Speaker Ethan Zuckerman in his lecture “Cute Cats and the Arab Spring: When Social Media Meet Social Change” asked the question ‘if 2011 ends up being the year of revolution, is it possible that social media had something to do with it?’

He questioned the theory that social media had nothing to do with protests and activism in 2011 and the opposing theory that the Internet changes everything – that as soon as you have access to information and to the internet, people will mobilize.

The reality, he stated, is not black and white: social media is not irrelevant, nor is social media responsible for how (or why) people get together and protest; instead social media falls within a complex grey area.

Citing Mohamed Bouazizi and his act of self-immolation as a launch-pad or ‘patient zero’ in the movements that have swept through the Arab world, he noted that social media platforms make it possible for people to create and disseminate information at a low cost.  More importantly, they allow people to contribute to the wider media ecosystem (including traditional media), which can sometimes result in citizens mobilizing beyond a small protest movement to removing a dictatorship from power.

He argued that while the development of encrypted and specialized tools for activists is important, just as effective are the tools that are simple enough for anyone to use. The tools that allow persons to easily share their own content and interests to a wide audience, as in the case of the internet user sharing her pictures of cute cats, becomes an even more potent tool for the person who accidentally stumbles upon activism. That user may be already using the tools, and can now use them to share their concerns and express themselves. These platforms are often difficult for governments to censor.

Ethan challenged the audience to become empowered citizens and netizens of the online world and to call on governments to respect the idea of a networked public sphere where content and information can be shared but also to call on companies to run the private spaces in a manner consistent with freedom of expression and privacy.

Yahoo! recognizes that the Internet is a powerful space for free expression and for this reason is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder initiative comprised of ICT companies, human rights organizations, academics, investors and others. The GNI is a positive and collective step by these stakeholders to work together to challenge censorship and threats to privacy. The group has worked together to establish a code of conduct to guide technology companies in protecting and advancing freedom of expression and privacy across the globe when they encounter laws and policies that interfere with these fundamental human rights.

Over the next year, the Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Program will continue to explore how people, and more specifically women, are using social and digital media to support positive change in their communities and around the world. Our Change your World summits start in Cairo on January 18 2012, where, together with Yahoo! Maktoob and in partnership with Vital Voices we will focus on how women across the Middle East and North Africa are using technology, the Internet and various social and digital media platforms to create positive change in the world through four areas: leadership in governance and politics, human rights and social justice, journalism and entrepreneurship.  Join us for Change your World: Cairo 2012. Click here for more information.

To listen to the 2011 Vancouver Human Rights Lecture podcast, please click here or view the lecture video here

Cute Cats and the Arab Spring: When Social Media Meet Social Change”

Activists around the world are turning to social media tools usually used for more pedestrian purposes: the sharing of family videos and videos of cats flushing toilets. But these tools can be extremely powerful in the hands of activists, as they are pervasive, easy to use and difficult for governments to censor. Ethan Zuckerman will look at “the cute cat theory” of internet activism, as it helps explain the Arab Spring protests, aggressive internet censorship in countries like China and Vietnam, and the challenges for the corporate owners of social media platforms in an era of online speech.

Flickr Creative Commons|nosferata1969|

By Kristen McTighe| New York Times| Oct 13, 2011|

She felt the stinging fumes of tear gas billowing through the streets here nine months ago and saw police officers firing live ammunition at protesters. She watched families weeping in grief over the bloodied bodies of their loved ones left lying on the ground.

The violence could have silenced Lina Ben Mhenni with fear, but it drove her to speak louder and clearer.

“It was very dangerous to be a blogger under Ben Ali,” Ms. Ben Mhenni, a 27-year-old activist and blogger, said in a cafe here on the capital’s Avenue Habib Bourguiba. Tunisians had taken to this street and many others to rebel against the regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali just nine months ago. “Of course I had fear, but when I saw people killed by the police I forgot it and it gave me the strength to do my work,” she said.

Ms. Ben Mhenni is an example of how protesters helped break a regime’s stranglehold on the media and accelerate a revolution that brought down the 23-year dictatorship of Mr. Ben Ali and that went on to ignite much of the Arab world. It was a revolution that, in the case of Ms. Ben Mhenni, began even before the Arab Spring.

