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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 | mujer (ensimismada)

By Neil Macfarquhar | New York Times | June 16, 2011 |

AL KHOBAR, Saudi Arabia — When Manal al-Sharif posted a video of herself breaking the law by driving her own black S.U.V. around this hot, flat city and called for a collective protest on Friday, the government responded harshly: she was jailed for nine days.

But unlike in the past, government censure did not quash debate. Instead, the Internet buzzed to life in Ms. Sharif’s defense, building on the surge of social media here after the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. Twitter and Facebook overflowed with comments denouncing both Saudi Arabia’s ruling princes and the clerics who called for her to be flogged as Neanderthals completely detached from the realities of life for women here.

More than 30,000 comments about Ms. Sharif’s arrest showed up within days on Twitter, the vast majority from supporters, said Abdulaziz al-Shalan, who tracks Saudi-related Twitter messages.

”Are you accusing a woman of being a sinner because she went to jail for driving? What kind of religion would come up with that?” wrote a woman in Jidda, on the Red Sea coast.

Social media, which helped drive protests across the Arab world, seems tailor-made for Saudi Arabia, where public gatherings are illegal, women are strictly forbidden to mix with unrelated men and people seldom mingle outside their family.

Virtually any issue that contradicts official Saudi policy now pops up online, including the status of prisoners being held without trial or a call to boycott municipal elections this September.

Louai A. Koufiah, a Twitter enthusiast, quipped: ”Saudis cannot go out to demonstrate, so they retweet!”

Essam M. al-Zamel, who helped start the municipal election boycott campaign, boasts that he cannot gather 30 people in a room, but that he can reach more than 22,000 instantly on Twitter.

But wherever the public goes, the government follows.

After Saudis thronged Twitter, activists noted a rash of new users without pictures who described themselves in patriotic terms and attacked government critics. Since the default picture on Twitter is an egg, they earned the nickname #saudieggs.

”My purpose in life is to be a watchdog to protect my religion, my state,” read part of one such user’s information.

Abdulaziz AlGasim, a lawyer and activist in the capital, Riyadh, is convinced that such users work for the government because in attacking him they used information unknown to the general public. ”Oh, this is a famous egg!” he said laughing as he flipped through his account, pointing out how they try to provoke factional or sectarian fights.

Previously, government critics were nervous about seeking out allies, never sure whom to approach. But the combination of bold opinions online and monitoring whom the ”eggs” attack has expanded contacts between activists nationwide.

Seeking to highlight the plight of prisoners held for years without trial, activists recently put a video on YouTube called ”Absent Saudis.” It featured the distraught relatives of some of the 16 men imprisoned in 2007 for what Bassem Alim, a defense attorney, said was taking rudimentary steps toward creating a political party and what the government said were links to terrorism. They were only formally charged last August.

The video response was called ”Saudis Are Present,” featuring an interview with the father of a Saudi girl killed in an attack by Al Qaeda and mixed in with pictures of famous Saudi dissidents.

”Keep them locked up!” screams the zipper running across the bottom of the screen. ”Side with the country against them and distribute this video.”

Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, the Interior Ministry spokesman, denied any government role in such counterattacks. Its main online effort was seeking out Qaeda ideology, he said. ”It is not our way to challenge individuals or social networks on the Internet. That is nonsense,” he said.

While social media was once almost solely the playing field of the liberal elite, Saudi activists say it has become more democratic this year, with more varied voices.

The religious conservatives are catching up. Gone are the days when they issued one fatwa reported by the newspaper Al-Watan that commanded women to avoid writing ”LOL,” or laughing out loud, because the very idea of a woman laughing might arouse male strangers.

Two Saudi conservatives started a special YouTube channel, CH905, to highlight the work of the most prominent clerics in the Sahwa or Wahhabi traditionalist movement in the country. (The telephone number for directory assistance is 905.) One cleric called for the Saudi government to tear down the mosque around the Kaaba, the sacred shrine in Mecca toward which Muslims turn when they pray, and put up a new, stacked structure so that men and women circulate on different floors. Others have attacked proposals for co-education in early elementary school.

Saudis who follow social media closely say that the crosscurrents, particularly on Twitter, have had a moderating affect. The more extremist religious figures and the hard-core social liberals have adopted flexible attitudes on some issues — seen as an attempt to increase followers and an indication that the different camps no longer talk solely among themselves, they said.

The women’s driving campaign shows what online organizing can accomplish — and what it cannot. Ms. Sharif, a 32-year-old information technology specialist working for Aramco, the state oil company, announced her campaign in April, and Saudi activists said they expected women at least in the hundreds to drive on Friday. But her open challenge to the government in posting the videos alienated countless supporters who thought she should have simply waited until the announced date.

Supporters believe the nine-day jail sentence was a deliberate attempt by the monarchy to eradicate any kind of online movement inspired by Tunisia and Egypt. It most likely had the desired effect of scaring off many women.

But it has not squelched the robust online debate. Some men suggested that Ms. Sharif, a single mother, was simply looking for a husband. Supporters, even Abdel Aziz Khoja, the minister of information and an avid Twitter user, weighed in, saying, ”My personal opinion is that a woman has the right to drive as long as she respects public etiquette and Islamic behavior.”

Younger women are particularly defiant, with a group of five 20- to 30-year-olds detained in Riyadh last Thursday for taking driving lessons. One brazenly kept posting to Twitter even when thrown into a holding tank by the morals police: ”We are waiting in a tiny, dirty, dusty room!”

One weakness in online movements is that their organizers often stay hidden to avoid government wrath.

In March, nobody knew exactly who was calling for street demonstrations. The day was suddenly named after Hunain, a famous battle in Islamic history that Shiite Muslims revere more than Sunnis. Numerous activists think the government planted the name online to try to turn the protests into a sectarian issue.

Saudi activists said they recognized that social media alone would not bring changes, although it exposes issues and links organizers.

”If you can reach the public, it will put pressure on royal family to modernize,” said Mr. AlGasim, the Riyadh lawyer, who found that even his 72-year-old mother had signed a democracy petition online. ”Change will come from demonstrations, not from talking.”

Flickr Creative Commons | Linda Demers

By Karin Laub | Associated Press | March 23, 2011

TUNIS, Tunisia – At the height of the Tunisian uprising, dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali tried hard to silence the young bloggers who were driving the protests against him. His security agents arrested, even tortured, some of them and repeatedly shut down their sites.

But two months after Mr. Ben Ali’s fall, the caretaker government that is to lead Tunisia to summer elections has embraced the very tools its predecessor tried to destroy.

It has lifted Web censorship. Key ministries – including the Interior Ministry, once in charge of the feared political police – now communicate with citizens through Facebook.

Some of the bloggers, once under threat from Mr. Ben Ali’s secret agents, are courted as heroes. One serves in the interim government, others have been awarded an online media freedom prize, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with Internet activists during her first post-revolt visit to Tunisia this month.

The bloggers, many of them university graduates in their 20s, say they have an important role to play in the new Tunisia as government watchdogs or political activists.

“We’re not stopping our fight, and we are the first line of defense of freedom,” said blogger Wissem Zghaier, 29, who was beaten and tortured during the uprising.

Social media were key to the Tunisian revolt and the anti-government protests it inspired across the Arab world.

In Tunisia, the protests erupted in impoverished outlying areas in mid-December after a fruit vendor railing against official harassment and confiscation of his wares set himself on fire outside a government building.

The protests were ignored at first by the national media, but bloggers uploaded videos and photos of police violence against the demonstrators, sharing them on Facebook, one of the only social networks functioning under Mr. Ben Ali. The images fueled more protests, which reached the capital, Tunis, and eventually drove out Mr. Ben Ali on Jan. 14.

During Tunisia’s transition to democracy, the Internet is bound to play a key role as a forum of political debate: About one-third of the population of 10 million has Internet access, and fundamental issues are at stake in July elections.

Voters are to choose a national assembly that will write a new constitution and determine, among other things, whether Tunisia gets a parliamentary or presidential democracy and whether gender equality is enshrined in the basic law.

Even after Mr. Ben Ali’s ouster, protests largely driven by social media have continued. For example, demonstrators forced the resignation of the first caretaker prime minister, Mohammed Ghannouchi, a holdover from the Ben Ali era some feared was trying to hijack the revolution. They also got the government to dissolve the former ruling party.

Ahead of Mrs. Clinton’s visit, the blogosphere was abuzz with efforts to organize protests against U.S. policy in the Arab world, including Washington’s previous support of Mr. Ben Ali and other dictators in the region.

During Mrs. Clinton’s visit, a few dozen demonstrators marched along the capital’s Avenue Bourguiba, a tree-lined boulevard with Parisian-style cafes and site of many demonstrations. “Clinton, get out,” they chanted, echoing the central slogan Tunisians used against Mr. Ben Ali, who had ruled for 23 years.

“Clinton came here to manipulate our politics,” said activist Hussein Hagbei, whose blog is called Sidi Bouzid, after the provincial capital where the Tunisian uprising began. “We don’t want Clinton to interfere in our politics.”

The 29-year-old has a degree in archaeology, but like many young Tunisian college graduates has not found work in his field. Instead, Mr. Hagbei runs a small Internet cafe to make a living.

But the experience of shaping history has galvanized him and his friends. Earlier this month, they gathered in a cafe near Avenue Bourguiba to discuss the possibility of forming a new party to give a voice to young activists.

Another blogger, Tarek Kahlaoui, is seeking training and funding for a news website that he hopes will meet Tunisia’s need for independent journalism. Bloggers can be influential in Tunisia if they seize the moment, said Mr. Kahlaoui, an assistant professor of Islamic history at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Some are going into politics. Mr. Zghaier, the activist who was tortured, belongs to the Democratic Progressive Party (PDP), a key opposition movement during the Ben Ali era. The 29-year-old, who adopted the middle name “libre,” French for free, is also a member of the PDP’s Facebook Committee, which is to help spread the party’s message of a market economy tempered by social justice.

The turnaround of Mr. Zghaier’s fortunes is particularly dramatic.

On Jan. 7, a week before the fall of the old regime, he was snatched from a Tunis street by plainclothes security agents who put a sack over his head, bundled him into a car and took him for interrogation.

For the next six days, Mr. Zghaier said, he was alternately beaten, threatened, cuffed to a wall, forced to strip and photographed in humiliating positions.

Much of the mistreatment, he said, took place in the basement of the Interior Ministry on Avenue Bourguiba – decried during the Ben Ali years as a torture chamber.

Today, the ministry is ringed by barbed wire and guarded by the military, but in a sign of the new times, its officials communicate with citizens through Facebook.

The ministry’s page, with more than 150,000 followers, explains how to apply for civil-service jobs, describes police activities and gives updates on the approval process for parties seeking to run in the elections.

As of this month, 37 were approved, the ministry said. It also listed nine that have been rejected, including some with a radical Islamic bent.
One of those behind the outreach is Sami Zaoui, minister of technology and communications in the interim government. Mr. Zaoui, a former consultant for an international accounting firm, told a French radio station last month that his first decision on the job was to lift the Internet censorship that had been enforced under Mr. Ben Ali.

The government is aware it’s being watched closely by the activists, said Fatma Azouz, a journalism professor at Manouba University in Tunis. “I am sure that those who went to the streets are capable of going again,” Mr. Azouz said. “Any government will be aware of the possibility.”

Flickr Creative Commons | Mohamed ElGohary

By Jennifer Preston | The New York Times | March 13, 2011

As the protests spread across Tunisia for weeks, many international news organizations scrambled to cover the unrest just before President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled on Jan. 14, ending 23 years of authoritarian rule. But Amira al-Hussaini was all over the story.

Flickr Creative Commons | Ricardo Leal

by Yasmine Ryan | Al Jazeera | January 6, 2011

Thousands of Tunisians have taken to the streets in recent weeks to call for extensive economic and social change in their country.

Among the fundamental changes the protesters have been demanding is an end to the government’s repressive online censorship regime and freedom of expression.

That battle is taking place not just on the country’s streets, but in internet forums, blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.

The Tunisian authorities have allegedly carried out targeted “phishing” operations: stealing users passwords to spy on them and eradicate online criticism. Websites on both sides have been hacked.

Anonymous, the loosely-knit group of international web activists that drew world attention for their “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks on the servers of companies that blocked payments and server access to the whistle-blowing website, WikiLeaks, joined the fray, in solidarity with the Tunisian uprising.

Most international news organisations have no presence in the country (and, some say, a lack of interest in the protests). Media posted online by Tunisian web activists has been some of the only material that has slipped through the blackout, even if their videos and photos haven’t generated quite the same enthusiastic coverage by Western media as the Iranian protest movement did in 2009.

Killing dissent

The attacks against some of the most vocal voices in the Tunisian cyber-community were sharp and swift.

Sofiene Chourabi, a journalist for Al-Tariq al-Jadid magazine and blogger known for his unabashed criticism of the Tunisian authorities, has been unable to recover his email and Facebook accounts after they were hijacked several days ago.

The first attempted hijacking of his Facebook account happened last week.

“My personal account on the Facebook, including around 4200 friends, was exposed to failed hacking attempt last Friday, but I quickly recovered it after an unidentified person had taken control of it,” he told Al Jazeera.

Then, on Monday, Chourabi was locked out of his Facebook and Gmail accounts.

Chourabi says he believes the Tunisian Internet Agency is responsible for hijacking his accounts. The agency has blocked access to his Facebook wall since October 2009, and his blogs are also unreachable from within Tunisia.

Several of his friends have contacted Facebook and Google asking for his accounts to be returned, to no avail. 

“I think it is high time for Facebook and Google to take serious steps to protect Tunisian activists and journalists,” he said in an interview via email, using a new account.

Facebook is working to ensure it can respond to all its users, Stefano Hesse, Facebook’s head of communications for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told Al Jazeera.

“One thing needs to be clear: we, as Facebook, are not censoring any content, and we had not been approached by the local government in order to do anything regarding anyone,” Hesse said via email.

Google did not respond to requests for comment from Al Jazeera.

Lina Ben Mhenni also had her Facebook page and Yahoo email account pirated, although she managed to retain control of her blog.

She told Al Jazeera that, as of Wednesday, web users in Tunisia were unable to change their passwords for Facebook.

Another activist who was caught in the phishing campaign is a Tunis-based man, who goes by the name of Azyz Amamy in the online world.
 
Amamy told Al Jazeera in a phone interview that his Facebook and email accounts had been hijacked on Monday. Amamy was able to recover both accounts within two hours, after Facebook and Gmail responded to his request. The difference is that he had retained control of a separate email account with which he had registered both accounts.

Two hours was enough time for the authorities to get the login information for his four blogs from his email accounts, deleting all the content.

“When they took Lina [Ben Mhenni]‘s account, and Sofiene Chourabi’s, within an hour all the Facebook pages they administrated had disappeared. And then their accounts were deleted,” Amamy explained.

The speed of the phishing operation, hitting several high-profile targets in a single day, demonstrated that it was exceptionally sophisticated, he said.

As well as Chourabi, Amamy and Ben Mhenni, those known to have been targeted include Med Salah M’Barek and Haythem El Mekki. 

Amamy suspects the phishing operation was far-reaching and that many more were hit, but are too scared to go public.

Several sources Al Jazeera spoke with said that web activists had been receiving anonymous phone calls, warning them to delete critical posts on their Facebook pages or face the consequences.

‘Phishing’ for dissent

The phishing was carried out by a malware code, several sources told Al Jazeera.

Sami Ben Gharbia, who monitors Tunisia’s web censorship for Global Voices, said that Google and Facebook were in no way complicit in the sophisticated phishing technique.

The initial signs that something was underway came on Saturday, he said, when the secure https protocol became unavailable in Tunisia. This forced web users to use the non-secure http protocol.

The government’s internet team then appears to have gone phishing for individuals’ usernames and passwords on services including Gmail, Facebook, Yahoo and Hotmail.

Web activists and journalists alerted others of the alleged hacking by the government via Twitter, which is not susceptible to the same types of operations.
 
“The goal, amongst others, is to delete the Facebook pages which these people administer,” a Tunisian internet professional, who has also been in contact with Anonymous, told Al Jazeera in an emailed interview.

The same source, who asked to remain unidentified due to the potential consequences for speaking out, said that in communication with the international group, he had come up with a Greasemonkey script for firefox internet browsers that deactivated the government’s malicious code.

The script had been installed 1,669 times at the time of writing.

“It isn’t like China and Gmail several months ago, where China attacked Gmail,” the web professional said in an email, referring to last year’s incident when Chinese hackers allegedly broke in the accounts of Chinese dissidents.

“This is much more intelligent (and I’m proud of this intelligence!). It’s the communication with Gmail [and the other sites] that is intercepted,” he said.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says there is clear proof that the phishing campaign was organised and co-ordinated by the Tunisian government, as did other sources that Al Jazeera spoke with.

Unexpected allies

Tunisian web activists found an ally in Anonymous, whose international activists have turned their attention to overthrowing the Tunisian regime of web censorship.

The group’s DDoS attacks, which began on Sunday night, local time, succeeded in taking at least eight websites, including those for the president, prime minister, the ministry of industry, the ministry of foreign affairs, and the stock exchange.

The web site of the government internet agency – known by Tunisian web dissidents ironically as “Ammar 404″, or “Page not found” for its oversight of censorship operations - was also targeted.

In email correspondence with Al Jazeera, one Anonymous activist described the group as a “hive mind,” centred on collective, rather than individual, identity. 

The activists, who prefer to go unnamed, co-ordinate their operations through discussions held in Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks, a type of online discussion forum.

Al Jazeera discussed “OpTunisia” with a group of the online activists on Tuesday. The operation began when one Anon spent last weekend “spamming” the forum, drawing support from activists around the world.

The Tunisian government first drew the Anons’ ire, they say, when it extended its pervasive filtering to WikiLeaks.

“The thing that did it for us, was initially their censoring of WikiLeaks, when WikiLeaks reports on .tn came out,” one participant in the forum wrote in response to questions from Al Jazeera, referring the Tunisia-based website that had been set up to host the WikiLeaks memos.

With their collective gaze turned to Tunisia, the Anons came into contact with Tunisian web activists.

“We did initially take an interest in Tunisia because of WikiLeaks, but as more Tunisians have joined they care more about the general internet censorship there, so that’s what it has become,” another Anon said.

It is hard to generalise the Anons’ diverse range of motivations and ever-changing targets, but most appear to share an outrage over the Tunisian government’s censorship and phishing activities, and a sense of solidarity with Tunisian web users.

Attacking government-linked websites is much more dangerous for those living within Tunisia, they noted, who risk arrest if they are identitied by the authorities.

“Although many Tunisians understandably do not feel comfortable participating in this operation out of precaution, I estimate there [were] about 50 Tunisians participating, to whom we provide the means and knowledge to properly secure their online behaviour from exposure to their government,” one Anon activist wrote via email.

Ben Gharbia says he accessed IRC to observe the discussions, and that there were some people chatting in Tunisian dialect.

By Tuesday, the government appeared to have taken steps to protect its websites from attack by making them inaccessible from overseas. The same sites were available within Tunisia.

On Wednesday, Anonfymous informed Al Jazeera that its own site was under DDoS attack. Anonymous was continuing its DDoS attacks on Thursday, and is likely to move on to another target now that momentum has gathered.

“We, as Anonymous, feel we have accomplished our mission with the major media now involved in Tunisia.  We will keep DDoS’ing that DNS server probably until after the [Thursday's] strike,” wrote the source by email.

Government hacking, en masse

This is hardly the first time Tunisian censors have phished for dissidents’ private information, nor is its censorship anything new.

Most popular video-sharing websites have been blocked for years now. Facebook was completely blocked in 2008.

Tunisia no longer blocks the entire Facebook platform, and is one of the main ways people are able to share video.

Individual Facebook pages are quickly censored, however, often within an hour of going online, Ben Gharbia said.

“Once they identify a link that needs to be blocked, they block it instantly,” he said.

In the siege against cyber dissidence, Twitter has been a bastion for activists. Because people can access Twitter via clients rather than going through the website itself, many Tunisians can still communicate online. The web-savvy use proxies to browse the other censored sites.

Yet even if bloggers manage to maintain their blogging, the censorship deprives them of those readers who do not use proxies. The result is what Ben Gharbia described as the “killing” of the Tunisian blogosphere. 

Ben Mhenni said that the government’s biggest censorship of webpages en masse happened in April 2010, when more than 100 blogs were blocked, in addition to other websites.

She said the hijackings that had taken place in the past week, however, marked the biggest government-organised hacking operation. Most of the pages that had been deleted in recent days were already censored.

Amamy said the government’s approach to the internet policy is invasive and all-controlling.

“Here we don’t really have internet, we have a national intranet,” he said.

You can follow Yasmine on Twitter @yasmineryan

Updates:  Azyz Amamy was arrested on Thursday, sources in Tunisia told Al Jazeera. Another web activist, Slim Amamou was also taken by the authorities.

Amamy’s last Tweet prior to his arrest was published on Thursday morning, as was Amamou’s. (6 Jan 2011 21:03 GMT)

Flickr Creative Commons | Don Toye

Al Arabiya | December 15, 2010

DUBAI — The political and sectarian unrest from which Lebanon has been suffering for a long time initiated an atmosphere of media bias where most TV channels and newspapers promote the ideologies of one group or another.

In came bloggers to break this pattern and establish a free medium of their own.

Within a short time, the number of Lebanese bloggers reached 400, all enjoying the freedom of expression offered by the internet. Despite the relative freedom of expression for which Lebanese media is generally known, several bloggers noted that owners of TV channels tend to restrict speakers in their shows in accordance with their political or religious affiliations.  While expressing their opinions freely, Lebanese bloggers exercise some kind of self-censorship to avoid becoming victims of clampdowns that targeted several of their fellow writers, especially that they usually write about sensitive political issues.

Four bloggers were arrested and briefly detained after launching a Facebook page that criticizes Lebanese President Michel Suleiman. This incident led many bloggers to be cautious over the content of their blogs of fear they might be tracked down and interrogated or arrested.

Lebanese blogger Engy Nassar views objectivity as the best way to strike a balance between freedom of expression and self-censorship.

“In my blog, I try to be objective while always emphasizing that any political entity in Lebanon is liable to criticism,” she said. “I also refuse to promote the ideologies of a certain religion or party or to criticize for the sake of criticism.”

Lebanese blogs reflect political divisions and their content is usually determined by the political scene and the latest events.  More than 900,000, one quarter the population in Lebanon, have accounts on the social networking website on Facebook and as inhabitants of the virtual world increase by the minute, the emergence of more blogs is expected in the coming years.

Flickr Creative Commons | Sinistra Ecologia Libertà

By Juliet Ye & Jason Dean| The Wall Street Journal | November 21, 2010

SHANGHAI—Organizers were forced to cancel an annual blogging conference in Shanghai this weekend under pressure from authorities, the latest sign of tightening limits in China on free expression.

The Chinese Blogger Conference has attracted dozens of prominent online commentators, entrepreneurs, digital artists and others each year since it was started in Shanghai in 2005. Many of the attendees are critical of government censorship, so the event is considered potentially sensitive.

This year, organizers waited until four days ahead of the two-day conference’s planned start on Saturday to announce the venue, an office building in Shanghai’s Xuhui District, near Shanghai Jiaotong University. But the planned hosts reneged late last week owing to pressure from authorities not to let their venue be used for the conference, according to one of the organizers.

It couldn’t be determined which arm of the government was responsible. A person who answered the phone Sunday at Shanghai’s cultural affairs bureau, which oversees events being held in the city, declined to comment.

China’s government has steadily stepped up efforts in recent years to curb free expression on the Internet, which has more than 420 million users in China—the most of any nation.

Earlier this month, a Chinese court handed down a prison sentence of two-and-a-half years to Zhao Lianhai for using the Internet to organize support for parents of children sickened in a tainted-milk scandal. The court found him guilty of inciting social disorder. The winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, Liu Xiaobo, was sentenced last Christmas to 11 years in prison for helping write a manifesto calling for political reforms that was circulated over the Internet.

Blogging is enormously popular in China. As of the end of last year, 145 million Internet users there had blogs or other such personal pages that they had updated within the previous six months, according to the government-backed China Internet Network Information Center.

While the vast majority of content on such pages is apolitical, blogs have also been used for sometimes hard-hitting social commentary. And although Twitter is blocked to Internet users in China, similar Chinese microblogging services have become popular ways to spread sensitive information.

Microblogging was to be one of the key subjects of discussion at this year’s blogging conference. The annual conference had come to be a symbol of the clever ways many Internet users evade Chinese censors. Organizers moved it to a different city each year to make it harder for authorities to quash. Last year, bloggers met by a cave near a remote city in southern Guangdong province to avoid possible problems.

After learning that their venue had been canceled this year, organizers posted a notice on their website blaming “well-known reasons” and said they were looking for an alternative. Then on Saturday, the conference’s home page was stripped of content, with a message saying “Website Suspended.” As of late Sunday, no new venue had materialized.

Isaac Mao, a venture capitalist and software architect who co-founded the conference, said that while pressure from authorities had “upset the original scheme of this year’s conference,” bloggers who came to Shanghai for it could “still find ways to gather in smaller groups.”

Meanwhile, organizers found a way to poke fun at censors: when visitors to the conference’s censored home page pressed Ctrl-A—the common computer command for “select all”—it highlighted previously hidden text that read, in Chinese, “The grass mud horse has been harmonized.” Grass mud horse is a famous anticensorship pun in China’s Internet world—its characters form a homophone for an obscene phrase—and “harmonize” is a euphemism for censorship, playing off President Hu Jintao’s longstanding campaign to create a “harmonious society.”

Flickr Creative Commons | Bruce Irving

By Rebecca MacKinnon | The Wall Street Journal | November 19, 2010

Just before U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Hanoi late last month, Vietnamese authorities redoubled their assault on Internet dissent. Two more bloggers were arrested and another due to be released had his sentence extended. Dissident websites came under cyber attack, taking them offline at a time when they most needed to be visible.

Meanwhile in Washington, a battle is raging over funding for organizations and projects supporting “Internet freedom.” Like many Washington fights, this one makes it harder for the U.S. government to help real people with real problems.

I study how governments seek to stifle and control online dissent. Activists from the Middle East to Asia to the former Soviet states have all been telling me that they suffer from increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks. Such attacks disable activists’ websites at politically crucial times. Email accounts are hacked and computer systems are breached, enabling intruders to install spyware and monitor every electronic move. They are desperate for training and technical help to fight increasingly sophisticated, well-funded adversaries.

The cyber-attacks are one of several new and intractable problems faced by online activists, alongside the older and more clear-cut problem of Internet censorship. A number of repressive governments, including Vietnam, Iran and China, block local Internet users from accessing politically sensitive overseas websites, as well as commercial social networking services like Facebook and Twitter. Anybody can get around this blockage if they know how to use what is called “circumvention technology.” Several U.S-based organizations have developed a range of circumvention tools.

Tools for circumventing censorship are indeed important for activists. But they do nothing to protect against cyber-attacks, or to address a growing number of other ways that governments work to prevent activists from using the Internet to access information, get their message out, and organize. Still, many in Congress and the media have bought into the fantasy that all the U.S. needs to do is put enough money into these circumvention tools, and one in particular—and freedom will flood through the crumbling firewalls.

Since 2007, Congress has inserted a total of $50 million of earmarks into the State Department’s budget to fund organizations dedicated to fighting Internet censorship. One group that has been lobbying hard for the money is the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, run mainly by practitioners of the Falun Gong, a religious sect banned in China. The GIFC has produced a suite of circumvention tools that work well, as long as the user doesn’t mind that GIFC engineers can see their unencrypted communications, or that the security of the tool has not been vetted by independent experts.

The GIFC has found powerful allies in Mark Palmer, who was U.S. ambassador to Hungary when the Iron Curtain fell, and Michael Horowitz, a former Reagan administration official and longtime advocate for human rights and religious freedom. They argue that if the GIFC can get sufficient funding to scale up their tools, authoritarian regimes will be brought to their knees.

The State Department has come under fire in the Journal, the Washington Post and the New York Times for failing to support GIFC. And it’s true that of the $20 million already allocated, most went to other groups that are less radioactive as far as U.S.-China relations are concerned. Some of these groups work to help activists with training and security against surveillance, cyber-attacks and other threats, in addition to circumventing censorship.

In August, $1.5 million out of $5 million available for 2009 was finally awarded by the State Department to the GIFC via the Broadcasting Board of Governors. The bidding process for a remaining $30 million is expected to start soon. With the mid-term elections now finished, we can look forward to a new surge in the war over who gets to be hero of the fairy tale “Toppling the Iron Curtain 2.0″

Meanwhile in real life, the human rights watchdog organization Freedom House warns of a “global freedom recession.” They point to a decrease in online freedom even in many countries that engage in little or no website blocking.

Take Russia, for example. In a new book published by the Open Net Initiative, “Access Controlled,” University of Toronto scholars Rafal Rohozinski and Ronald Deibert point out that while the Russian government doesn’t block many websites, it stifles online dissent in a range of other ways. Government critics in Russia face cyber-attacks, surveillance, and good old-fashioned intimidation.

In a growing number of countries including China, domestic Internet companies are enlisted in this effort through regulatory pressures. Laws and mechanisms originally meant to enforce copyright, protect children and fight online crime are abused to silence or intimidate political critics.

In real life, conceiving and implementing an effective set of policies, programs, and tools for promoting a free and open global Internet requires hard work by both the public and private sectors. This work has barely begun.

A range of fast-evolving technical problems requires an array of solutions. Activists around the world need technical assistance and training in order to fight cyber-attacks more effectively. We need more coordination between human rights activists, technology companies and policy makers just to understand the problems, and how they can be expected to evolve in the next few years.

What’s more, existing research indicates that many of the problems aren’t technical, but rather political, legal, regulatory and even social. Other obstacles to free expression are probably best addressed by the private sector: Social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be urged to adhere to business practices that maximize the safety of activists using their platforms.

Circumvention technology is one tactic to support access to information and online dissent. It makes sense to keep funding these tools, so long as activists are given choice. On their own, however, they are not the silver bullet that many claim. The State Department and Congress need to approach freedom of speech issues strategically, based on a clear understanding of purpose and effect.

Ms. MacKinnon is a Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

Flickr Creative Commons | Jan Smith

By Roueida Mabardi | AFP |  November 4, 2010

DAMASCUS — Syria is preparing to vote on an Internet law that has raised concerns about online media in a country which already keeps a tight control of the Web and where access to at least 240 sites is blocked.

Journalists say the law, which was approved by the government last week and is awaiting parliament’s rubber stamp, could seriously curtail the online media that has enjoyed greater freedom than print.

During the past few years, dozens of news websites have emerged in Syria, and the Internet has become an important source of information given the state’s close scrutiny of more traditional media.

Reports on sensitive subjects like a ban in Syrian universities of the niqab, or full-face veil, which received wide coverage on the Internet, are often absent from newspapers.

And even though the Internet is often slow in Syria and websites get shut down for specified periods of time, there is no existing law that regulates online activity.

The new law was “very severe,” said Ayman Abdel Nour, director of the website all4syria.org, which is edited from Dubai but has numerous contributors in Syria.

It would allow police to enter editorial offices to arrest journalists and seize their computers, Abdel Nour told AFP, adding the arrested journalists would then be hauled before criminal courts.

His website publishes information on out-of-bounds subjects including the president and his family, the army and religion. Despite being blocked since 2005, his website gets about 33,000 daily hits thanks to software that allows Syrians to get around censorship.

Nidal Maalouf, who runs the pro-government news website Syria-News.com, said that under the new law, online media would be overseen by the information ministry, which would make it harder to criticise the government.

But Syrian League for the Defence of Human Rights (SLDHR) chief Abdel Karim Rihawi said online censorship is already getting worse.

“More than 240 websites are blocked in Syria and attempts to control the Internet continue,” he said.

In its efforts to stifle online dissent, the government has targeted the websites of Syrian opposition parties like the Muslim Brotherhood, Kurdish minority groups, and human rights organisations.

But other websites considered politically hostile to the government, and even social networking sites Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, are also proscribed, Rihawi said.

Media rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders painted a bleak picture of online media freedom in Syria in a July report, describing it as “one of the more repressive countries” in terms of Internet censorship.

“Many bloggers have been harassed by the authorities since the end of 2008 for contributing to online publications,” RSF said.

The group mentioned the case of Karim Arbaji, a blogger who was arrested by military intelligence officers in July 2007 and held in pre-trial detention before finally being sentenced to three years in jail in September 2009 for “publishing mendacious information liable to weaken the nation?s morale.”

Arbaji was freed in January after representatives of the Christian church in Syria addressed a request to the president, RSF said.

Another blogger, Firas Saad, was imprisoned in April 2008 for writing articles critical of the regime and only released in September, said SLDHR’s Rihawi.

Flickr Creative Commons | Sean Hobson

By Josh Wood | New York Times | November 3, 2010

BEIRUT — Two officers from the Mukhabarat military intelligence came for the blogger Khodor Salameh one midnight in March, soon after he had written articles critical of the president and the army. He was to report for questioning in the morning — and it was not a request.

Such a scene is familiar in Syria — and much of the Middle East. But Mr. Salameh was in Lebanon, a country widely seen as the freest in the region.

Over the past year, the country’s reputation as a bastion of free speech has been tarnished by a rash of arrests, detentions and intimidation of Lebanese citizens for their online activities.

The level of Internet freedom “is better than in any other Arab country, but it is not good,” said Mr. Salameh. The 24-year-old blogger and journalist said he was held in detention for more than eight hours and threatened with prosecution unless he stuck to writing poetry rather than politics.

In June and July, four people were arrested for comments posted on the social-networking site Facebook about Michel Suleiman, the president of Lebanon.

In the 2010 press freedom index compiled by Reporters Without Borders — which takes restrictions on Internet freedom into account — Lebanon ranked above every country in the Arab world, in addition to Israel and Iran. Still, its ranking dropped 17 places from 2009.

Red lines have emerged: The most dangerous topics to speak out against online are the army and the president.

“The army is uncriticizable, especially after Nahr al-Bared,” said Farah Qobeissy, a socialist activist and blogger, referring to the Palestinian refugee camp where the Lebanese armed forces fought a pitched three-month battle with the Islamist extremist organization Fatah al-Islam in 2007. In that engagement, the army “were pictured as kind of a savior to Lebanon,” she noted.

Other taboos include in-depth discussions of the 1975-1990 civil war and subjects that could give religious offense.

Under Lebanon’s penal code, defamation is a criminal offense. This statute has given the authorities the power exercised by the four Facebook arrests and has left some Internet activists self-censoring their work.

Over the summer, too, some members of the government tried to push through a law governing electronic transactions. Critics, however, have pointed to vaguely worded clauses in the draft bill that could be abused. One clause would require licenses for a hazy range of “online services,” which some feared could cover blogs and news Web sites. Other sections gave the authorities access to private information and the right to go through the records of any company or organization dealing with the Internet.

“It reads like it’s a mechanism for warrantless search and seizure,” said Mohamad Najem, the president of Social Media Exchange, a local organization that trains civil society and non-government organizations to use social media technologies.

The group spearheaded efforts to postpone a vote on the proposed law in June. Using Twitter, blogs and Facebook, it spread the word about the dangers of the new law, while also lobbying legislators to explain its concerns. The effort eventually paid off, with a decision to delay the vote.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, violations of Internet freedom are rife. A number of states including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and Iran are listed as “Internet enemies” by Reporters Without Borders for their imprisonment of Web activists and restrictions placed on Internet access.

In Lebanon, things are not quite as bad, but Nadim Houry, the director of Human Rights Watch’s Beirut office, described the latest infringements on Internet freedom in Lebanon as “a step in the wrong direction.”

The committee that drew up the e-transactions law was headed by Lebanese Parliament members who belonged to Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s Future Movement. Some critics have suggested that the law was inspired by Internet laws in Saudi Arabia, a country that has close ties to Mr. Hariri.

“We can’t think that Lebanon thinks about these things in isolation — they don’t think about anything else in isolation,” Mr. Najem said.