Internet Censored in Iran to Sabotage Pro-Democracy Protests

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Troy Holden

International Business Times | February 17, 2011

In an expected repeat of the January internet and electronic communication blockade in Egypt, Iranian authorities have begun censorship by disrupting mobile phone services and slowing down broadband speed in the major cities.

Following the outbreak of the Opposition-fueled pro-democracy demonstrations in Tehran, pro-opposition websites have been blocked. The anti-government movement began in Iran on Monday, when thousands of supporters of opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi took to the streets.

The anti-government dissidents have also been forced to compromise on electronic communication as mobile-phone and text message services stand disrupted.

Iran, along with Bahrain and Libya, is among the latest states to experience the aftermath of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions led to the ouster of autocrats. In all these regions, internet, especially social media platforms, were used to mobilize the protests.

Iran is among the group of 12 countries, including China, North Korea and Syria, which are labeled as ‘Internet Enemies.’ These countries have strict laws limiting Internet use and are known to block government-opposition and human rights websites.

Through URL blocking and keyword filtering of words such as ‘torture’ and ‘rape’, Iran has blocked 5 million websites. Now, in the wake of the protests, another word has been added to the list. The word ‘bahman’, which is the current month in the Persian calendar, has reportedly been blocked.

Media Gagged

Besides cutting of the communication life-line, authorities have also gagged the media by forbidding reporting of the events related to the protests.

Iran has blocked top two news sites, jammed satellite TV broadcasts and prohibited photography.

U.S. vows Internet Freedom Plan

Moved by the attack on freedom of expression in the pro-democracy protests across Egypt, Tunisia, and now Iran, the United States has vowed to push for global Internet freedom.

“There is a debate underway in some circles about whether the Internet is a force for liberation or repression. But as the events in Iran, Egypt and elsewhere have shown, that debate is largely beside the point,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday.

Also, departing from the wait-and-watch stance of the U.S. on its military allies in Egypt, Clinton hailed the “courage of the Iranian people.”

Internet Censorship Not New To Iran

Besides the fact that the current censorship in Iran is similar to the January 28 Egyptian Internet blackout, the country is not new to this form of censorship. In 2009, Iranians turned to internet and social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to reach out to the world after the authorities imposed a media lock down. It was not long before Iranian bloggers were ordered to remove all pictures of protests from the web immediately or face legal action.

U.N. Rapporteur Reports Freedom of Expression Severely Curtailed in South Korea

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Ko_An

By Son Jun-hyun | The Hankyoreh | February 17, 2011

A report that is to be submitted to the United Nations this year states that freedom of expression has receded substantially in South Korea under the Lee Myung-bak administration and recommends that the South Korean government initiate improvements. The report, written by U.N. Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression Frank La Rue following a May 2010 visit and investigation, serves as an important measure of the human rights situation in the country and is expected to draw charges from the international community that South Korea is an underdeveloped human rights nation.

The English-language report titled “Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, and Culture Rights, Including the Right to Development,” a copy of which was acquired Wednesday by the Hankyoreh, states that the scope of freedom of expression has diminished in South Korea since the candlelight vigil demonstrations against the full-scale resumption of U.S. beef imports in 2008.

The report also noted an increasing number of cases where individuals who present opinions that do not agree with the government’s position are prosecuted and punished based on domestic laws and regulations that do not conform to international law.

Over its length of 28 A4-sized pages, the report includes expressions of concern about or recommendations of amendments to the South Korean human rights situation in eight areas, including defamation and freedom of opinion and expression on the Internet, freedoms of opinion and expression during election campaigns, freedom of assembly, restrictions on freedom of opinion and expression for reasons of national security, and rights to free opinion and expression for government employees.

Citing the arrest of television news show producers who reported on U.S. beef, La Rue said that a number of criminal defamation lawsuits are being lodged in cases of expression for the public good and used to punish individuals who criticize the administration. Noting that prohibitions on defamation are also stipulated in civil law, La Rue recommended that the crime of defamation be deleted from the criminal code.

La Rue also made reference to a suit filed by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) claiming damages from Hope Institute Executive Director Park Won-soon for defamation. La Rue said that government officials and public institutions should refrain from filing civil suits on defamation charges in the interest of citizen monitoring of public officials.
La Rue welcomed a December unconstitutionality ruling on the Framework Act on Telecommunications, which has been abused to restrict freedom of opinion on the Internet, as witnessed in the “Minerva” case. With regard to the Internet real name system, he recommended examining other means of identity verification and applying the system only in cases where there are substantial grounds for believing the individual will commit a crime.

La Rue also recommended the abolition of the Korea Communication Standards Commission (KOCSC), expressing concern about the fact that the KOCSC is empowered to review and reject or suspend information whose distribution is prohibited by the Information and Communications Network Act, including information deemed defamatory or a matter of national confidentiality. He expressed concerns that the KOCSC, whose members are appointed by the president, might function as what amounts to a censorship organization deleting online criticisms of the administration, and he remarked on the absence of sufficient safeguards to prevent this.

La Rue recommended remedial measures to address the practice South Korea’s notification system for assemblies, which in effect has operated as a permit system. La Rue also recommended remedial measures to address in addition to the failure to properly guarantee freedoms of political opinion and expression for public school teachers, and he urged the abolition of Item 7 of the National Security Act stipulating punishment for acts of praise and sympathy for anti-state groups.

“The Lee Myung-bak administration, which goes on about ‘advanced Korea’ every time it opens its mouth, suffered a major embarrassment from the international human rights community despite being a U.N. Human Rights Council member nation,” said former National Human Rights Commission of Korea Policy Director Kim Hyung-wan. “The international embarrassment could have been avoided if the NHRCK had just done its job faithfully.”

La Rue submitted the report to the South Korean government on Jan. 31. It was confirmed that around ten government institutions, including the Ministry of Justice, the NHRCK, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST), the KCC, and the National Police Agency, have been examining the truth of the report’s claims since Feb. 14.

This is the first report from a U.N. special rapporteur for freedom of opinion and expression issuing recommendations to the government regarding the domestic human rights situation since a report issued 16 years ago in 1995 by Abid Hussain. At the time, Hussain recommended abolition of the National Security Act and the release of those imprisoned for exercise of freedom of expression.

A human rights group official who claimed to have examined the report said that it contained “a relatively accurate picture of the regression of human rights in South Korea.”

“Unlike the reports by international NGOs or individual countries, a U.N. report carries a high level of reliability and influence,” the official said.

The report is scheduled to be officially delivered to the UNHRC in June.

An official with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said the report was “a draft for which Mr. La Rue requested that the South Korean government verify the accuracy of the content prior to formal submission to the UNHRC.”

“We are still in the stage of gathering opinions from the different offices and ministries, so if a government opinion is issued, I imagine it can be done at the official announcement in June at the UNHRC meeting,” the official added.

After Egypt, Clinton Calls for ‘Serious Conversation’ On Internet Freedom

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | l r

By Sara Yin | PC Magazine | February 15, 2011

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton on Tuesday called for a “serious conversation” about the principles of Internet freedom, championing the Web’s contribution to the uprising in Egypt, but maintaining her position that WikiLeaks postings are tantamount to theft.

“If people around the world are going come together every day online and have a safe and productive experience, we need a shared vision to guide us,” Clinton said during a speech at George Washington University.

This was Clinton’s second speech about Internet freedom; the first came 13 months ago in the midst of a censorship battle between China and Google. This time, Clinton focused on Egypt and Iran. While citizens in Egypt used the Internet to organize protests and Iranians banded together online after the last election, Clinton acknowledged that the Web is not solely responsible for what happened in those regions.

“What happened in Egypt and what happened in Iran, which this week is once again using violence against protestors seeking basic freedoms, was about a great deal more than the Internet,” she said. “Egypt isn’t inspiring people because they communicated using Twitter. It is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future.”

“In both of these countries, the ways that citizens and the authorities used the Internet reflected the power of connection technologies on the one hand as an accelerant of political, social, and economic change, and on the other hand as a means to stifle or extinguish that change,” Clinton continued.

Therein lies the challenge, Clinton said.

“Governments have to choose to live up to the commitment to protect free expression, assembly, and association,” she said. “For the United States, the choice is clear. On the spectrum of Internet freedom, we place ourselves on the side of openness.”

That is sometimes easier said than done, thanks to several key challenges: achieving liberty and security; protecting free expression while fostering tolerance and civility; and protecting transparency and confidentiality. The Internet can be “a force for unprecedented progress” but also a haven for terrorists, she said. It can also create a forum for hate speech. It’s a delicate balance, and “I’m the first to say that neither I nor the United States Government has all the answers,” Clinton said.

On the transparency and confidentiality aspect, Clinton reiterated her opposition to WikiLeaks, which has been releasing confidential government documents that were reportedly stolen by military personnel and submitted to the whistle-blowing Web site.

“Fundamentally, the WikiLeaks incident began with an act of theft,” Clinton said. ” Some have suggested that this theft was justified because governments have a responsibility to conduct all of our work out in the open in the full view of our citizens. I respectfully disagree.”

Clinton also denied that the U.S. forced private companies to shut off access to WikiLeaks; “That is not the case,” she said. “Some politicians and pundits publicly called for companies to disassociate from WikiLeaks, while others criticized them for doing so. Public officials are part of our country’s public debates, but there is a line between expressing views and coercing conduct,” she said.

In the wake of WikiLeaks releasing 250,000 State Department cables in late November, companies like Visa, MasterCard, Amazon, and PayPal cut ties with the Web site.

Critics have called Clinton’s speech hypocritical, given its pursuit of WikiLeaks. Clinton’s speech was actually timed hours after civil rights groups like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation went to a court in Alexandria, Virginia, to protest a government subpoena of the private Twitter accounts of suspected WikiLeaks affiliates.

“There is a jarring disconnect between the administration’s pro-privacy policies abroad and its pro-surveillance policies at home,” Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU Center for Democracy, said in a statement. “Americans deserve the same privacy protections that the State Department is eager to secure for people overseas. We commend the administration for its ambition to expand free speech abroad, but an administration truly committed to democratic freedom should not turn a blind eye to the hypertrophic expansion of government surveillance inside the United States.”

Chloe Albanesius contributed to this report.

Thai Website Director Goes to Trial Over Content

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Colleen Curnutte

The Associated Press | February 4, 2011

BANGKOK – The head of a popular Thai political website went on trial Friday, charged with violating the country’s tough cyber laws in a case seen as a bellwether for freedom of expression in the politically troubled nation. Chiranuch Premchaiporn, manager of the Prachatai website, faces up to 20 years’ imprisonment on 10 separate charges of failing to promptly remove from the website offending comments posted by readers. The 2007 Computer Crime Act addresses hacking and other traditional online offenses, but also bars the circulation of material deemed detrimental to national security or that causes public panic. Several people have been prosecuted under the law, but Chiranuch is the first webmaster to be tried, and her case has garnered the attention of free speech advocates around the world. Thailand’s freedom of speech reputation has taken a battering in recent years, as successive governments have tried to suppress political opposition. Its standing in the Press Freedom Index issued by the Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders slid to 153 last year from 65 in 2002, when the ratings were initiated. Prachatai, which was founded by several respected journalists, senators and press freedom activists to serve as an independent, nonprofit, daily Internet newspaper, has often run afoul of the government. Police arrested Chiranuch in March 2009 for an offense that allegedly occurred five months earlier. The controversial comments posted by members of Prachatai’s webboard were said to have defamed the country’s monarchy. She was accused of not deleting the comments for several days. “I’m not sure if Prachatai was targeted specifically,” Chiranuch told The Associated Press earlier this week. “All I can say is, given the circumstances, we were doing our job as we would normally do.” Prachatai was one of scores of websites the government barred access to last year during political unrest in Bangkok that turned violent and left about 90 people dead. The government claimed the sites stirred up unrest among the so-called Red Shirt protesters who were calling on Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva to hold early elections. Supinya Klangnarong, a media reform activist, said that the Computer Crime Act “has become a political tool of the state to close down websites and arrest people. “The Thai state has been intensely using the act as political punishment, instead of curbing actual computer-related crimes,” she said. Chiranuch late last year was charged with another set of offenses, including lese majeste — defaming the monarchy — another controversial area of law. Thailand’s lese majeste law mandates a jail term of three to 15 years for “whoever defames, insults or threatens the king, the queen, the heir to the throne or the regent.” Critics say it is mostly used as a weapon by political opponents to try to punish each other, since almost any critical comment touching on the monarchy can be construed as disloyalty to the institution. As in Friday’s case, Chiranuch denies breaking the law.

Iconic in Egypt

By Kee

Witnessing the literal influence of Internet icons in Egypt in analog form.

photo credit: @whoisubik and @tomgara

via @whoisubik in Dubai and @tomgara who received this great photo from a friend in Egypt.

What are you seeing on the ground?

Egypt’s Web, Mobile Communications Severed

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Divine Harvester

By Shereen El Gazzar, Lilly Vitorovich, and Ruth Bender | The Wall Street Journal | January 28, 2011

The Egyptian government’s crackdown on protestors intensified Friday with access to most forms of mass communication, including the Internet, mobile and SMS down, even as United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that “freedom of expression should be fully respected.”

Government-owned Telecom Egypt runs the country’s fixed-line network. Attempts to connect to the websites of several Egyptian ISPs, including EgyptWeb, TeData and Purenet all failed.

U.K.-headquartered Vodafone Group PLC said in a statement that all mobile operators in Egypt had been “instructed to suspend services in parts of Egypt. Under Egyptian legislation, the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it.” It said the Egyptian authorities will be clarifying the situation in due course.

Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao said in comments to a Davos session on mobile devices that “Egyptian authorities” had asked the company to “turn down the network totally.”

Mr. Colao said Vodafone determined that the request was legitimate under Egyptian law, and therefore complied with the request. “I hope” the decision will be reversed by Egypt “very soon,” Mr. Colao said.

In a blog, U.S.-based Internet intelligence firm Renesys recorded how late Thursday it saw “the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table,” in what it called “an action unprecedented in Internet history.”

It contrasted the scale of the crackdown with the “modest Internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or Iran, where the Internet stayed up,” but download times were slowed.

During the rallies in Iran in 2009, one account from a person in the capital, Tehran, said it took 20 minutes to download Yahoo’s website and that landlines, satellite phones and SMS were all disrupted.

And in 2007, security forces in Myanmar cracked down on communications following monk-led protests against the regime there, disabling some mobile phones and closing some service providers, but images of the clampdown continued to be relayed out of the country via cellphones. More than 110,000 people joined the Support the Monk’s Protest in Burma group on Facebook. Facebook and Twitter weren’t immediately available to comment on what is happening in Egypt.

France Telecom also confirmed that the Egyptian authorities had taken “measures to block mobile phone services,” and apologized to Mobinil customers, adding it had no information about when service would be restored.

All attempts to reach other mobile and Internet operators in the country were unsuccessful either because offices were closed due to the weekend or because mobile numbers weren’t working.

“From my knowledge of the region, I suspect the Egyptian government controls the main ISP in the country and would thus be able to decouple the main backbone in Egypt from the rest of the Internet,” said Sean Sullivan, security adviser at Finnish IT security firm F-Secure. Mr. Sullivan drew parallels with Syria, where the government also has full control of the Internet backbone and can therefore shut down the network if it wishes.

According to Egypt’s National Telecom Regulatory Authority, or NTRA, mobile subscribers in the country reached 53.43 million by the end of the third quarter of 2010, the latest figures available.

Earlier this week, blogs and social networks were full of calls to take to the streets to bring down the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Egypt’s Interior Ministry had warned it would take decisive measures against the protestors in the Arab world’s most populous nation, after organizers said demonstrations set to take place after noon prayers Friday would be the biggest in decades.

The protests in Egypt come after the 25-year regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was toppled in Tunisia, sparking shockwaves across the Arab world.

—Alan Murray in Davos, Switzerland, contributed to this article.

How Egypt Killed the Internet

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Syd Daoust

By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries | WSJ Blogs | January 28, 2011

UPDATE: This post has been updated with more detailed information on the timing of the shutdown.

How do you turn off the Internet in an entire country?

Egypt severed mobile and Web communications late Thursday, the Journal reported.

Mr. Cowie said in an interview with Digits that he isn’t privy to how Egypt actually shut down the Web but outlined a scenario based on his “knowledge of how the Internet is structured.”

“People have talked about a ‘kill switch’” that would link to every router and be able to shut each one off from a central location, “but that is not realistic,” he said. “What is most likely is that somebody in the government gives a phone call to a small number of people and says, ‘Turn it off.’ And then one engineer at each service provider logs into the equipment and changes the configuration of how traffic should flow.”

