presumably prefers its pictures to be thrown on the television screen.

The loss of advertisers to television and a drop in circulation to below 600,000 saw the Picture Post publish its last edition in June 1957, a move no doubt welcomed by the ever-alert guardians of Irelands morality.

Mark OBrien is an associate professor at Dublin City University and the author of The Fourth Estate: Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland (2017)

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Immoral, indecent and obscene, or timeless portraits of Ireland? - The Irish Times

When Americans watch White House press briefings on the latest COVID-19 updates, we can check and double-check the information were given against multiple online sources. Most of us living in the U.S. can take to social media to share information, get answers to important questions such as where to get tested, or even crowdsource where to go for certain supplies. In short, we are empowered to access information that helps us make informed choices. This power becomes even more vital, and the internet becomes a lifeline, when forced to shelter within our homes.

Now imagine the position of the 12 million people living in Wuhan, China. Every piece of information Chinese citizens receive about COVID-19 is filtered through the Chinese government on the internet or on state-run media outlets. They cannot double-check that information or share it with their communities. A cyber wall, in essence, cuts them off and this likely puts millions of people in mortal danger. Though China claims to be providing accurate data about the virus, a recent U.S. intelligence report shows that China not only knew about the outbreak long before the rest of the world but has consistently under-reported their total cases and deaths.

Vice President Pence recently said, The reality is that we could have been better off if China had been more forthcoming. This is just one example of how Chinas censorship of the internet endangers us all. The lack of information can be a death sentence for those living in closed societies, but it also hampered the rest of the world from containing the viruss global spread.

In the United States, we have known for more than a decade that lack of internet freedom poses a serious threat to the global community. For this reason, Congress has continually increased funding to support proven, large-scale firewall circumvention tools capable of providing uncensored internet access to millions of people living behind government firewalls.

Since 2012, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) and the Open Technology Fund (OTF) have been the two primary vehicles responsible for ensuring these tools are funded. Unfortunately, they have withheld sufficient funding from these technologies for nearly a decade. They may talk a good game, but in a town where money does the real talking, the truth is clear: the U.S. government continues to spend the vast majority of internet freedom funding on conferences, fellowships, research and development, and incubator funds.

The impact of that lack of funding is being felt more than ever today. Our research with leading circumvention developers has shown that, while average daily attempts to use their circumvention tools have more than quadrupled in countries hit by the coronavirus, there just is not any money to provide the additional bandwidth and processing capacities to serve demand. Without funding, these freedom fighters are unable to provide access to uncensored information that could very well mean life or death for the people who seek it. It is difficult to calculate the human cost on societies left in the dark.

It is folly to think that the 2019 re-establishment of OTF as an independent nonprofit and the sole grantee of the USAGMs internet freedom funds will lead to any meaningful change. There was hope that OTFs new status and more funding might have meant that government funds would finally flow with nimbleness, focus and determination. However, in the face of the deadliest global health pandemic in over a century, OTF seems intent on repeating past mistakes. Our recent plea that they rapidly fund these proven circumvention tools on an emergency basis was met with bureaucratic obfuscation.

Clearly, the internet is the most powerful tool for disseminating accurate information, opening minds and making informed choices. It is painfully clear that the safety of millions of people behind digital walls as well as those living in open societies depends on their getting uncensored, unfiltered information to protect themselves and those around them. Chinas spreading of disinformation during a global crisis demonstrates the urgency of tearing down these walls.

We must not give a pass to the USAGMs abysmal track record on oversight of its grantees. Nor should we excuse the shortcomings of an organization that has been sharply criticized by the Office of Inspector General and others for its handling of internet freedom funds. We must prevent the passage of H.R. 6621, the Open Technology Fund Authorization Act, in its current form and stop funding an organization that has proven it is not up to the task of aggressively combating global internet censorship. It is time to identify new and better ways to spend valuable U.S. funds that could effectively support internet freedom.

Katrina Lantos Swett, Ph.D., J.D., is president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice, which leads a coalition of human rights groups committed to opening the internet in closed societies. She is a human rights professor at Tufts University and the former chair of the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom.