Now a teaching assistant in linguistics at Tunis University, she began the blog in 2007, the year her mother donated a kidney to her to replace the one that had failed two years before. Six months after that surgery, she competed in the World Transplant Games. (She competed again in 2009, winning two silver medals in race walking.)

She named her blog “A Tunisian Girl” and wrote about censorship, women’s rights, human rights and freedom of speech. She soon found herself at odds with the government, which blocked her site inside Tunisia. She used proxy sites to access her pages, and in April 2010, she said, the police broke into her family home. “They took my computer, my cameras, my everything,” she said. “It was clear it was them because of the way only I was targeted and the way they went after my equipment.”

But Ms. Ben Mhenni — whose father, Sadok Ben Mhenni, was a political prisoner under Mr. Ben Ali’s predecessor Habib Bourguiba — fought on.

On Dec. 17, 2010, she and other Tunisians heard about a fruit vendor in Sidi Bouzid named Mohamed Bouazizi who set himself on fire to protest the confiscation of his goods and his constant harassment by municipal officials and police officers. Ms. Ben Mhenni called friends in the city to see what was happening. She reported what she learned on her blog, a Facebook page and her Twitter account.

On Dec. 25, she took part in the demonstration that erupted in the capital after Mr. Bouazizi’s death, uploading articles and photographs to social media sites. At the beginning of January, she went to Sidi Bouzid, Regueb and Kasserine, where the security forces’ response to the protests had been vicious. She took photos of people killed and wounded by the police and put them all online.

It soon became clear that the protests were not going to stop. “The social movement was spontaneous,” Ms. Ben Mhenni said. “There was no political party. It was just Tunisians. People were angry.”

Mr. Ben Ali fled Tunisia on Jan. 14. Censorship was lifted and Ms. Ben Mhenni and others could write freely.

Themeur Mekki, a journalist and blogger who worked with Ms. Ben Mhenni on an earlier campaign against censorship, said: “What she did was break the media blackout that the media aligned to Ben Ali had imposed during the revolution.”

Laetitia Matiatos, head of the new media desk at Reporters Without Borders, said: “Bloggers like Lina Ben Mhenni and Astrubal of the blog Nawaat during the Tunisian uprising played an important role in spreading information across the world, using VPN and proxies.” The bloggers, she added, not only were censored by the government, they also faced intimidation, arrest and physical attacks.

Kerim Bouzouita, author of ReadWriteWorld at blogspot.com, said Twitter and Facebook were important to the revolt. As in other uprisings, protesters were able to break the media blackout by spreading video, information and commentary through the Internet and social media operations.

But it was the government itself that lifted the blockade on the two sites and ironically allowed them to thrive.

“Ben Ali banned Facebook in August 2008 because of ‘disruptive people,’ according to the regime’s speech,” Mr. Bouzouita said. “We do not know why it was uncensored, perhaps because of popular discontent and mobilization.” But he said the government also hoped to use that openness to keep tabs on those who were using Facebook and Twitter to communicate and organize.

Ms. Matiatos agreed that the move was intended to open the door for surveillance. “Facebook has been unbanned in Tunisia mostly to spy on netizens,” she said. “For example, police also logged into Facebook accounts to steal activists’ passwords and infiltrate networks of citizen-journalists.” She said she believed the security forces in Syria and other countries use the same methods.

Ms. Ben Mhenni, however, said that though such sites played a role in Tunisia’s revolution, they did not spark it: “In Tunisia at least, the role of social media has been exaggerated.”

“Maybe in Egypt the call started on social media,” she added, “but here, everything started on the ground. Mohamed Bouazizi set his body on fire and everyone started to demonstrate. Social media didn’t start the revolution. It was just a tool that helped.”

Flickr Creative Commons |Dantessina.Sara|

By Evgeny Morozov| New York Times |Sept 1, 2011|

AGENTS of the East German Stasi could only have dreamed of the sophisticated electronic equipment that powered Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s extensive spying apparatus, which the Libyan transitional government uncovered earlier this week. The monitoring of text messages, e-mails and online chats — no communications seemed beyond the reach of the eccentric colonel.

