New Zealanders will be able to join freedom activists in London and around the world on June 7 in a battle against Internet repression.
Bloggers, writers, technologists, lawyers, journalists and members of the public will come together at the Human Rights Action Centre in London on June 6, to discuss global internet censorship.
The event will be broadcast live via webcast enabling viewers from all over the world to comment and ask questions.
Amnesty International UK and The Observer newspaper will host the event as part of Amnesty's Irrepressible.info campaign.
Technology correspondent for 'The World', an international news programme co-produced by BBC World in London, WGBH Radio in Boston and Public Radio International, Clark Boyd, will chair the discussion.
Mr Boyd said China, Vietnam, Burma, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Belarus and Tunisia have all been highlighted as having serious Internet repression problems.
Ethan Zuckerman from Global Voices Online will contribute to the discussions via the web link-up.
Mr Zuckerman said Internet repression by governments is "shameful", and now the OpenNet initiative is tracking Internet filtering in more than 23 countries.
"In many cases those countries are not just blocking information, they are are also blocking the tools of freedom of expression," he said.
He said some Fijian citizens had been using blogs to criticise the military government who took power in the recent coup.
"As the government started to become threatened by those bloggers it started threatening to arrest suspected bloggers and threatened to block blogger.com.
"And those bloggers showed great credit, they didn't shut up, they wouldn't be silenced by it. Instead, they reached to groups like Global Voices, groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation, and figured out how to speak online in a way that they were able to hide their identities."
He said the Fijian government had now backed down, largely because of the international attention.
"Not everybody is willing to take a stand like that. Not everybody is willing to move from being an ordinary citizen to being an activist like that," he said.
Mr Zuckerman got a sense of how dangerous speech can be when his colleague, Global Voices North Asia editor Hao Wu, was arrested by Beijing police in February, 2006.
"Despite the fact that over five months he was never charged with any crime, we don't know whether he was detained for his online speech or not," he said.
Hao Wu stopped blogging when he was released from prison, Mr Zuckerman said.
"And his detention had very serious consequences for his all family, especially for his sister who found herself becoming a blog-based freespeech advocate, trying to agitate for her brother's release while he was in prison. She is now also under state scrutiny," he said.
Cory Doctorow, from the blog 'Boing Boing' said technology can improve and restrict freedom.
"I certainly feel like things like the Linux Operating System or the Google search engine or forms of dissident speech and campus organisations do really amazing things. I think that all of that stuff makes us more free than we ever were before."
He said Microsoft had put a lot of money and effort in the new Windows operating system, Vista, to restrict owners from from getting around blocks to copying movies or songs.
But in contrast, little effort had been put into ensuring that its operating system protects owners against being "snooped" on by the government, criminals, or other elements who might want to invade their privacy, he said.
Amnesty International announced in January that they would become part of discussions with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, other NGOs, experts, and socially responsible investors, to establish principles for safeguarding human rights on the Internet.
Speakers at the London event will include, Martha Lane Fox from lastminute.com, Clark Boyd from the BBC, Ron Deibert from Open Net Initiative, Sami Ben Garbia a Tunisian cyber-dissident, Josh Wolf a US cyber-dissident, Morton Sklar from the Yahoo! court case, Shava Nerad from the TOR Project, Yan Sham-Shackleton from glutter.org, Markus Beckedahl from netzpolitik.org, and Kevin Anderson from The Guardian.
Others will contribute to the discussion via the webcast, including Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia, Richard Stallman from the Free Software Movement, Ethan Zuckerman from Global Voices, Dan Gillmor from the Centre for Citizen Media, Yu Ling the wife of Chinese cyber-dissident and Cory Doctorow from 'boing boing' blogging site.
New Zealanders can join the live webcast at 5.30am on June 7, at www.amnesty.org.uk/webcast