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The pandemic exposes realities of failing to combat global censorship | TheHill - The Hill

One of the world's top VPN providers has boosted its offering in an effort to help its users bypass state and corporate censorship

ProtonVPN has added a new feature to its Android app called Smart Protocol Selection, which the company says will likely be required when a network administrator, either a nation state or a telecom, wants to restrict access to parts of the internet. This is often done to prevent users from accessing social media, news sites or other information sources.

In these situations, there have been document cases where state actors have also blocked transmission protocols to prevent their citizens from using VPNs to circumvent these restrictions. Thankfully though, ProtonVPN's Smart Protocol Selection can now help circumvent this kind of censorship.

Transmission protocols are the underlying rules that govern how data is sent and received via ports on a device. As most mobile VPNs use a protocol called IKEv2, network operators that want to prevent people from using a VPN will block this protocol.

ProtonVPN's Android app now has the ability to automatically detect if IKEv2 is being blocked and switch to the OpenVPN protocol. It can also automatically search for unblocked ports in order to increase the likelihood of successfully establishing a VPN connection.

The majority of other VPN only use one protocol and can easily be blocked by network operators. ProtonVPN however, supports multiple VPN protocols and a wide range of ports to enable more reliable service in the face of censorship.

Founder and CEO of ProtonVPN, Andy Yen explained why the company decided to introduce its new Smart Protocol Selection feature, saying:

We believe the Internet should be uncensored. Open access to information is a bedrock of democratic society, and our mission is to create online tools that make digital freedom possible. Features like Smart Protocol Selection help our users get free access to the internet, even in the face of state or corporate censorship.

The rest is here:
This top VPN has a nifty new feature to circumvent censorship - TechRadar India

Algonquin Township (ECWd)

We had previously written about Algonquin Township paying its attorney to try and censor a video obtained from Township cameras (here), which at the time did not work very well for them. According to their attorneys invoices, several communications were had between him and YouTube and are still the subject of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit which the township will end up losing.

A National Press Freedom Organization even highlighted Algonquin Townships censorship efforts in their article (here).

Our original article with the video in it is (here).

Apparently someone, we believe either the Township Clerk, her family member, or the township attorney kept complaining to YouTube.

In March of 2020, YouTube sent us a message stating they had taken the video down because of a privacy complaint.

What YouTube apparently was not aware of, was this video was eventually obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, albeit after we posted it online, and is no longer subject to any privacy concerns with it being a public record of the township.

In the interest of full disclosure, we provide the video as it was received under the Illinois FOI Act from the McHenry County States Attorney Office.

To the Algonquin Township Clerk Karen Lukasik, or whomever finally succeeded in censoring and taking down a public video from YouTube, you should be ashamed for promoting censorship.

Try taking this one down. The other censored video of the Clerk and her family in the basement file storage room will be in an upcoming article.

From the previous article:

Why would Jennifer Curtiss, a Village of Fox River Grove Trustee, be going through files and a persons desk in the Algonquin Township Supervisors Office? Not only is this trustee from another community going through Algonquin Township records, she is left alone in an office she has no business being in.

At the 12:17mark of the video, Curtiss asks the Clerk: Karen, do you have the authority to be going through this stuff? Lukasik responds with:I can do whatever I want. Then, as if the Clerks authority is all encompassingto her, she admittedly starts going through Township employee Ryans stuff. She even tells Clerk LuKasikat the 13:16 mark of the video that she is going through Ryans stuff, which generated a response of;I dont give a shit.go through it all. By asking if the Clerk had authority to go through stuff you would think she would understand that the same authority question would apply to her.

This video provides clear indicators that the Clerk was not honest with her responses to our FOIA requests and is not a trusted keeper of the records. Additionally, as statutory custodian of the records, her response of I dont give a shitgo through it all, is sufficient to call for her immediate resignation in our opinion.

Any Clerk that brings in another person from another community and allows them to have free access to records to include leaving them in that office alone with those records is not protecting the records of the Township.