What is even more surprising is where Colonel Qaddafi got his spying gear: software and technology companies from France, South Africa and other countries. Narus, an American company owned by Boeing, met with Colonel Qaddafi’s people just as the protests were getting under way, but shied away from striking a deal. As Narus had previously supplied similar technology to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, it was probably a matter of public relations, not business ethics.

Amid the cheerleading over recent events in the Middle East, it’s easy to forget the more repressive uses of technology. In addition to the rosy narrative celebrating how Facebook and Twitter have enabled freedom movements around the world, we need to confront a more sinister tale: how greedy companies, fostered by Western governments for domestic surveillance needs, have helped suppress them.

Libya is only the latest place where Western surveillance technology has turned up. Human rights activists arrested and later released in Bahrain report being presented with transcripts of their own text messages — a capacity their government acquired through equipment from Siemens, the German industrial giant, and maintained by Nokia Siemens Networks, based in Finland, and Trovicor, another German company.

Earlier this year, after storming the secret police headquarters, Egyptian activists discovered that the Mubarak government had been using a trial version of a tool — developed by Britain’s Gamma International — that allowed them to eavesdrop on Skype conversations, widely believed to be safe from wiretapping.

And it’s not just off-the-shelf technology; some Western companies supply dictators with customized solutions to block offensive Web sites. A March report by OpenNet Initiative, an academic group that monitors Internet censorship, revealed that Netsweeper, based in Canada, together with the American companies Websense and McAfee (now owned by Intel), have developed programs to meet most of the censorship needs of governments in the Middle East and North Africa — in Websense’s case, despite promises not to supply its technology to repressive governments.

Unfortunately, the American government, the world’s most vociferous defender of “Internet freedom,” has little to say about such complicity. Though Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton often speaks publicly on the subject, she has yet to address how companies from her country undermine her stated goal. To add insult to injury, in December the State Department gave Cisco — which supplied parts for China’s so-called Great Firewall — an award in recognition of its “good corporate citizenship.”

Such reticence may not be entirely accidental, since many of these tools were first developed for Western law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Western policy makers are therefore in a delicate spot. On the one hand, it is hard to rein in the very companies they have nurtured; it is also hard to resist the argument from repressive regimes that they need such technologies to monitor extremists. On the other hand, it’s getting harder to ignore the fact that extremists aren’t the only ones under surveillance.

The obvious response is to ban the export of such technologies to repressive governments. But as long as Western states continue using monitoring technologies themselves, sanctions won’t completely eliminate the problem — the supply will always find a way to meet the demand. Moreover, dictators who are keen on fighting extremism are still welcome in Washington: it’s a good bet that much of the electronic spying done in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt was done with the tacit support of his American allies.

What we need is a recognition that our reliance on surveillance technology domestically — even if it is checked by the legal system — is inadvertently undermining freedom in places where the legal system provides little if any protection. That recognition should, in turn, fuel tighter restrictions on the domestic surveillance-technology sector, including a reconsideration of the extent to which it actually needs such technology in our increasingly privacy-free world. 

As countries like Belarus, Iran and Myanmar digest the lessons of the Arab Spring, their demand for monitoring technology will grow. Left uncontrolled, Western surveillance tools could undermine the “Internet freedom” agenda in the same way arms exports undermine Western-led peace initiatives. How many activists, finding themselves confronted with information collected using Western technology, would trust the pronouncements of Western governments again?

Flickr Creative Commons| chris.corwin|

By Alison Craiglow Hockenberry| Huffington Post |August 16, 2011|

For all the debate about whether this is the year of the Twitter revolution and the Facebook riots, the much more interesting question is: What is not happening on the giant social media websites of the world?

The answer is: A lot.

About two billion people have been touched by the Internet revolution. The connections they have made, information they have exchanged, and actions they have taken are undeniably revolutionary and immeasurably profound. But Facebook and Twitter, for all their power to speed a new era of openness, can’t do it all.

While we celebrate the fact that two billion people now have access to the Internet’s opportunities for speaking out, five billion others are still waiting for their chance to be heard.

In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, there are countries with regimes every bit as repressive as those we hear about daily in the Middle East, in which Internet penetration is only about one percent.

This dismal rate is due to many factors, including the lack of cable and electrical infrastructure, a prohibitively-high cost of service, language barriers, and illiteracy. The region’s more readily-available mobile phones allow some information access, but sharing one’s own views and interacting over social media is not practical on a non-smart phone and in places where languages are not digitized.

Globally, there is another group without a strong enough voice: women. In much of the world where home Internet connections are prohibitively expensive, Internet communication happens mostly in cyber cafes. In regions where women are not allowed or not comfortable going to these public gathering places, it’s mostly men doing the blogging. This is a vastly unbalanced situation.

“If we want a world that is more just and more representative and involves more perspectives and more voices, and has more fairness for more people, then let’s build it,” said Ethan Zuckerman, who was recently named director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media. The big question is, he said, “How do we get our technologies to do what we want them to?”

In Afghanistan, for example, the Jalalabad-based FabLab develops locally-designed tech solutions from start to finish that address communications challenges specific to the country. Among other things, the organization aims to keep information flowing across Afghanistan despite sketchy infrastructure and a fluid political and security situation. FabLab is an initiative of MIT; there are FabLab workshops around the world.

Mizzima News Agency trains the passionate storytellers of Burma’s emerging democracy to create engaging, well-crafted narratives out of their citizen journalist impulses. Mizzima recognizes that in a country long under the grip of censorship, factual, compelling journalism of the kind that can engage citizens and hold the government accountable is a skill that needs to be developed. Citizen media cannot be the only source of checks and balances.

FreedomBox aims to confront the privacy risks associated with communicating over huge, easily-tapped networks by building simple, low-wattage devices that put privacy controls squarely in the hands of users. “We integrate privacy protection on a cheap plug server so everybody can have privacy,” explained James Vasile, FreedomBox counsel. “Data stays in your home and can’t be mined by governments, billionaires, thugs, or even gossipy neighbors.”

Mizzima, FreedomBox, and many other brilliant ideas can be found among the entrants in Citizen Media, a Google-sponsored online competition with Ashoka Changemakers. The global competition welcomes innovations that “catalyze full information citizenship… to engage freely and powerfully with information to advance their own lives and society.”

The competition seeks not only tools for increasing access to information and avenues for expression, but also to solve other challenges of a more open world, including: How to figure out what sources to trust, how to get other people to care about a story, how to share ideas efficiently and effectively and ensure people’s exposure to a diversity of opinion, and how to sift through the ever-growing supply of information.

These grass roots approaches may be the key to opening access to free expression to more and more people — especially those in the “Long Tail” — in rural and marginalized communities. The solutions may overcome the challenges of infrastructure requirements, expense, and cultural barriers that have left people totally unconnected, especially in places where the profit-potential hasn’t been attractive to investors.

“Free expression is a universal value,” said Jillian York, director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. A universal value that’s not nearly yet experienced universally. You can help change that. If you have or know of a solution for creating a more engaged global citizenry through boosting media access, you have until September 14 to enter and vie for $5,000 and a chance to become an Ashoka Fellow, part of the world’s leading network of systems-changing social entrepreneurs.

Flickr Creative Commons|tokiipictures |

By Suzanne Moore | The Guardian (UK) | July 02, 2011 |

There was something very odd about the bedroom of Ryan Cleary, the young man arrested over allegations of computer hacking. It wasn’t the neatly framed pin-up or the two computer screens but the absolute tidiness of this teenage space. He has been bailed on suspicion of a crime that most members of the public would be hard-pressed to explain.

Arrests have been made in the US and the hacking collective LulzSec says it has disbanded. “Lulz” means laughs. I guess some of what they did was clever, but not really funny. The Lulz are pretty Dulz: hacking into sites to disrupt services. Hackers may know their systems, memes and modes, but often come up with morally specious claims for the cyber equivalent of kicking in a bus shelter. You do it because you can. Because you are bored. Because you hate everything. LulzSec were not so much into hacking the CIA but more in the business of bombarding Sonyand gaming sites with so much traffic they would collapse. This made them unpopular even with other hackers, who certainly don’t want their porn and games ruined.

We don’t really know how to regard such people. The idea of putting Gary McKinnon in prison in America remains fundamentally ludicrous. The brilliant writer William Gibson – please let’s drop the sci-fi label – wrote about such people as connoisseurs not of objects but of data. But they are criminals. They respect no boundaries. They steal. Privacy is violated. Something must be done! But what?

Hackers are extreme disrespecters of any notion of privacy. Arguably they cause harm to those in power, not individuals. This is what supposedly drives Wikileaks. I hope no actual humans were harmed in the latest fundraising ad for WikiLeaks, yet another supplication at the feet of St Julian of Assange. Still most people make a distinction between the underworld of hacking and bad people who just try to steal your bank account details.

Most people use computers for more and more transactions with little idea of how they work. But then do I know how my dishwasher works?

Yet I am a total fan of what this technology enables me to do, even with all its privacy implications. I love social media. Facebook. Twitter. For their silliness, and for their seriousness. Twitter operates as my main news feed. But often it’s watercooler chat. If you don’t like Twitter, then don’t use it. Just don’t try banning watercoolers. Twitter was the thing that busted the Ryan Giggs injunction. This mangled attempt at privacy was shot to pieces.

I was debating press privacy this week at an event organised by the excellent Index On Censorship to launch its new issue Privacy is Dead, Long Live Privacy. Much has been said lately about the use of injunctions and superinjunctions not just by footballers, but by companies such as Trafigura. The concern is, surely, that any creeping legislation is enforceable. This is why I began this piece talking about hackers. Sure enough, I was in august company, but felt I was on another planet to someone like Max Mosley. He is a persuasive speaker whose private life has been terribly invaded, and he has gone to the European courts to get newspapers to give notice of stories. I feel if you buy sex off a number of women at once, then pragmatically privacy may be harder to maintain. Actually, I care little about what he does in private, but totally disagree about what he wants in public life. Look at the French, who have a privacy law that means their politicians and journalists form an elite that keeps the public out of the loop.

The injunctions that bother the public are mostly those concerning the affairs of famous men. We perfectly understand the need for injunctions taken out by local authorities to protect the identities of children. The feral press, on the whole, is not trying to bust them.

Somewhere between the extremes of hackers who recognise no boundaries and the activities of Giggs’s lawyer Hugh Tomlinson, who was also speaking at the event (and who makes a fine living from trying to maintain his clients’ privacy), I felt something was missing.

That is, the simple reality of the cultural and technological shift we have lived through. Yes, I think people are entitled to private lives. No, I don’t think footballers are role models. But yes, people do want to read about sex and celebrity. Broadsheets pick up tabloid “scandals” two days later for their postmodern postmortems. Mosley’s case is a muddle between libel and privacy law. Phone-hacking is desperate stuff and a crime that does not require new legislation to deal with.

Basically though, I do not want what I read dictated by a carve-up between judges and media lawyers. They do not understand that the means of production of celebrity, or the means of production of information, are now in so many hands.

It is appalling that the judiciary and the politicians are engaged in an argument without bothering to understand the basics. Twitter, said Max Mosley, is not to be taken seriously. He sneered: “Anybody can write it.” This, of course, is the actual point if it. The idea that any privacy legislation may stop online communication is simply unworkable. Once a name has been online, it is very hard for any court to say that this information is not already in the public domain. Tomlinson argued vaguely that eventually, technically, we can somehow regulate the internet. Sarkozy wants the G8 to act. How? Are we to be like China? Maybe instead of locking up hackers, we get them to bring down servers?

More importantly, we need to understand a generation that defines privacy differently. Any overheard conversation about “the night before” on any bus will tell you that. Social media, alongside the projection of personae encouraged by reality TV, mean boundaries are changing. This is really not even a generational argument. You get it or you don’t. The wonderful Zygmunt Bauman, not perhaps in his first flush of youth, wrote this week of the death of anonymity online: “Or perhaps we just consent to the loss of privacy as a reasonable price for the wonders offered in exchange.”

This is so unless you are super-sussed and have bought anonymity software that hides your IP. Any talk of privacy and press regulation cannot ignore the internet. When I told Mosley the press was mostly online, he just said it wasn’t. What can you say? These “Who are the Beatles?” judges have now been replaced by the “What is Twitter?” brigade. It matters when Cameron sits bemused by laws being broken and Prescott blusters about “mass civil disobedience” by the twits.

Laws work when a pact is made, when a consensus had been reached. This does not exist around privacy, or even piracy, as it is sometimes called.

