The case of well-known Tibetan environmentalist, businessman and philanthropist Karma Samdrup, sentenced to 15 years in prison on June 24, 2010, by a court in Xinjiang, has been highly unusual in that those monitoring the case were able to see events unfolding almost in real time, thanks to the blog and Twitter output of Karma Samdrup’s wife, Dolkar Tso, and Karma Samdrup’s lawyer, the reknowned Chinese civil rights lawyer, Pu Zhiqiang. 

The trial of Karma Samdrup that started on June 22 ended with his heavy sentencing on June 24 on charges of “grave-robbing”, charges that had actually been dropped 12 years earlier by the authorities. Throughout those few days of the trial, Pu Zhiqiang was using Twitter to document the case as it unfolded. The verdict of 15 years was made known to Pu Zhiqiang’s followers, over 10.000 of them, just hours after it was announced. Below is a screenshot of Pu Zhiqiang’s Tweet announcing the verdict: 

At the same time, Karma Samdrup’s wife, Dolkar Tso, also present in the courtroom in Xinjiang for the duration of the trial, was also documenting events and writing about her thoughts and feelings on her blog, hosted on the popular Chinese blog portal Sohu.com. Below is a screenshot of one of Dolkar Tso’s early blogs: 

Screenshot of Dolkar Tso's blog on Sohu.com

Dolkar Tso persistently continued to use Sohu as her blog-hosting site despite her blog being closed down several times. Dolkar Tso’s blogging activities were monitored and reported by Tibetan writer, poet and blogger Woeser on her blog. Woeser was often quick to re-post articles from both Dolkar Tso and Pu Zhiqiang’s blogs before the posts were removed. 

According to Woeser’s blogposts, Dolkar Tso opened several blogs one after the other starting on June 2 with http://drolkartso.blog.sohu.com, the day when it was suddenly announced that the date of Karma Samdrup’s trial was to be postponed. This blog was shut down after just one day. 

The second blog, http://drolkar.blog.sohu.com/ was started on June 21 but was closed down after 5 days, shortly after Karma Samdrup’s sentence was announced. The post that Dolkar Tso wrote on her second blog, expressing her worries for her husband titled “Praying” was translated into English by High Peaks Pure Earth and subsequently quoted in an article in TIME magazine: 

“The account we heard … exceeded our worst imaginations,” his wife Dolkar Tso wrote in a blog post that was translated by High Peaks Pure Earth, a website that monitors Tibetan source material. “We heard about hundreds of different cruel torture methods, maltreatment around the clock, hitherto unheard of torture instruments and drugs, hard and soft tactics, and even of fellow prisoners being grouped together to extract a confession.” 

The third blog http://drolkar3.blog.sohu.com/, started on June 27 was closed down after 6 days on July 3. 

The fourth blog http://drolkar4.blog.sohu.com/ was started on July 3, the day that Karma Samdrup’s brother, environmentalist Rinchen Samdrup, was sentenced to 5 years in prison in a separate case taking place in Chamdo, Tibet. The blog was closed down after 3 days. 

The fifth blog http://drolkar5.blog.sohu.com/ was started on July 6 and appears to still be online at the time of writing, below is a screenshot of the blog: 

Screenshot of Dolkar Tso's Fifth Blog

Underneath her photograph on her blog is this passage: 

“Regardless of nationality, regardless of geography, seek only mercy and justice. No lies, no flattery, only perseverance and calm. What good comes of deleting this post or this blog?” 

Dolkar Tso (1) and Pu Zhiqiang (centre) in Xinjiang

Lawyer Pu Zhiqiang’s personal blog survived the duration of the trial and crucially he was even able to photograph and upload all 10 pages of Karma Samdrup’s sentencing documents on the evening of the sentencing. The documents were re-posted almost immediately on Woeser’s blog. 

However, on July 15, the blog was closed down, below is the error message that appears when trying to access http://puzhiqianglawyer.blog.sohu.com/ 

Since then, Pu Zhiqiang has been blogging on a new blog but still hosted on Sohu: http://lawyerpuzhiqiang.blog.sohu.com/ As he notes in the top bar of the blog, it is his 13th blog. A few days ago, ChinaGeeks reported that lawyer and blogger Liu Xiaoyuan had his Sohu blog closed down on July 12, 2010. 

Whilst an unprecedented amount of information was reaching the internet and the wider world throughout this case, what is also demonstrated here is the sheer persistence and determination required by civil society activists in the PRC to be heard using social media, as well as the importance of online networks of support to re-post articles and to spread the word on shuttered blogs that may have moved or reincarnated elsewhere.

Flickr Creative Commons | David Shankbone

By Ndesanjo Macha | Global Voices Online | July 14, 2010

Supporters of the president Paul Kagame of Rwanda have turned to the power of Facebook, Twitter and blogs to help him win presidential election that will be held on 9 August 2010.

MyKagame is an online fan club for Paul Kagame. This is what the club is all about:

As a career statesman with a rich profile and long list of accomplishments, President Paul Kagame has a large following of admirers who look up to look up to him for guidance as Hero. This is their platform. The Fan Club is managed entirely by the president’s fans as a group with a common cause, purpose and direction.

As a fan of President Kagame, this August campaign is about you. Your voice counts. This is your platform to share thoughts and advise on issues to address during and after the presidential elections. Stand up for what you believe in, make Rwanda proud!

You may get involved in several ways:

Connecting with other supporters through Fan Club blogs.

Joining grassroots efforts to support the President’s campaign

Spreading the word about the Fan Club and our Hero’s agenda for Rwanda especially during the upcoming Presidential campaign.

Boosting morale of people who share our values and love Rwanda.

In addition to its website, the club has a blog. Following are two recent posts on the blogs:

1. Rwanda’s strides to build a regional ICT hub:

Rwanda has positioned itself as a regional hub for information and communication technology (ICT) with a robust ICT industry, including e-commerce, e-services, applications development, and automation. It is believed that ICT will be harnessed to generate wealth and be a key economic driver. As part of its policy goal to progressively transform Rwanda from a predominantly agriculture economy to a predominantly information-rich, knowledge-based economy (PIKE), the Government committed itself to the implementation of the envisaged four rolling NICI/ICT4D Plans over the 20 year life-span of Vision 2020 and the ICT4D Policy.

2. Our hero is cleared by NEC to contest:

As highly expected by the fans, President Paul Kagame was among the four candidates cleared yesterday by the The National Electoral Commission to contest in the August 09 poll.

NEC has accepted Kagame’s application for the race after the RPF returned as its flag bearer to run for the second and final term as provided for by in the constitution.

For this term, President Kagame has pledged to put leadership in the hands of the people. It will strengthen further the integration of the youth, women, vulnerable groups and the civil society. He also promises to fortify the means of disseminating information and consolidate the country’s security and sovereignty

There is a Facebook page called Paul Kagame will win 2010 presidential elections. At the time of writing this post there were 3,408 followeres. Following are a few messages on its wall:

Moses Ndayisenga says:

May God bless Rwanda’s paul kagame in his victory b’se he won 2010 election.VIVA KPAUL. OUR Mzee

Siriba AbdulKarim says:

May God be with you in leading Rwandans to their social welfare. Keep it up!

Sangano Gentle adds:

Yes our beloved PRESIDENt is gonna win 2010 ELECTION.no one like him.

There are two other Facebook pages for Kagame; PaulKagame with 6,327 followers and Paul Kagame with 8,169 followers (at the time of writing this post).

The latest message on PaulKagame page reads:

today co-chaired the meeting of the Broadband Commission for Digital Development held in Geneva, Switzerland.
In his remarks said “… There
is no doubt, that using Broadband to unleash peoples’ full potential is an
economic imperative for attaining an inclusive and prosperous global economic
society…Leaders in governmen…t, business and civil society organizations must be accountable to achieve concrete results.”

A speech by Paul Kagame at the 16th Commemoration of The Genocide is the latest message on Paul Kagame page.

One of the topics on the page is about the administrator/creator of the page. There were fears that the administrator may have passed away without the knowledge of his followers:

Mukiza I have this feeling that the anonymous admin for this page may have silently met his or her creator without our knowledge.
For what explains the fact that this page has gone non-updated since august of 2009.
That is a hell of a long time for a live person to be that un-responsive.

If my worries are founded,then my sincere condolences are guaranteed.

The administrator joined the discussion explaining his silence:

Paul Kagame Still kicking, I’m afraid

I recently moved cities and have been largely without the internet for the past 3 months as well as splitting up with my partner of over a year. I’m sorry for neglecting you, but I still check in whenever I can. Unfortunately even admins are human.

If anyone has any complaints all they have to do is make a topic and I’ll see it.

As for the page, well it seems to take care of itself pretty much, or so it seems to me. But I’ll do some spring cleaning.

But maybe I’ve grabbed the wrong end of the stick here, is this a coup? Would the community like me to step down?

~ The Administrator

Kagame supporters are also on the popular microblogging site, Twitter. There is paulkagame, which is private (196 followers) and PaulKagame with 964 followers.

The latest tweet on PaulKagame reads:

in Eastern Province yesterday, commended success of land distribution and agricultural surplus -pledged more government support

There is also Paul Kagame photostream on Flickr and Paul Kagame podcast and pK blogs on paulkagame.com

We will have to wait and see the overall impact of social media in the 2010 presidential election in Rwanda.

Flickr Creative Commons | Mirry

Reporters Sans Frontieres | June 25, 2010

Reporters Without Borders today launched the world’s first “Anti-Censorship Shelter” in Paris for use by foreign journalists, bloggers and dissidents who are refugees or just passing through as a place where they can learn how to circumvent Internet censorship, protect their electronic communications and maintain their anonymity online.

“At a time when online filtering and surveillance is becoming more and more widespread, we are making an active commitment to an Internet that is unrestricted and accessible to all by providing the victims of censorship with the means of protecting their online information,” Reporters Without Borders said.

“Never before have there been so many netizens in prison in countries such as China, Vietnam and Iran for expressing their views freely online,” the press freedom organisation added. “Anonymity is becoming more and more important for those who handle sensitive data.”

Reporters Without Borders and the communications security firm XeroBank have formed a partnership in order to make high-speed anonymity services, including encrypted email and web access, available free of charge to those who user the Shelter.

By connecting to XeroBank through a Virtual Private Network (VPN), their traffic is routed across its gigabit backbone network and passes from country to country mixed with tens of thousands of other users, creating a virtually untraceable high-speed anonymity network.

This network will be available not only to users of the Shelter in Paris but also to their contacts anywhere in the world and to all those – above all journalists, bloggers and human rights activists – who have been identified by Reporters Without Borders. They will be able to connect with the XeroBank service by means of access codes and secured, ready-to-use USB flash drives that can be provided on request.

XeroBank is a communications security firm that has cornered the market on one of the rarest commodities in the world: online privacy. It specializes in communication solutions that protect its clients from all eavesdroppers.

The best-known free encryption and censorship circumvention software is also available to users of the Shelter, along with manuals and Wiki entries on these issues. A multimedia space is planned for journalists and Internet users who want to film and send videos.

The Shelter will eventually also have a dedicated website for hosting banned content. Egyptian blogger Tamer Mabrouk’s reports on the pollution of Egypt’s lakes, which are banned in his country, and articles that are banned in Italy by its new phone-tap law will all have a place in what is intended to be a refuge for those who still being censored.

The Shelter is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday to Friday. Anyone wanting to use it should make a reservation by sending an email to shelter@rsf.org.

The Shelter could not have been created without the support of the Paris city hall.

Reporters Without Borders points out that around 60 countries are currently subject to some form of online censorship and that Internet filtering is in effect in around 40 of them. About 120 netizens (bloggers, Internet users, and citizen journalists) are currently in prison worldwide.

Read the latest “Enemies of the Internet” report and its introduction “Web 2.0 v. Control 2.” – link

Flickr Creative Commons | Les Chatfield

By Nico Colombant | Voice of America | June 15, 2010

African gay activists in Africa and in the diaspora are increasingly using the Internet to have their voices heard, while still trying to figure out how to advance homosexual rights on the continent.

One of the most popular blogs advocating gay rights in Africa is called Gay Uganda. Its author chooses to remain anonymous.

“I am somebody in the heart of Africa who has been lonely without the rest of the Internet, without the rest of the global sphere, talking about what I would like to talk about, with that kind of freedom,” he said from Kampala.”I cannot do it elsewhere.”

While harsher laws are being proposed against homosexuality across the continent, including in Uganda, the author of Gay Uganda says what he is doing helps Africa’s homosexual community.

“It started off as a way of venting, but then later I realized that it was a way of putting across to the rest of the world what our lives were more or less,” he said. “The things that have been happening around Kampala, in Uganda, and all over the continent – it is strengthening to me personally, that is why I do it.”

He says that in Kampala, very few people know he is gay. But online, he has a community of followers who support him. He adds that the types of articles he writes would never be allowed in traditional media.

“Society is more or less homophobic and the reporters come from the society. But also you have to consider that in a place like Uganda, you cannot write a positive story about gay people. That is a matter of fact,” he added.

Uganda’s Ethics and Integrity Minister James Nsaba Buturo said recently that the government is concerned about what he called the “mushrooming” number of gays and lesbians in the country. He said he wants a law enacted that would criminalize confessing to being a homosexual.

Even in African countries like Ghana, which are seen as being relatively tolerant, anti-homosexual activities, such as marches denouncing gays, are becoming more frequent.

Media and influential politicians and religious leaders often denounce homosexuality as Western contamination. And they say homosexuality is contrary to traditional family values.

More than three dozen countries in Africa, including Senegal, have laws criminalizing homosexuality. Selly Thiam, who lives in the United States, is a native of Senegal. She is the founder of the None on Record website, which records testimonies of gays, lesbians and transgender people from Africa, most of them anonymously.

Thiam says she hopes the website will be used to help change policies toward homosexuals.

“None on the Record is just at the beginning of understanding or even becoming conscious of how we fit into the larger movement,” said Thiam. “I think we will have more opportunities in the future to see how we can really impact and support the organizing that is going on in the continent and around the world in other LGBT communities as well.”

LGBT refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.

Thiam says that although it is important for her to build contacts through the Internet, face-to-face interaction is also important, even if most pro-gay groups in Africa work underground.

“That is why I have to keep going back to work in concert with people who are organizing. It is an issue of safety, and something that I have to think about all the time. But I have to also continue to do my work,” Thiam added.

A columnist from the United States, Reverend Irene Monroe, says her own work and Internet outreach have put her in contact with many gays and lesbians in Africa like a woman from Kenya who recently wrote her an email.

“She says here, ‘I need encouragement. Here homosexuality is punishable by 14 years imprisonment and 28 strokes of the cane. “The church is also extremely hostile. Some suspected lesbians from my church were once beaten and burnt,’” Monroe said.

Gay activists in Africa say it is a very difficult process to advance homosexual rights, especially in difficult economic times, when scapegoats are used by politicians and religious leaders to divert attention.

Irene Monroe links discrimination to a lack of democracy and government policies toward HIV and AIDS.

“Countries that tend to be more open around addressing the issue of HIV/AIDS and have a lot more financial solvency and really do run more in terms of employing a democratic model, you will find in those small pockets throughout Africa and other parts of the world people are more tolerant in the different ways in which people express love,” she said. “And we see it here when we see rabid forms of conservatism here we find in most groups of people who are less tolerant of LGBT folks, it operates similarly believe it or not in Africa too. Culturally, it looks different. But the seed around what gives rise to the kind of homophobia that blossoms in the way it does, it is planted in the same soil.”

Gay activists say they hope those advocating homosexual rights eventually will succeed – one blog entry and appeal for understanding at a time.

In June 2007, I founded insidesomalia.org, a news and social networking website focused on Somalia.

My motivations to start the website were due to the limited knowledge and a view of insignificance outsiders have about the Horn of Africa.

When people mention Somalia to me, they use such words as: pirates, failed state, Black Hawk Down, refugees, Extremist Islamists, poor, and clan politics. Whilst these words on the surface are true, it requires deeper analysis to fully understand the crisis taking place in the past 20 years.

Traditional media has limited space and time to highlight the problems of Somalia in depth, causing the lack of understanding about the region.

The Internet carries an immense power in shaping a nation’s agenda. The old gatekeepers of media; television, newspapers and radio, have a lesser role in the dispersal of information. Insidesomalia.org aims to take advantage of the new media to educate the global community by bringing together an extensive resource of information.

We are living interesting times; never has it been easier, faster or cheaper to create and publish content.

It is important that people are able express their views and feel a sense of control of their destiny.

To what extent do these technologies contribute to conflict resolution?

All media have vital roles to play; the Internet in particular will play a pivotal part in bringing peace and addressing key issues of the reconstruction of Somalia.

On the conflict resolutions the Internet can:

Bring forth the voices of moderates, “the silent majority”;

Hold the Somali government & International community accountable to the people;

Be a platform to discuss & exchange views to building peaceful & prosperous society;

Looking beyond the current state of conflict, the Internet will serve all sectors of society, namely:

To ensure that the government is transparent and open to the people;

To help lift people out of poverty by giving low cost access to educational and healthcare.

To connect businesses and consumers to the global marketplace.

It will be a long journey, mistakes will probably be made, but through the Internet and the networking of billions of people, an unprecedented force for the good can be achieved.

-Abbas Gassem, Founder and Editor, Inside Somalia and Senior Manager, APG and Business Optimisation, Yahoo! UK

Flickr Creative Commons | Hamed Saber

By Jeff Jacoby |Boston Globe | April 25, 2010

IT WAS 21 years ago this spring that hundreds of thousands of students flooded the streets of Beijing, Shanghai, and other Chinese cities to protest communist repression and call for greater freedom and democratic reforms. Those amazing demonstrations generated intense global interest — interest the regime tried to quell by blocking international TV transmissions, ordering Western networks to halt their coverage, and arresting several journalists.

But the government overlooked the then relatively new communication technologies of cellular phones and fax transmissions. As the Newseum’s Sharon Shaheed described it in a retrospective last year, “Reporters got around the ban by reporting by mobile telephone. Students in China’s prodemocracy movement kept the news flowing by fax machines and electronic mail connections. Technology managed to open Chinese repressions to the world, despite government censorship.’’ The same technology enabled the world to respond, buoying the protesters with invaluable moral support.

In the wake of the Chinese uprising and the fall of the Iron Curtain later that year, many voices extolled the power of technology to advance liberty and undermine authoritarian regimes. Two decades later, many are still hailing the ability of information technology to produce greater freedom — only the technical innovations being celebrated now are the Internet, text messaging, and social media applications such as Twitter and Facebook. Tweets by the thousands fueled the “Green Revolution’’ set off by last year’s elections in Iran, and prodemocracy activists from Vietnam to Venezuela are using the Internet to denounce repression, expose government corruption, and champion human rights. “The Internet is God’s present to China,’’ the prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo exulted a year ago. “It is the best tool for the Chinese people in their project to cast off slavery and strive for freedom.’’

If only that were true. If only the miracles of high-tech communication really were a silver bullet against dictatorship and government brutality. But fax machines didn’t prevent China’s rulers from sending in tanks to crush the 1989 democracy movement at Tiananmen Square, and Twitter hasn’t weakened the mullahs’ grip on power in Iran. As for Liu Xiaobo, he was convicted of “subversion’’ this past December and sentenced to 11 years in prison.

For all the wonders it makes possible, information technology is only a tool, and like all tools it can be used to promote the cause of freedom, or to oppose it. That was the sobering theme of a conference on cyber-dissidents organized in Dallas last week by the George W. Bush Institute in conjunction with the human-rights organization Freedom House. The conference brought together online dissidents from an array of unfree or authoritarian countries — China, Syria, Venezuela, Russia, Cuba, and Iran — as well as experts on Internet strategy, nonviolent resistance, and international relations.

It is always inspiring to encounter individuals who jeopardize their safety and freedom to speak truth to power, and the dissidents gathered on the campus of Southern Methodist University were no exception. Ahed al-Hendi, a young antigovernment activist seized by the Syrian mukhabarat — the secret police — as he was blogging in a Damascus Internet café, spent 34 days in a 3-by-5-foot jail cell. The Russian dissident Oleg Kozlovsky (who was grounded in Europe and joined the conference via Skype) has been repeatedly arrested and was even drafted by the Russian army in 2007 in order to thwart his prodemocracy activities. As former President Bush put it in opening the conference, these “are people who refuse to take the lack of freedom for granted.’’

The speakers traded war stories and discussed ways to use cyber-technology to rally supporters and share intelligence. But running through the whole program was the Dickensian sense that today’s dissidents are living in the best of times and the worst of times: The social-media explosion makes it easier for champions of freedom to organize opposition and get information to the outside world, yet the very same online technology arms repressive governments with sophisticated new methods of censorship, surveillance, and disinformation.

Far from ushering in a golden age of democracy, remarked the Bush Institute’s James K. Glassman, a former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, the Internet era has coincided with a “freedom recession.’’ Interactive Web 2.0 applications have facilitated the rise of “Authoritarianism 2.0.’’

The Internet, in short, will not set men and women free. It is, rather, just the latest arena in which those who yearn for liberty must battle for it — and in which the outcome is never guaranteed.

Flickr Creative Commons | Hamed Saber

by Indira A.R. Lakshmanan | New York Times | February 23, 2010

Cameran Ashraf was instant-messaging from Los Angeles with an activist in Iran during anti-government demonstrations Feb. 11 when the chat went dead.

Had Iran’s government “shut down the Internet” to thwart dissidents from organizing online, or had the authorities come to arrest the man, Mr. Ashraf said he wondered as he described the incident during an online video interview. Mr. Ashraf, who says he sees himself as a digital aid worker, immediately alerted other Iranian contacts to block surveillance of their Web traffic.

A 29-year-old American whose parents emigrated from Iran, Mr. Ashraf is a co-founder of AccessNow, a group of tech-savvy volunteers who joined forces during Iran’s crackdown on election protests last year to help Iranians evade censorship. They are the type of cyberactivists the U.S. State Department is seeking to support with $50 million in funds for an expanding counteroffensive against suppression of Internet freedom.

“The fact that many governments are trying to prevent their citizens from expressing themselves or obtaining information that would be critical” underscores the importance of defending online speech and assembly, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a Feb. 16 interview. The United States wants to support “garage type” outfits trying to circumvent Web censorship, she said.

AccessNow has communicated with Google on censorship and security issues and received help from its YouTube subsidiary when Iranian protest videos were hacked, said Brett Solomon, a co-founder of the group, in New York.

“This is what we do, at the core of who we are: to make sure that everyone has access,” said Scott Rubin, a Google and YouTube spokesman who works on free expression issues.

The State Department has given $15 million in the past two years to private projects that use technology and training to promote online freedoms. It is reviewing applications for $5 million to support work including research into circumventing firewalls and surveillance, and $30 million more will be available later this year, said Daniel Baer, deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor.

Helping activists creates a problem by exposing them to retribution from repressive governments. Projects are so sensitive and the people involved at such risk that the State Department declined to identify current applicants. One Washington-based group that got the bulk of the money doled out so far — more than $13 million for projects worldwide — asked not to be named, fearing that Chinese employees would be jailed.

AccessNow’s founders haven’t received government funds and said they would have reservations about accepting any because they want to remain independent and protect contacts in countries where taking foreign money is a crime.

The group does disseminate open-source software that receives indirect U.S. support, including Tor, a network of virtual tunnels that allows people to surf anonymously. Built on work by the Office of Naval Research, the science and technology arm of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, Tor was developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, and by volunteers. It is used by an average of 8,000 people in Iran and 100,000 in China at any moment, said Andrew Lewman, executive director of the nonprofit Tor Project in Dedham, Massachusetts.

Scrutiny of digital dissidents drew headlines last month when Google, the Mountain View, California, search-engine company, said the e-mail accounts of Chinese rights activists had been singled out in an attack on its computer systems. Mrs. Clinton called on the Chinese authorities in a Jan. 21 speech to “conduct a thorough investigation” and said U.S. technology firms should use their influence to protest censorship, surveillance and theft of information.

Iran’s post-election restrictions on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook — used to organize and publicize protests — inspired Mr. Ashraf, Mr. Solomon and two Internet enthusiasts in Los Angeles, who all met online, to form AccessNow. A handful of other volunteers help run servers and share technical support.

“Our genesis is Iran, but the idea behind AccessNow is to develop a global movement,” Mr. Solomon, a 39-year-old Australian, said in an Internet video chat, adding that he’s sharing his experience with Tibetan, Burmese and Cuban dissidents.

The Internet has built-in perils for democracy advocates. Users who don’t utilize encryption or other methods to obscure their identity leave a digital trail of conversations, contacts and Web sites visited.

Global Voices Online, an international bloggers network, has documented 206 cases of bloggers under arrest or threat, most in China, Egypt and Iran. Last year, Internet journalists outnumbered print, radio and television reporters among 136 imprisoned members of the news media, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York.

Mehdi Saharkhiz, 28, an Iranian in New Jersey, joined AccessNow after his father, a journalist named Isa Saharkhiz, was arrested outside Tehran eight months ago. He has gathered 2,200 videos on his OnlyMehdi YouTube channel, including iconic footage by anonymous Iranians who won a George Polk Award in journalism last week for filming the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan, who has become a symbol of resistance.

“YouTube videos provided some of the only perspective of what was happening in Iran,” said Olivia Ma, 27, news manager of the video-sharing site. During the protests this month, videos were hacked and erased; AccessNow alerted Ms. Ma, who restored them.

Not every problem is so easily resolved. Mr. Ashraf hasn’t heard back from the Iranian rights campaigner who disappeared from his screen.

Flickr Creative Commons | Zensursala

by Clothilde le Coz, Reporters Without Borders

2009 was an unprecedented year for online repression.

For the first time since the Internet emerged as a tool for public use, there are currently 100 bloggers and cyber-dissidents imprisoned worldwide as a result of posting their opinions online in 2009, according to Reporters Without Borders. This figure is indicative of the severity of the crackdowns being carried out in roughly 10 countries around the world. (In one example, Burma handed out long prison sentences to online dissidents.)

The number of countries pursuing online censorship doubled in the past year — a disturbing trend that suggests governments seek to increase their control over new media. In total, 151 bloggers and cyber-dissidents were arrested in 2009, and 61 were physically assaulted.

The crackdown on bloggers and ordinary citizens who express themselves online comes at the same time that social networking and interactive websites have become extremely popular, not to mention powerful vehicles for free expression.

China Still Leads in Online Censorship

China was once again the leading Internet censor in 2009. Countries such as Iran, Tunisia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Uzbekistan also blocked websites and blogs, and engaged in surveillance of online expression. In Turkmenistan, for example, the Internet remains under total state control. Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer is still in jail, while the famous Burmese comedian Zarganar still has 34 years left on his prison sentence. These are but a few examples.

The list of approximately 120 victims of Internet censorship in 2009 also includes leading figures in the defense of online free speech, such as China’s Hu Jia and Liu Xiaobo, and Vietnam’s Nguyen Trung and Dieu Cay.

People are usually targeted because they speak out on political matters, but the global financial crisis is also on the list of subjects likely to provoke online censorship. In South Korea, a blogger was wrongfully detained for commenting on the country’s disastrous economic situation. Roughly six people in Thailand were arrested or harassed just for making a connection between the king’s health and a fall in the Bangkok stock exchange. Censorship was slapped on media in Dubai when it came time for them to report on the country’s debt repayment problems.

Overall, wars and elections constituted the chief threats to journalists and bloggers in 2009. It is becoming more risky to cover wars because journalists themselves are being targeted for murder and kidnappings. It’s also just as dangerous for reporters in some countries to do their job at election time. Journalists have ended up in prison or in a hospital thanks to their election reporting. Violence before and after elections was particularly prevalent in 2009 inside countries with poor democratic credentials.

Iran Election Crackdown

Iran saw the most violence, censorship and arrests due to an election. Its elections this past summer saw more than 100 arrests, and many prison sentences handed down. The country, which is on the Reporters Without Borders list of “Enemies of the Internet,” has also deployed a sophisticated system of Internet filtering and monitoring, especially in recent months. The country’s main ISPs depend on the Telecommunication Company of Iran, which recently came under control of the Revolutionary Guard, and does not hesitate to flout international treaties or to restrict the free flow of information.

Within hours of the announcement of President Mahmoud Ahmadinedjad’s election “victory,” journalists were being arrested by the intelligence ministry, Revolutionary Guard, and other security services. Most were taken to Tehran’s Evin prison. At least 100 journalists and bloggers have been arrested since June, and 27 are still being held. Today, Iran is one of the world’s five biggest imprisoners of journalists.

Since the election, national and international media in Iran have been subject to massive and systematic censorship that is without precedent. For the first time since the 1979 revolution, the security services are vetting the content of newspapers before they’re published.

The Iranian regime’s offensive against online free expression took a new direction in December after Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi announced he was going to prosecute two conservative websites for “insulting” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Meanwhile, several Internet service providers cut access to prevent political opponents from disseminating information during opposition demonstrations on December 27. After the demonstrations, the intelligence ministry and Revolutionary Guard began rounding up government opponents and journalists, arresting an estimated 20 people in the latest wave. Those targeted included a dozen or so journalists and cyber-dissidents. Alireza Behshtipour Shirazi, the editor of Kaleme.org (opposition leader Mirhossein Moussavi’s official website), was arrested at his Tehran home and taken to an unknown place of detention.

Trouble in Democratic Countries

Democratic countries have also enacted online censorship. Several European nations are working on new steps to control the Internet in what they say is a campaign against child porn and illegal downloads. Australia is also planning to set up a compulsory filtering system that poses a threat to freedom of expression.

Communications minister Stephen Conroy announced in December that, after a year of testing in partnership with Australian Internet service providers, the government will introduce legislation imposing mandatory filtering of websites with pornographic, pedophilic or particularly violent content.

Google Australia’s head of policy, Iarla Flynn, raised concerns, saying, “Moving to a mandatory ISP filtering regime with a scope that goes well beyond such material is heavy-handed and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information.” In a Fairfax Media poll of 20,000 Australians, 96 percent strongly opposed a mandatory Internet filtering system.

Yet that proposal — as well as many others around the world — continues to move ahead. Hopefully, 2010 will be a better year for free speech online.

Flickr Creative Commons | James Buck

From Tibet to Tehran, more and more front-line reporting is being carried out by freelancers and published online. But the revolution in newsgathering—brought about by new technology and the downsizing of traditional media outlets—has a down side. For the first time, half of all journalists jailed around the world worked online as bloggers, reporters, or Web editors. Most of them are freelancers with little or no institutional support.

These are the key findings of a report released Dec. 8 by the Committee To Protect Journalists. The annual census of imprisoned journalists was conducted on Dec. 1 and includes every journalist who was in jail on that day. All told, there are 136 journalists on the list, an increase of 11 from the previous year. Sixty-eight of them worked online, the vast majority of them freelancers.

For the 11th year in a row, China is the world’s leading jailer of journalists, with 24 behind bars. It is followed closely by Iran, where 23 journalists remain in jail, out of dozens rounded up in the aftermath of the disputed June 12 election. Cuba, Eritrea, and Burma round out the top five.

A closer look at the numbers in China reveals just how dramatically the Internet has transformed both newsgathering and the dissemination of critical commentary in repressive societies.

A decade ago, when China first topped the list, most of those jailed were print reporters for mainstream media outlets who had gone too far in their criticism of government officials. The Chinese media are much more open today, but there are still clear limits, and journalists who displease the authorities face consequences. The difference is that they are more likely to be fired than thrown in jail.

But online journalists can’t be fired, blacklisted, or, in most cases, bought off precisely because most work independently. They don’t have employers who can be pressured. Chinese authorities have few options when it comes to reining in online critics—censor them, intimidate them, or throw them in jail. This explains why 18 of the 24 journalists imprisoned in China worked online.

In Iran, there’s a similar dynamic. The 23 reporters jailed there fall roughly into two camps—those who worked for print media outlets allied with opposition candidates and those who worked independently online. Under the reformist presidency of Mohammed Khatami, 1997-2005, the Tehran intelligentsia famously spent hours in cafes perusing dozens of newspapers and magazines, reformist and conservative. A crackdown on the print media that accelerated under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad closed many newspapers and forced top journalists and commentators online, fueling the rise of the Farsi blogosphere. Today, many of these journalists are in jail or in exile.

Unquestionably, the rise of Web-based reporting provides exciting new opportunities. An adventurous young freelancer can head out to cover the world armed with a laptop and a digital camera. Government critics from Burma to Vietnam are able to circumvent the censors and get their views out to the world.

But the sharp increase in the number of imprisoned online journalists highlights new vulnerabilities. They are utterly alone when authorities knock on the door to take them away. Freelancers face jail without legal assistance or the backing of an employer who can provide support for their families.

Even more alarming is the vulnerability of the Internet itself. The utopian notion that the Internet is impossible to censor or control has given way to a new reality. Even as new formal and informal news organizations emerge on the Web, traditional media—text and broadcast, public and private, partisan and nonpartisan, for-profit and nonprofit—are all converging online. The convergence creates an “information chokepoint” that repressive governments can shut down when a story gets out of control. Whereas governments used to have to close dozens of newspapers and shut down individual radio stations, now they can simply halt the circulation of information by pulling the plug on the Web.

In China, for example, the government shut down the Internet and even the cell phone network when riots broke out in Xinjiang province earlier this year. In Iran, citizen journalists’ reports about the post-election violence were eventually silenced as the mullahs shut down Internet communication and began rounding up critical bloggers. On Saturday, Iranian authorities did it again, shutting down the Internet and the cell system to disrupt planning for student protests held Monday. The shutdown was also intended to limit coverage of the events through the Web and social media sites.

This is why the battle for press freedom around the world has moved online. It’s no longer about keeping the presses running and unblocking the airwaves. Ensuring that people around the world have access to diverse news and information means keeping the Internet free.

