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Australian scientists are rallying behind their counterparts in the United States amid fears that President Donald Trump could ram through a damaging anti-science agenda over the next four years.

Trump's moves to censor federal government scientific departments and undermine the integrity of climate research have triggered sympathy and anger in Australia, where many scientists believe the country's conservative government has conducted a similar assault on science over the past few years.

"My sense is that morale among the science fraternity in the U.S. is extremely low at the moment," said Associate Professor Stuart Khan, a water researcher at the University of New South Wales and one of the organizers of the Australian March for Science. "We want to show that we understand what is going on and we stand in solidarity."

The United States is an important research partner for Australia and a bilateral science and technology relationship has existed in some form for 48 years.

However, Trump's recent directives, particularly his administration's instructions that any data from the EPA must undergo review by political appointees, have many Australian scientists concerned.

"It's reminiscent of the censorship exerted by political officers in the old Soviet Union," Dr. Alan Finkel, the chief science advisor to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, told a roundtable discussion in the capital Canberra on Monday. "Every military commander there had a political officer second-guessing his decisions."

Gag orders aren't the only sign of Trump's apparent anti-science stance. His pick to head the EPA, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, has made a career of challenging the agencies environmental regulations. Trump has also reportedly tapped vaccine skeptic Robert Kennedy Jr., who has erroneously linked vaccines with autism, to lead a commission into immunization safety.

RELATED: Will Trump Go After Vaccine Science?

Australian scientists have not faced directives limiting interaction with the media and public like those imposed by Trump, but several said political interference has taken different forms.

"It's primarily lack of funding, pulling out government support, and public campaigns that undermine and belittle scientific achievements," Khan said.

After taking office in 2013, former prime minister Tony Abbott slashed science funding, abolished climate science programs and chose not to appoint a science minister for the first time since 1931.

Funding for Australia's main research grants body, the Australian Research Council, was cut by $74.9 million; the national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, had its funding slashed by $111 million.

As a result, severe job losses including up to 110 roles in the organization's Oceans and Atmosphere division were announced by CSIRO in February 2016. The decision was reversed and extra resources allocated to climate change research only after a public outcry and widespread international criticism.

"It was a brutal act to try and force compliance and control because they didn't regard the organisation to be sufficiently beholden to government directives," Dr. Michael Borgas, a climate scientist and former president of the CSIRO staff association, said.

RELATED: Cities Are Tackling Climate Change by Freeing Their Data

Abbott, who once declared that climate change was "absolute crap," was ousted by Malcolm Turnbull in a party coup in September 2015, but key science policies have remained intact.

In fact, the Turnbull government has proven it's not above scrubbing science from the record.

In May 2016, it was revealed the Australian government intervened to have all mentions of the country removed from a UNESCO report on climate change impacts at world heritage areas.

One of three Australian case studies, the Great Barrier Reef, experienced its worst coral bleaching ever in 2015-2016, an event scientists said was 175 times more likely because of human-caused climate change.

More than 93 percent of the smaller reefs that make up the wider ecosystem were affected by bleaching and preliminary surveys have shown widespread reef mortality.

"I was confidentially told by the editor of the report that the Australian government asked that the Great Barrier Reef case study and two others that referred to Australia were taken out of the report," said Professor Will Steffen, a climate science expert at the Australia National University, who reviewed the Great Barrier Reef chapter.

The Australian government later admitted the request was made because the reef's inclusion may have impacted tourism.

Borgas, who spent 15 years advocating for employees at CSIRO, said there were lessons from the Australian experience that could be useful to scientists in the U.S.

Participating in a trade union or scientific society that advocated for the rights of scientists was a good start, he said. But he also urged U.S. scientists to keep speaking out about threats to science integrity.

"Scientists sometimes don't like to be politically engaged," said Borgas. "But it's something you have to do. You have to learn to do it."

WATCH: The Difference Between Global Warming and Climate Change

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Australian Scientists Who Faced Censorship Have Advice for Dealing With Trump - Seeker

If youre having trouble with your internet connection, one of the first things tech support will ask you to do is to run a speed test. There are dozens of websites and apps that will, at the tap of a button, measure your network speedbut they cant tell you which sites you can actually access with that bandwidth. Even with a good connection, if youre in a country that censors the internet, whole swaths of the web might be out of reach.

Now, theres an app that will test your internet connection not for speed, but for freedom. The program, ooniprobe, is part of a 5-year-old project called the Open Observatory of Network Interference, or OONI. This project is sponsored by Tor, the organization behind the privacy-preserving Tor Browser.

OONI has made censorship-testing software available for years, but it has until now required downloading a desktop software package using a command-line toola step most computer users arent comfortable taking on. The new app will allow anyone with a smartphone to run a test. Mobile is where the next billion will come online, so this app fulfills a pressing need to put censorship detection in the hands of the people, said Deji Olukotun, the senior global advocacy manager at Access Now, an international digital-rights advocacy group.

I downloaded a beta version of the mobile app to give it a spin. (It will be made available in the iOS and Google Play app stores next week.) For now, the app only includes two of the many tools available on OONIs desktop software: a web-connectivity test and a probe that checks for hardware that censors or alters traffic on a network.

The connectivity test is straightforward. For each website on a preselected list, the test sends to requests: one from my smartphone and one from a server located elsewhere. If both requests return the same result, the URL passes the test and the program moves on to the next one. But if the pages load differently, its a hint that something fishy might be going on. If that happens, OONI will test for several ways that network could censor or block access to a URL.

The list of sites that the probe uses is the product of a collaboration between OONI and CitizenLab, a research group at the University of Toronto focused on technology and human rights. The sites on the list generally provide important services, host controversial content, or are likely to be censored for some other reason, said Arturo Filast, OONIs project lead and core developer.

The other test bundled in the app is simple but clever. It involves sending an invalid request to an echo server, a computer thats designed to send back an identical copy of any data it receives. If the bad request comes back in the same form it was sent, the path between the device and the echo server is likely unobstructed. But if the echo is modified in some way, something on the network might be manipulating the traffic that crosses it.

The tests certainly arent foolproof. When I ran the second test on the wi-fi network here in The Atlantics newsroom, it showed no evident tampering. But the first test found evidence of censorship on five sites: Two religious sites, a sports-betting site, the homepage of the DEFCON hacking conference, and a sex-doll site. When I tried visiting each in a normal browsersorry, IT departmentthey loaded without issue. (There are several reasons why the connectivity test might return a false positive, including when websites look different depending on the country theyre accessed from.)

By default, test results from OONIs desktop software or from the ooniprobe app are uploaded to a website called OONI Explorer, which aggregates the results into a browsable database and an interactive map. According to a page with highlights from OONIs findings, the project collected more than 10 million measurements from 96 countries between late 2012 and early 2016.

The map paints a stark picture of internet censorship around the globe. It doesnt show a single confirmed censorship case in the Western hemisphere, but reveals a rash of censorship across Asia and the Middle East. OONI only shows one confirmed case of censorship in AfricaSudan appears to block a handful of adult sites, according to a 2-year-old scanbut networks in many African countries havent yet been tested.

Perhaps surprisingly, the club of countries that censor their internet also includes several in Europe. Greece appears to block a dozen betting sites, while Sweden, Denmark, and Italy block several bit-torrent sites. Belgium has assembled a long blacklist of both types of sites. France, on the other hand, only blocks two: the homepages of a pair of Islamic terrorist organizations.

When you first download and install ooniprobe, the app warns that in some countries around the world, legal and/or extra-legal risks could emerge. Probing a network could be illegal or considered espionage, the developers write, or a user could get in trouble for requesting data from a site thats illegal in their country: The probe requests data from porn sites, hate-speech sites, and terrorism-related sites. (OONI says its not aware of a user ever facing consequences for running a test in the past.)

Filast says the forthcoming mobile app will allow more people to contribute to the worlds understanding of internet censorship patterns. Access to that information, he says, is a fundamental human right. He pointed to an example from East Africa: Last year, Ethiopians complained that their internet access was being censored in response to a wave of political protests, but there was little evidence to prove it. By running ooniprobe, Ethiopian activists found that the government was censoring media, human-rights, LGBTI-related, and political websites, among others, in addition to blocking WhatsApp.