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To the Algonquin Township Clerk: Censorship never works. Enjoy this video - Edgar County Watchdogs

May 01, 2020 Skye Arundhati Thomas on censorship and resistance in locked-down India

NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS, identity papers, and crumpled, bloodstained notes lie next to pair of folded trousers. The photograph was taken by Kashmiri photographer Masrat Zahra, the items carefully arranged on a lavender cloth, embroidered with red and blue flowers, by Arifa Jan, the widow of Abdul Qadir Sheikh. Sheikh was shot by the Indian Army in 2000; we are looking at what was in his pockets on the day he died. Sheikhs death was the result of an encounter killingconfrontations staged between suspected militants and state forces that most often result in unarmed civilian deaths. There is little accountability after such killings, and many of the murders go unrecorded. Zahra visits the homes of those that have were gunned down and collects their stories. Her quietly moving photographs of objects animate the ways in which they are remembered. There were eighteen bullet holes and I still remember how deep they were, the widow Jan told Zahra, who posted the image on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram on April 18. She tagged it #KashmirBleeds.

Shortly after the photograph went online, the cybercrime police station of the Kashmir Zone booked Zahra under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), for uploading anti-national posts with criminal intention to induce the youth and to promote offenses against public tranquility. Zahra could be incarcerated for up to seven years and arrested at a moments notice. Despite being in the middle of a nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of Covid-19during which people are being beaten and fined for violating curfew restrictionsZahra was forced to appear at a police station in Srinagar on April 21.

In the document detailing the allegations, Zahra is referred to as a Facebook Usernot a journalist or artist. Her photographs and captions have been classified as having criminal intention. Special attention must be paid to the language here: The UAPA is an intentionally ambiguous piece of legislature that allows the state to label an individual as a terrorist simply if it believes so. On April 22, New Delhi police booked university students Meeran Haider and Safoora Zargar under the UAPA. Both students are from Jamia Millia Islamia Universityone of the central sites of the recent demonstrations against the Islamophobic and discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC). Haider and Zargar were charged with conspiracy and inciting violence during the protests and are currently being held in judicial custody. Zargar, who is pregnant, spent the first day of Ramadan in a high-security prison in New Delhi.

Indias 2020 began with the revolutionary energy of the anti-CAA and anti-NRC protests, but also the police brutality that came with it, including a four-day-long pogrom in the working-class Muslim neighborhoods of New Delhi which happened to coincide with Donald Trumps state visit (dubbed Namaste Trump). Muslims were lynched by Hindutva mobs and their homes burned down. Many were relocated to refugee camps, some set up in graveyards. One of the strongholds of dissent was Shaheen Bagh, where a monthslong, women-led sit-in had become a generative site for community, public art, music, and book-sharing. On March 24, Modi declared that India was on lockdown. One of the first moves the police made was to bulldoze through the protest site, pull down posters and whitewash the murals and slogans that emblazoned its walls.

Across India, the pandemic and lockdown have provided an occasion for the free play of authoritarian impulses, writes Siddharth Varadarajan, a journalist, editor, and cofounder of the online newspaper The Wire. On April 11, a group of policemen delivered court summons to Varadarajan, the case against him relating to The Wires coverage of a large Hindu religious gathering in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, which was allowed to occur despite the lockdown. The charges claim that Varadarajan was promoting enmity, hatred or ill-will between classes simply for printing the news. The Wire is one of Indias only newspapers that neither censors its opinions nor panders to the Hindu-centric, jingoistic demands of the central government. The lockdown is giving the central government leverage that could not have arrived at a worse time: Protest is impossible, millions are starving or stranded because of the lockdown, and all political opposition has neared a complete standstill as state-level governments focus on combating the virus.

We are being organized and disciplined along the borders of identity: primarily of class and caste (there is no doubt that it is the poor and the already marginalized that are bearing the brunt of this crisis), but also the borders of culture, and whether it aligns with the intentions of the ruling government. The recent slew of arrests began with that of educator and activist Anand Teltumbde, who is, incidentally, married to the granddaughter of Dalit leader and scholar Dr. B. R Ambedkar. After months of scrutiny and psychological harassmentincluding the ransacking of his faculty houseTeltumbde was taken into judicial custody on April 14, on the one hundred and twenty-ninth anniversary of Dr. Ambedkars birth. Suspecting an imminent arrest, he published a letter with The Wire a day prior. In it, he details his case and unfair treatment, and signs off with this: [I] do not know when I shall be able to talk to you again. However, I earnestly hope that you will speak out before your turn comes.

Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer based in Mumbai. She is a contributing editor at The White Review.

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Skye Arundhati Thomas on censorship and resistance in locked-down India - Artforum