It was the head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre who finally admitted before an Australian Parliament committee that she had unilaterally directed and pressured the CyberCon conference to drop myself and an academic research professor (an Australian citizen) from the University of Melbourne as speakers.

I viewed the extraordinary pressure to block me as an already-accepted speaker -- a week before the start of a high visibility public interest conference on cybersecurity -- as a most alarming and Orwellian development and a distinct form of brazen censorship for the express purpose of outright silencing me.

The head of the ACSC misled the committee when she said the reason she wanted my talk canned was because of a proposal for me to participate on a panel with Edward Snowden that never went forward.

It appears she dissembled and used the apparent floating of the idea of a proposed Edward Snowden panel (for which I had NO prior knowledge whatsoever) as a convenient foil and cover to justify and excuse the barring of me as a speaker from CyberCon with the very heavy hand of her "higher authority" as the head of the ACSC over the conference organizers (Australian Information Security Association).