OONI and Amnesty International collaborated on a report that laid out incontrovertible evidence of systematic interference with access to numerous websites, which was published in December. Today, Ethiopia is in a state of emergency, said Filast. Yet the published findings illustrate that censorship events took place beforehand. This type of information can potentially aid political discussions on an international level.

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Mapping Countries That Censor the Internet - The Atlantic

Four US states are considering legislation that would ensure free speech on college campuses and prohibit universities fromshielding people from offensive and controversial ideas.

Most states were put on alert after the eruption of violence at the University of California, Berkeley, whereMilo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to give a speech.His event was cancelled over safety fears.

President Trump has put the issue of free speech on campus in the spotlight after hethreatened to withdraw federal funds from universities that dont honor the First Amendment rights.

Virginia

Earlier this week, the Virginias House of Delegates passed bill HB1301aimed at protecting freedom of speech on campus. The bill reaffirms that public colleges and universities in the state are covered by the First Amendment.

The full text of the law reads: Except as otherwise permitted by the First Amendment to the Constitution, no public institution of higher education shall abridge the freedom of any individual, including enrolled students, faculty and other employees, and invited guests, to speak on campus.

House Democratic leader David Toscano celebrated the bill, saying:Any time we have the chance to support the First Amendment we should do that.

Its a good idea to celebrate the First Amendment. We want our campuses to be noisy, we want people to debate things, he added.

Colorado

In Colorado,the Senate Education Committee approved abill defending the constitutionally granted rights of Colorado students. The bill would prohibit governmentfunded colleges from restricting students First Amendment rights to free speech in any way. According to the draft of the bill, free speech includes speaking, distributing materials, or holding a sign.

The bill also requires convertingexisting so-called free speech zonesa campus phenomena where only at certain places students are able to exercise free speechinto monuments or memorials.

Free speech zones are counterintuitive to our core values, we should never falter in our defense of our constitutional rights or confine a free exchange of ideas, explained Senator Tim Neville, who introduced the bill.

Students on Colorado campuses are growing into the leaders of tomorrow, and restricting their fundamental rights as they seek out truth and knowledge is contrary to the American spirit as well as the mission of universities, he added.

North Dakota

North Dakota is also considering a bill to fight the onslaught of safe spaces and ensure the Constitution that guarantees free speech is protected in the states public universities.

Republican State Rep. Rick Becker sponsor of House Bill 1329, said the proposed legislation is aresponse to an attitude that free speech is not free speech at universities, where free expression is stifledby university policy.

There is an atmosphere of political correctness and social justice that will lead to safe spaces and this whole concept on every campus, hesaid. We have to put a stop to it now.

The bill would confirm free speech as a fundamental right and demand the governing body of the North Dakota University System to a ratify a policy of free speech.

The policy would require acommitment to free and open inquiry by students in all matters and outlaw any restrictions on speech, unless it violates other laws or disrupts the universitys functions.

It would also require tocontain a bill of student rights that would prohibitcolleges in North Dakota from subjecting students to any nonacademic punishment, discipline or censorship for exercising their free speech.

Becker cited the violence last week at the University of California, Berkeley during the protests againstMilo Yiannopoulos, claiming theres a growth of anti-speech rhetoric on college campuses.

North Carolina

The States Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest has announced his intention to work with the General Assembly to pass the Restore Campus Free Speech act, a law closely based onthe model campus free speech legislationthat would guarantee free speech at universities.

North Carolina will be the first state to use the model law by the Goldwater Institute think tank and turn it into an actual legislative proposal. AsHeat Streethas reported, the model proposalincludes a toughlegal regime to ensure free speech.

The law would prohibit colleges in North Carolina from banning speakers, creating safe spaces with the intention of shielding students from certain ideas and opinions, harsh sanctions for those limiting free speech including expulsion, and even a $1,000 fine if university violates free speech rights.

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4 US States Consider Free Speech Laws To Fight Censorship and 'Safe Spaces' On Campus - Heat Street