We live in a world where younger people have simply been able to divert and bypass the rules of their elders by using technology. It was ever thus. The ruling class is ridiculously legislating about something it is almost proud of not understanding. Do I want a world where I choose to invade my own privacy, where there is too much information, a lot of oversharing, lots of daft gossip and sometimes facts and news that no official body is telling me? Do I want too much freedom? Yes. Because the opposite is unthinkable.

Flickr Creative Commons | Damien Van Achter

By Sanja Kelly and Sarah Cook | San Francisco Chronicle | April 18, 2011

A young Tunisian discovering that his blog has been hacked and deleted. An Indonesian housewife suddenly facing high fines for an e-mail she sent to friends complaining about a local hospital. Millions of users in Pakistan discovering that Facebook has been shut off. These are some of the restrictions on Internet freedom that users around the world have encountered in the last two years.

Indeed, as more people use the Internet to freely communicate and obtain information, governments have ratcheted up efforts to control it. Today, more than 2 billion people have access to the Internet, a number that has more than doubled in the past five years. Deepening Internet penetration is particularly evident in the developing world, where declining subscription costs, government investments in infrastructure, and the rise of mobile technology has allowed the number of users to nearly triple since 2006.

In order to better understand the diverse, rapidly evolving threats to Internet freedom, Freedom House, a Washington, D.C., NGO that conducts research on political freedom, has undertaken an analysis – the first of its kind – of the ways in which governments in 37 key countries create obstacles to Internet access, limit digital content and violate users’ rights. What we found was that Internet freedom in a range of countries, both democratic and authoritarian, is declining. Emboldened governments and their sympathizers are increasingly using technical attacks to disrupt political activists’ online networks, eavesdrop on their communications and debilitate their websites. Such attacks were reported in at least 12 countries, ranging from China to Russia, Tunisia to Burma, Iran to Vietnam. In Belarus, at the height of controversial elections, the authorities created mirror versions of opposition websites, diverting users to the new ones, where deliberately false information on the times and locations of protests were posted. In Tunisia, in the run-up to the January 2011 uprising that drove the regime from power, the authorities regularly broke into the e-mail, Facebook and blogging accounts of opposition and human rights activists, either deleting specific material or simply collecting intelligence about their plans.

Governments around the world increasingly are establishing mechanisms to block what they deem to be undesirable information. In many cases, the restrictions apply to content involving illegal gambling, child pornography, copyright infringement or the incitement of hatred or violence. However, a large number of governments are also engaging in deliberate efforts to block access to information related to politics, social issues and human rights. In Thailand, tens of thousands of websites critical of the monarchy have been blocked. In China – in addition to blocking dissident websites – user discussions and blog postings revealing tainted-milk products, pollution or torture are deleted.

Centralized government control over a country’s connection to international Internet traffic also emerged as one significant threat to online free expression. In one-third of the states examined, authorities have exploited their control over infrastructure to limit access to politically and socially controversial content or, in extreme cases, cut off access to the Internet entirely, as Hosni Mubarak’s government did in Egypt during the height of the protests there.

Until recently, the conventional assumption has been that Internet freedom would inexorably improve, given the technology’s diffuse and open structure. But this assumption was premature. Our findings should serve as an early warning sign to defenders of free expression.

Sanja Kelly, managing editor, and Sarah Cook, assistant editor, at Freedom House produced “Freedom on the Net: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media,” a 2011 report, which was released on April 18, 2011 at the World Affairs Council of Northern California.

Flickr Creative Commons | Niklas Sjöblom

By Henry Chu | Los Angeles Times | April 02, 2011

Lawmakers here have given the go-ahead to an ambitious plan to turn this unassuming island in the North Atlantic into an international sanctuary for free speech, putting Iceland at the leading edge of media openness but also pushing it into uncharted territory.

The goal, supporters say, is to promote transparency not only in Iceland but across an increasingly interconnected world.

Flickr Creative Commons | Laurent Jegou

The Associated Press | December 9, 2010 

HANOI, Vietnam — Human rights violations and arrests have recently spiked in Vietnam, with sharp restrictions on Internet freedoms and a crackdown on dissidents who peacefully express their views, the U.S. ambassador said Thursday.  

Ambassador Michael Michalak said some restrictions on religious freedom have eased during his three years in Vietnam but the Communist government continues to clamp down on critics of its one-party system.  The government blocks Facebook and has been accused of attacking anti-Communist sites and chat rooms, while also closely monitoring activity at Internet cafes.

Michalak said there was an increase in arrests in late 2009 and again recently. More than 24 people were jailed and 14 others were convicted this year for peacefully expressing their views, he told journalists.   “In our opinion, no one should be sent to jail for merely disagreeing with government policies or labeled a terrorist for wanting to be able to provide more input into policymaking,” Michalak said. “Increasing efforts to stifle media organizations, Internet freedom and civil society are also troubling.”

The U.S. and Vietnam have grown closer in a number of areas, including trade and military ties, since the former battlefield foes normalized relations 15 years ago. But the U.S. and international rights groups continue to prod Vietnam to improve its human rights record.

All media are state-controlled. The government does not tolerate any form of dissent and uses vague national security laws to imprison those who challenge its rule.

Hanoi maintains that only lawbreakers are jailed.

Flickr Creative Commons | ccarlstead

By Anthony Khun | NPR | November 22, 2010

In established democracies, the Internet has become a powerful political tool used for mobilizing, fundraising and advertising. The Internet has taken on an important but different role in emerging democracies, such as Malaysia, where its use has been essential in breaking a half-century old monopoly on power by the ruling coalition.

When mainstream media will not or cannot cover important political stories, many Malaysians click toward Malaysiakini, or Malaysia Now, the nation’s most popular news website.

The site attracts 300,000 visitors a day to its text and video content in English, Bahasa, Chinese and Tamil. The languages reflect the main ethnic groups of Malaysia’s 28 million people: roughly 54 percent ethnic Malays, 24 percent ethnic Chinese and 7 percent ethnic Indians.

Print Media On A ‘Pretty Short Leash’

“We came about mostly because of the fact that we were unable to get a print license,” recalls Malaysiakini editor Steve Gan. “To do print, you need to get a license from the government, and that license is renewable every year, which puts a lot of print publications on a pretty short leash. And the license is only given to people who are friendly to the government.”

Malaysiakini quickly made a name for itself by daring to write about the politics of race and religion in Malaysia, areas where Gan says few conventional media dare to tread.

“We’ve been told time and again by the ruling coalition that all these issues are sensitive issues,” he says, “[that] it shouldn’t be debated and discussed out in the open, it should be discussed behind closed doors by the ruling parties, and they will come up with solutions.”

Azmi Sharom, a legal scholar at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, says blogs were essential in helping the political opposition seize a two-thirds majority in parliament from the ruling Barisan Nasional, or National Front coalition, in Malaysia’s 2008 general elections.

“It was the primary method with which opposition views were distributed,” he says. “It was the only method where criticism of the government could be expressed freely.”

Government’s No-Web-Censorship Policy

Malaysia’s online news scene owes its dynamism to several factors. First, more than half of Malaysians have access to the Internet. Many young Malaysians are used to getting their news online, and not from traditional news media.

And the government has pledged not to censor on the Internet. Ironically, it was former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who had a reputation as an authoritarian, who made the pledge as part of an effort to attract investment to a hi-tech “multimedia super corridor.”

Sharom argues that the credit for this goes to foreign investors, not the former prime minister.

“He wanted to create a cyber hub, another one of his grandiose plans which I don’t think has taken off,” Sharom says. “But thankfully for the rest of us, as part of his plans, he had to give in to international demands that there be no Internet censorship.”

One of the more successful critics of Malaysia’s media establishment was blogger Jeff Ooi. He parlayed that success into becoming an opposition member of parliament.

Ooi says he was inspired by former San Jose Mercury News tech-beat writer Dan Gillmor, who has written about independent citizen journalists and their competition with mainstream media. Ooi insists that his reformist message — not being a blogger — got him elected.

“Blogs have become a commodity,” he observes. “Now you have to brand yourself through your content and through your viewpoints of what you can do to fire the imagination of the people for change.”

In other words, the message still counts more than the medium. Besides, Ooi points out, the ruling coalition may be behind the curve, but the coalition parties are learning now, and building up their own contingent of online scribes to battle the opposition bloggers — issue by issue — as news breaks.