You will notice that I have put on my wig, which denotes that I am hereby assuming my role of Chief Justice of the High Court.

The message in question was timestamped 4 September 2021, at 11:48 PM. This means that at the time it was labouring under the terms of censorship as revised by this notice, dated 4 September 2021 at 08:52 am. This can also be evidenced with reference to the appropriate ruleset edit.

That means that the clause

Terms that indirectly but specifically refer to any of the above (eg “The second item on the Ideologies List”, “the third Cell alphabetically”).

was present in the ruleset when the message was sent.

The message was clearly an attempt to “indirectly but specifically refer to” a specific ideology so was appropriately censored.

Thank you for bringing up that particular term of censorship, Your Honor. The application of this Censorship Term came after the Ministry stated, in its own words,

The Brendan cell has developed an innovative new technique

moments after the referenced public post. We can only conclude that the application of this term was therefore an explicit and specific targeting of a named Cell. Whether it was created with that purpose in mind is irrelevant; this challenge concerns its usage, and that usage was clearly unconstitutional, per the Ruleset:

A Censorship Term is Unconstitutional if any of the following are true:

It specifically and explicitly targets one or more named Cells.

The council hears the Prosecution, and shall now allow the defence its rebuttal:

The act of censoring a message cannot, by definition, explicitly target one named Cell, as a message has both a sender and a recipient. We would suggest that if the Prosecution can “only” conclude that the coincidental naming of the Brendan Cell suggests targeted intent then we may only conclude that the Prosecution lacks imagination; it seems clear to the Defence that the Ministry’s statement suggests that it is targeting a technique, rather than a Cell. But in any case, given that the Ministry’s act affected four Cells (the sender and each of its named recipients) its application cannot, in our submission, be argued to have been “targeting” any of those people specifically, regardless of whether one of them was named in a coincidentally related parenthetical.

I am either voting greentick or abstaining. Still studying the case.

brendan’s original follow the leaders post seems to me to have been establishing a code, and its publicity doesnt rule that out; so i feel like the censorship was legal on those grounds

What’s the nature of the contentious message, if Brendan is saying it “contained only a single number”?

That it was a message of, say, “ABC” to signal the third Ideology per the public code he said he’d be using? Or that he changed tack and sent a message of “3” instead, intending recipients to guess what that number meant from context?

[lemon] By that argument, using any reference of any kind is a code, including words found in a dictionary.

[Kevan] It was a long number.

“In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code

So you set up a system of rules to convert information - your Ideology - into another form - a long number - and you’re claiming that this isn’t a code?

The defense appears to be trying to use a hyperlink—an item of communication expressly forbidden by the government’s own censorship rules—as a way of converting information into another form, that is, the plain text from the referenced article, into an argument… against the use of plain text references. I trust the jury can draw their own conclusions about the standards being applied here. Prosecution rests.

I’ll refer the Jury to the case of Hodgkins vs MinInf, in which it was decisively ruled that while the government makes the laws, it is in no way obliged to follow them.

Oh, I have no obligation either to vote in any particular way, so I’ll vote what I want: