First Egyptian Blogger Imprisoned for Writings is Released

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | John Ward

By Courtney C. Radsch | Huffington Post (Blog) | November 22, 2010

Kareem Amer, the first Egyptian blogger to be prosecuted for the content of his writings, was released Tuesday after serving a four-year sentence for defaming Islam and President Hosni Mubarak. His sentence expired Nov. 5, but upon being released he was immediately re-arrested, pretty par for the course in terms of Egypt’s approach to dealing with its ‘problematic’ bloggers and digital activists.

Amer was a student at Al Azhar University studying law and growing increasingly disillusioned with his religion and his government. The 24-year-old started his blog in April 2005, in the height of the Kefaya movement, the genesis of cyberactivism and in the midst of a series of protests against constitutional amendments and for the independence of the judiciary.

“I am down to earth Law student; I look forward to help humanity against all form of discriminations,” Kareem wrote in his Blogger profile. “I am looking forward to open up my own human rights activists Law firm, which will include other lawyers who share the same views. Our main goal is to defend the rights of Muslim and Arabic women against all form of discrimination and to stop violent crimes committed on a daily basis in these countries.”

Kareem traversed red lines on his blog, including criticizing Islam and Christianity, assailing the Egyptian regime including Mubarak, and attacking Al Azhar University and his professors there by name. In March, 2005 he was subjected to disciplinary hearings at Al Azhar, which he chronicled on his blog, labeling them an “inquisition” by a “repressive” institution. According to one fellow blogger I interviewed in Egypt for my doctoral research on digital activism, Kareem would print out hard copies of his posts and distribute it, like a newspaper, to people walking down the street. Although laws specific to Internet publishing were not yet in place in 2005, Kareem’s translation of electronic materials to hard copy printed materials meant he could be prosecuted under existing libel and defamation laws. Nov. 6 became the first time a blogger was explicitly arrested for the content of his writing rather than his activism in the streets.

His first arrest came on Oct. 25, 2005 after he posted an entry entitled “The naked truth about Islam as I saw it in Maharram Beh.” Three weeks later he was released, only to be arrested again on Nov. 6. By the next day the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), which had positioned itself as a leading defender of freedom of expression and essential monitoring organization that became a leading reference on cyberactivism and regime response for journalists and NGOs around the world.

Two days after Kareem’s arrest the pan-Arab Al Quds al Arabi published a piece on detention followed the next day by a piece on the emerging global activist & citizen journalist network Global Voices. Reporters Without Borders issued a press release on his detention and an article appeared in the popular liberal Arabic website Elaph. By the end of January nearly every major media outlet in the English-speaking world and beyond had published articles about his case, including the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera English, the Associated Press, Le Monde, and The Guardian, to name a few.

A bi-partisan letter by two members of the US Congress demanding Kareem’s release was the first of many high-level governmental interventions around the world, from Italy to Sweden to the United Nations. The US State Department expressed its concern and his case was mentioned in Egypt’s Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council. Kareem became a cause célèbre of internet freedom and freedom of expression, garnering mention in the reports of every major human rights organization from Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House. In 2007 Index on Censorship bestowed its annual Freedom of Expression award on Kareem.

Perhaps more interesting, however, was the widespread support he received from fellow bloggers from across the political and religious spectrum. The self-proclaimed “cynical, snarky, pro-US, secular, libertarian, disgruntled” blogger who blogged pseudonymously under the moniker Sandmonkey came to his defense as did the Muslim Brotherhood’s first, and most famous, blogger Abdel Menem Mahmoud (Ana Ikhwan). Manal and Alaa’s joint blog Manalaa’s Bit Bucket featured the campaign and “Free Kareem” banners appeared on blogs throughout the Arab world and beyond. The rallying effect sparked by Kareem’s arrest was a powerful message to the Egyptian government and its autocratic neighbors that there was widespread support among the activist youth for freedom of expression as a fundamental right, even if the views expressed are repugnant or offensive. It was also a clarion call to the West that there were youth show shared the same values and desires as their counterparts in more open societies. Free speech, it turned out, was the common denominator that connected bloggers of all stripes and trampling on that right put them all at risk. Today the blogosphere is more diffuse and diverse than it was when the Free Kareem campaign launched.

A chronology of press, NGO and governmental attention to Kareem’s case compiled by the FreeKareem.org campaign shows that from the day of his arrest through mid-2008 there was sustained engagement on his case on a near weekly basis. Yet despite the efforts of Egypt’s most seasoned digital activists, a global online campaign that spanned continents and languages, the global media’s attention and engagement on the issue, condemnation by Western governments, and the sustained engagement of human rights and journalist rights organizations, Kareem served his four-year prison sentence. He was not released early. The Egyptian government did not bend to international pressure. And the extensive mobilization in support of his cause did little to impact Kareem’s imprisonment, although it likely prevented him from being treated more harshly, as is all to common in Egyptian prisons. Of course the by product of keeping Kareem in jail for the past four years is that the Egyptian government has remained under scrutiny for its treatment of its citizens, and especially of cyberactivists and other human rights defenders. But this likely would have been the case even without Kareem’s compelling story, leaving me to wonder whether the past four years were merely a simulacrum of effective activism.

No Quick Fixes for Internet Freedom

By Tsering

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.

World’s youngest detained blogger on trial in northern Iran

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Sean Hobson

Reporters Without Borders | November 18, 2010

The world’s youngest detained blogger, 18-year-old Navid Mohebbi, is currently being tried behind closed doors before a revolutionary court in the northern city of Amol. His lawyer is not being allowed to attend the trial, which began on 14 November.

Arrested at his home in Amol on 18 September by eight intelligence ministry officials, Mohebbi is facing the possibility of a long prison sentence. A women’s rights activist who keeps a blog called “The writings of Navid Mohebbi” (http://navidmohebbi3.blogfa.com/), he had been summoned and questioned several times by various intelligence services in the past year. He was beaten at the moment of his arrest and has been held in cell with ordinary offenders ever since.

Mohebbi has been accused of “activities contrary to national security” and “insulting the Islamic Republic’s founder and current leader (…) by means of foreign media.” He has also been accused of being member of the “One Million Signatures” movement, a campaign to collect signatures to a petition for changes to laws that discriminate against women.

One the movement’s leaders, Sussan Tahmassebi, who edits the English-language version of the “Change for Equality” website, received the Alison Des Forges award from Human Rights Watch on 16 November for her activities of behalf of human rights.

She told Reporters Without Borders: “I dedicate this prize to all the human rights activists and women’s rights activists in Iran, especially those who are currently in prison, hoping to be freed soon. This prize will given them encouragement.”

Mohebbi’s case is not isolated. Many Iranian netizens have been arrested, prosecuted or convicted. Ten of them are currently in prison in Iran. One of the detained bloggers is Ahmad Reza Ahmadpour, a cleric and editor of the “Silent Echo” website (http://www.pejvak-kh.com), who has been held since 27 December 2009 in the religious city of Qom.

He is serving a one-year sentence on charges of “disseminating false information attacking the government” and “discrediting the Shiite clergy.” He went on hunger strike last year in protest against his prison conditions and sent an open to UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon.

Until Mohebbi’s arrest, the world’s youngest blogger in detention was the Syrian high school student Tal Al-Mallouhi, who was 18 when she was arrested on 27 December 2009 after responding to a summons from a Syrian intelligence agency. She is still being held by the intelligence agency although no charge has so far been brought against her.

Chinese woman jailed over Twitter post

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | West McGowan

By Damian Grammaticas | BBC News | November 18, 2010

A woman in China has been sentenced to a year in a labour camp after posting a message on the social networking website Twitter.

The fiance of human rights activist Cheng Jianping told the BBC she had been accused of disrupting social order, but her message had been a joke.

She had repeated a Twitter comment urging nationalist protesters to smash Japan’s pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, adding the words “Charge, angry youth”.

Twitter is banned in China.

However, many people use it by circumventing internet controls.

Diplomatic row

The offending online “tweet”, which has landed 46-year-old Cheng Jianping with a year of re-education through labour, was posted in the middle of last month.

At the time, China and Japan were embroiled in their worst diplomatic row in recent years over a group of uninhabited, but disputed, islands in the East China Sea.

Groups of young Chinese had been demonstrating against Japan, publicly smashing Japanese products.

Cheng Jianping’s fiance, Hua Chunhui, told the BBC he first posted the short message on Twitter, ridiculing the demonstrators, saying their actions were nothing new and if they really wanted to make an impact they should smash the Japanese Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo.

Ms Cheng then “retweeted” the mocking message, he said, forwarding it and adding the words “charge, angry youth”.

Ten days later she was detained by police “for disrupting social order” and has now been sent to the Shibali River women’s labour camp in Zhengzhou city in Henan Province.

Mr Hua said his fiance had started a hunger strike and he was trying to get her released to undergo her re-education at home.

Contacted by the BBC, staff at the camp said they had no information to give.

But Mr Hua said documents from the labour re-education committee made it clear Ms Cheng had been committed because of her single “tweet”.

Another Twitter user has now tweeted that Ms Cheng should apply for a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, because the five words she added to the message had cost her a year of freedom.

Dissidents

Her detention is a sign of how closely China’s government scrutinises comment on the internet.

The authorities are fearful of the power of the internet to stir up discontent.

They are also wary of the way nationalist demonstrations like those targeting Japan have the potential to run out of control.

Ms Cheng may also have been targeted because she is a local human rights activist.

Her fiance said she had signed petitions including one calling for the release of China’s jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.

And she had been detained by police for five days in August this year after she voiced support for Liu Xianbin, a long-time campaigner for democracy in China, involved in the protests that preceded the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

Liu Xianbin had been detained again this year, apparently suspected of inciting subversion of state power for criticising China’s Communist Party.

Google Accuses China of Violating W.T.O. Rules on Internet Access

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Beijing Patrol

By Keith Bradsher | New York Times | November 16, 2010

HONG KONG — Google has released a policy paper contending that China violates its World Trade Organization commitments by limiting Chinese Internet users’ access to information providers outside China. The assertion, which was published online Monday but went largely unnoticed until bloggers started writing about it Tuesday, is the latest sign of Google’s ever greater willingness to confront censorship in China.

“Invocation of W.T.O. rules suggests that Google is fed up, and willing to play hardball,” said James Seymour, a specialist in Chinese politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  

Bob Boorstin, Google’s public policy director, made the free-trade link forcefully in a posting on Google’s public policy blog, although he stopped short of mentioning China specifically.“It’s pretty wonky stuff,” he wrote in a statement posted on the blog with a link to the paper, “but the premise is simple: In addition to infringing human rights, governments that block the free flow of information on the Internet are also blocking trade and economic growth.”Mr. Boorstin went on to call for Western officials to challenge trade barriers to information. “In the paper we’re releasing today, we urge policy makers in the United States, European Union and elsewhere to take steps to break down barriers to free trade and Internet commerce,” Mr. Boorstin wrote.The policy paper said that more than 40 governments around the world now restrict freedom of information on the Internet — which it said was more than a 10-fold increase in the last decade of governments with such restrictions. Many of the examples of restrictions came from Google’s experience in China.Until January, accommodating China’s policy, Google censored search results delivered to computers in China. Stepping back from that approach, the company in March curtailed its operations in China and began directing Internet users there to its site in Hong Kong. A former British colony, Hong Kong maintains freedom of speech and other individual liberties despite its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.Since March, Google has continued to lobby Beijing, with little success, for unfettered access to the Chinese market.Even before it pulled out of the mainland, Google was losing market share to a Chinese rival, Baidu. And it has lost further market share since then. The latest industry estimates suggest that Google, which before March had about one-third of the mainland market for Internet searches, now has only about one-fifth, with Baidu having the rest.Kaiser Kuo, the director of international communications for Baidu, said that it was wrong to suggest that China’s controls on the Internet were unfairly helping his company.“Google no longer incurs the costs of censorship that we continue to incur; those costs include not only hardware, software and manpower but most importantly the time of our very senior managers,” Mr. Kuo said. “We should not labor under the illusion that censorship is some sort of competitive advantage to Baidu.”Google’s public policy paper emphasized that when the W.T.O. was created in 1995, international free trade rules were broadened in many ways to cover services like Internet search providers. But Chinese officials have consistently said that their commercial policies comply fully with all W.T. O. rules.Google joins a growing chorus of critics of China on trade grounds. The Obama administration opened a broad investigation last month of whether China had violated W.T.O. rules by reportedly subsidizing exports of solar panels, wind turbines and other clean energy products.

Keith Bradsher reported from Hong Kong and Sharon LaFraniere reported from Beijing.

British Politician Arrested Over ‘Stoning’ Tweet

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Jeff Turner

By Jill Lawless | Associated Press | November 11, 2010

LONDON (AP) — Two cases in Britain are testing the limits of freedom of speech on the Internet.

A city councilor in England has been arrested after allegedly posting a message on Twitter calling for a journalist to be stoned to death, and a court has upheld the conviction of a man who tweeted about blowing up his local airport.

Police said that Birmingham city councilor Gareth Compton was arrested on suspicion of sending an offensive or indecent message. He has not been charged and was released on bail pending further inquiries.

Media reports say the post on the microblogging site said, “Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing, really.”  The post appears to have been removed. On Thursday, Compson tweeted an apology for his “ill-conceived attempt at humor.” 

Alibhai-Brown is a liberal columnist for The Independent newspaper.  The governing Conservative Party said Compton had been suspended indefinitely.

Also Thursday, a court rejected an appeal by Paul Chambers, who was convicted of sending a threatening message after saying on Twitter that he would blow up an airport if his flight was delayed.

Chambers, 26, was arrested in January after he posted the message saying he would blow Robin Hood Airport in northern England “sky high” if his flight, due to leave a week later, was delayed.  Chambers insisted his post was a joke, sent to his 600 Twitter followers in a moment of frustration. But a judge found him guilty of sending an offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing message over a public telecommunications network.

On Thursday, Judge Jacqueline Davies at Doncaster Crown Court upheld the conviction, saying Chambers’ message was “obviously menacing.”  He was ordered to pay 2,000 pounds ($3,225) in prosecution costs, in addition to a 385 pound ($620) fine.  Thursday’s verdict caused a wave of outrage on Twitter from supporters of Chambers, including writer and actor Stephen Fry, who tweeted “whatever they fine you, I’ll pay.”

Asia-Pacific Governments Chip Away at Internet Freedom

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Jared Tarbell

By Adrian Addison | AFP | November 5, 2010

HONG KONG (AFP) – The tentacles of government censors are creeping ever further across the web in the Asia-Pacific region as officials from Thailand to Australia try to control what people say and do online.  Aside from China, which has a vast army of censors operating behind what has been dubbed the “Great Firewall”, other countries are also taking steps to restrict access to the Internet.

A massive cyber attack has crippled the web in military-ruled Myanmar ahead of Sunday’s controversial election, IT experts say, raising fears of a deliberate communications blackout for the vote.  But moves to rein in Internet freedoms in other countries in the region are often presented as being well intentioned.

Australia proposes introducing an Internet filter to block sites containing material such as rape, drug use, bestiality and child sex abuse.  Prime Minister Julia Gillard has defended the plan as a moral move which will bring the web into line with TV and film which have long been censored by the state.

“My fundamental outlook is this: it is unlawful for me as an adult to go to a cinema and watch certain sorts of content, it’s unlawful and we believe it to be wrong,” Gillard said recently.  “If we accept that then it seems to me that the moral question is not changed by the medium that the images come through.” 

Yet the plan has been heavily criticised as setting a precedent for censorship and has even been attacked by web giants Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.  Australian anti-censorship campaigner Geordie Guy said while the filter was not designed to control political dissent it was a case of the state “putting its foot down on what the population can see”.

In another Asia-Pacific democracy, the Philippines, several bills have been filed seeking restrictions on the Internet, mainly focused on pornography and the trafficking of women.

And in Thailand, a wide-ranging campaign of government censorship has shut down thousands of Internet sites.  It is a reflection of the deep political divide in the country, where 91 people died and nearly 1,900 were hurt in clashes between Red Shirts and troops during two months of protests, which ended with a bloody army crackdown in May.  Thousands of web pages have also been removed in recent years on the grounds that they were insulting to the Thai royal family.

In April, a Red Shirt sympathiser was arrested and charged for allegedly insulting the monarchy on Facebook — a serious crime punishable by up to 15 years in jail.  He remains in detention awaiting possible trial.  The editor of the popular Prachatai website could face up to 70 years in jail after she was arrested on charges of insulting the monarchy and breaching computer law — for comments posted by users of the site.

John Palfrey, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, says online censorship and surveillance are growing around the world.

“This increase in control is taking place concurrently with the growth of the role that the Internet and digital media are playing in the ways that people live and societies function,” he told AFP.

“Oftentimes, these online controls grow out of well-meaning online protections designed to help keep children safe.  But the same mechanisms that we use to keep our children from unwanted content and contact can be used to keep dissidents from communicating with one another or with the world outside their own society.  The tools that prevent harmful forms of pornography from being published can also keep a political manifesto from reaching its intended audience.  The same tools that bring a terrorist to justice before he can harm his targets can also be used to put a muck-raking journalist in prison for something that she said in an email or a web chat.”

Sometimes calls for censorship of the Internet are for religious reasons.

Hundreds of Indonesian Islamists rallied in central Jakarta in June to demand the stoning to death and public caning of celebrities who allegedly appeared in homemade sex videos circulating online.  About 1,000 protesters led by radical group Hizbut Tahrir shouted “Allahu akbar” (God is greater) and brandished black flags and banners with slogans such as “Arrest those who commit promiscuous sex”.  Hizbut Tahrir spokesman Mohammed Ismail Yusanto said the Internet was a threat to Islamic values in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country.

“The widespread circulation of the celebrity sex videos shows the bad side of uncontrolled information technology, which will surely become one of the most terrible destroyers of morality,” he said.  “Based on sharia law… those who are married should be stoned to death and the unmarried should be caned 100 times in public.  With that kind of punishment it is guaranteed promiscuous sex won’t spread wildly like it is now.”

Radical groups like Hizbut Tahrir have little popular support among Indonesia’s 240 million people in a state which is constitutionally secular and culturally moderate.  But President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has backed calls for tighter controls on the Internet in response to the sex video furore and has warned that the nation risked being “crushed” by the information technology “frenzy”.

While China is a major censor of the Internet in the region, communist Vietnam has also cracked down, arresting bloggers who have criticised the government’s relationship with Beijing.  “Some of the most advanced forms of Internet censorship and surveillance are carried out in Vietnam, following the lead of neighbouring China,” said Harvard University’s Palfrey.

“Over the next five to ten years, I see an escalating struggle between states that wish to control the information environment and citizens who wish to communicate privately and freely with one another.  I expect that we will see substantial growth in the ability of states to listen in on conversations online.”

Syria Internet law threatens online freedom

By Tsering

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.

Lebanon Cracks Down on Internet Freedom

By Tsering

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.

YouTube faces new ban in Turkey

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | codenamecueball

Associated Press | November 2, 2010

ANKARA, Turkey – Turkey’s telecommunications authority will again block access to YouTube unless the video-sharing site removes a sex video of a former opposition party leader, the state-run news agency reported Tuesday.

The threat of a new ban comes just three days after Turkey had ended a more than two-year ban on YouTube.

The Anatolia news agency said a court, considering a complaint by lawyers representing former opposition party leader Deniz Baykal, ruled that YouTube must be blocked and notified the telecommunications authority of its decision on Tuesday.

Telecommunications officials would now either ask YouTube to remove the video or block access to the site, the agency said.

Scott Rubin, a spokesman for Google, which owns YouTube, had no immediate comment on the possibility of a renewed ban, saying he had no information “beyond what I have also read or heard anecdotally.”

Access to YouTube had been blocked in Turkey since May 2008 because of videos deemed insulting to the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Turkey restored access on Saturday, after the offending videos were removed.

It is a crime in Turkey to insult Ataturk, who founded Turkey in 1923 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The country has implemented reforms as part of a bid to join the European Union, but still faces questions about its record on free expression.

Turkey began blocking access to websites in 2007, after parliament adopted a law against cyber crime in an effort to curb child porn, prevent the dissemination of terrorist propaganda and stamp out illegal gambling.

More than 6,000 sites have been banned in Turkey according to Engelli Web, a site that monitors blocked pages.

Former opposition leader Baykal resigned in May after the video showing him having an affair with his aide appeared on the Internet.