In order to defend press freedom in this new environment, press freedom groups like CPJ need to change tactics. Traditional advocacy—protest letters to heads of state, detailed reports chronicling government crackdowns—will continue to be relevant, but there will also be a technological component to our advocacy that involves navigating around firewalls, circumventing censorship, and outflanking government efforts to control the Web. In order to better carry out this kind of advocacy, CPJ is adding a new specialized program dedicated to the defense of online journalists.

But technology has its limits, and the freedom to express ideas and disseminate information through the Internet cannot be taken for granted. Like all freedoms, it must be actively defended. While there are highly effective organizations like the OpenNet Initiative and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, media companies and journalists are just beginning to understand that they have a huge stake in preserving Internet freedom.

Internet and technology companies also need to do more. So far, they have a mixed record. It’s true that people in repressive societies benefit from access to the Internet, but not when companies collaborate in censoring content or exposing government critics, as Yahoo did when it turned over to Chinese authorities information used to arrest journalist Shi Tao in 2004.

Fortunately, these companies are taking steps to address the issue. CPJ is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, an organization of human rights groups, academics, socially responsible investors, and Internet leaders such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. These companies have agreed to a set of principles that will help them push back against censorship.

Traditional media companies and Internet service providers have complex commercial arrangements that make them partners in some realms and competitors in others. But they should be natural allies as the battle for press freedom enters this new phase. We need to form a united front to push back against government censorship, confront repressive regimes, blend traditional advocacy with technological innovation, and stand up publicly for journalists of all kinds who seek to report the news online.

Joel Simon is the executive director of the Committee To Protect Journalists.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2237675/

Flickr Creative Commons | Yeowatzup

New fears of Internet censorship spread in the Russian blogosphere Monday after a wireless Internet provider co-owned by Russian Technologies acknowledged blocking access to some web sites.

Moscow-based users of the Yota provider have been unable to access web sites such as Garry Kasparov’s Kasparov.ru, Solidarity’s Rusolidarnost.ru and the banned National Bolshevik Party’s Nazbol.ru over the past few weeks, bloggers and the sites’ editors said.

Access also was patchy until Sunday to the site of opposition magazine The New Times, its web editor Ilya Barabanov said Monday.

Yota denied that it was blocking those sites. But Denis Sverdlov, chief executive of WiMax operator Skartel, which runs the Yota brand, did acknowledge that Yota blocks access to sites that are classified as extremist by the Justice Ministry. Because of that, Yota users cannot open the Chechen rebel web site Kavkazcenter.com.

“In November, we got an order from prosecutors recommending that we close access to extremist sites,” he said in e-mailed comments. “Since we are a law-abiding firm, we put the order into practice.”

As for users’ lack of access to the opposition web sites, Sverdlov blamed technical difficulties that arose after Yota introduced new IP addresses to cope with the rapid growth of its customer base. “On Oct. 23, we were assigned a bloc of 65,536 IP addresses. After we put them to commercial use, we found that IT managers of some other sites could not exclude them from those IP addresses they filter,” Sverdlov said.

As proof that there was no censorship, he said President Dmitry Medvedev’s official site at Kremlin.ru was at times inaccessible as well.

Kavkaz Center was declared extremist in a 2008 court decision and appears 10 times on the Justice Ministry’s list of more than 450 items classified as extremist. The ministry’s list does not mention any of the opposition sites that have complained of being inaccessible to Yota users.

Critics say the extremism law, which was widened in 2006, is being used to silence the opposition.

It is unclear why, with the exception of Yota, most national providers do not block access to Kavkaz Center.

A representative at Yota’s technical support hot line told the Novy Region news agency on Friday that the company was blocking 29 extremist sites. The unidentified representative said Kasparov.ru was not on the list but the list had been updated a week earlier.

Bloggers, meanwhile, are rattled by an audio file posted online Sunday in which a female voice — purportedly of a Yota support representative — says Kasparov’s and Solidarity’s sites are blocked because they are on that list.

“This strongly smells of political censorship,” said Denis Bilunov, a senior member of Kasparov’s Other Russia movement.

He said the most likely explanation was Russian Technologies’ involvement in the company.

The state-owned arms and industry behemoth bought a blocking stake in Telconet in November 2008.

A spokeswoman said Russian Technologies could not immediately comment on the allegations Monday.

Skartel spokesman Anton Belkov said he would not comment beyond Sverdlov’s statement.

Skartel has been building a network providing high-speed wireless Internet service since last summer and has said it wants to become a nationwide operator covering 180 cities within three years. State corporation Russian Technologies holds a 25.1 percent blocking stake in Skartel’s parent company, Telconet.

The Internet has been called the country’s last bastion of free speech after the state brought most national television channels and influential print media under its control over the past decade. Fears of a crackdown were raised last month after a video address by police officer Alexei Dymovsky lambasting corruption unleashed a string of copycat whistle-blowers airing their complaints online. Also last month, top search engine Yandex stopped ranking popular blog posts after several entries exposed problems that embarrassed government officials.