Mr. Cowie said a detailed look at the traffic shows that Egypt’s Internet providers started shutting down their networks at about midnight Cairo time. Rather than turning off all at once, they each initiated the process separately, starting with Telecom Egypt at 12 minutes and 43 seconds after midnight. Raya started the process about a minute later, and the other networks followed at intervals of two to six minutes. This could lend credence to the theory that a decision to shut down was made around midnight and each operator was notified in succession and began the process shortly thereafter.

In many countries, including Egypt, the Internet involves a few large providers that sell service to smaller providers. The large providers — of which there are a handful in Egypt — pay money to international carriers to transmit internet data over undersea cables. Ordinarily, the large providers announce via computer code that they will accept and send transmissions. But late Thursday, the code at most providers simply switched to stop allowing that — thus blocking communications altogether.

About 3,500 of these “border gateway protocol” routes were withdrawn, Renesys reported. BGPmon, which also monitors such traffic, said more than 88% of Egyptian networks were unreachable as of early Friday morning, Egyptian time. As of Friday evening, Renesys reported that 93% were offline.

And what about the small number of Egyptian networks that are still transmitting? One major network appears to have been entirely unaffected: Noor Group. It’s unclear why this provider didn’t go silent, but Mr. Cowie pointed out that it has one of the Internet protocol (IP) addresses for the Egyptian Stock Exchange (www.egyptse.com). “Apparently they didn’t get the call, or if they got the call, they didn’t listen to it,” he said.

So could this sort of shutdown happen in the U.S.? Mr. Cowie said it’s unlikely, and not just because of the legal issues involved. Egypt’s Internet ecosystem is small enough that a few phone calls could shut it down, but that’s not the case in the U.S. “To say the least it would be very implausible,” Mr. Cowie said. “You’d have to make far too many phone calls, and most of those people would ignore you.”

Tunisia Closes Schools and Universities as Riots Continue

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | maistora

by David D. Kirkpatrick | The New York Times | January 10, 2011

CAIRO — The Tunisian government ordered the closing of all schools and universities in the country on Monday until further notice in an attempt to quell escalating riots over poverty and unemployment.

At least 14 people have died in the riots, according to the official Tunisian news agency, which also reported the school closings. Opponents of the government contend that riot police officers have shot and killed many more since the riots broke out three weeks ago.

President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, in a televised address, promised to create more jobs, but also to stamp out any violence. He blamed unspecified enemies abroad for the rioting.

“The events were the work of masked gangs that attacked at night government buildings and even civilians inside their homes in a terrorist act that cannot be overlooked,” he said, according to Al Jazeera.

Citing criticism from the State Department for its handling of the riots, the Tunisian government summoned the American ambassador to express its “astonishment,” Tunisian state television reported.

A State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, described the meeting as “a follow-up discussion” with the Tunisian government. “We, again, affirmed our concerns not only about the ongoing violence, the importance of respecting freedom of expression, but also the importance of the availability of information,” Mr. Crowley said.

The riots began about three weeks ago after a 26-year-old man with a college degree, in despair at his dismal prospects, committed suicide by setting himself on fire. He had been trying to sell a container of fruits and vegetables, and the police confiscated his merchandise because he had no permit.

His self-immolation unleashed the pent-up anger of Tunisia’s educated and underemployed youth, and soon that of others as well.

On Monday, security forces surrounded a university where hundreds of students were trying to protest, according to Reuters. The rioting showed signs of spreading from provincial towns toward the cities of the Mediterranean coast which are central to the tourist industry, Reuters reported.

The riots are believed to have spread in part through social-media Web sites, and the Tunisian government reportedly directed Internet service providers to hack into the accounts of individual users. As the riots mounted over the weekend, the State Department expressed concern about intrusions into the privacy of Tunisian customers of American companies like Facebook, Yahoo and Google.

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, urged restraint and respect for freedom of expression.

Since taking power in a bloodless coup more than two decades ago, President Ben Ali has enforced strict censorship and tolerated little dissent. Although Tunis markets itself as a peaceful tourist haven, it earns dismal marks from international human rights groups.

Official figures put unemployment at about 14 percent, with much higher levels among young people.

Tunisia’s Bitter Cyberwar

By Kee

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)

Will ‘Porn-Lock’ in UK and France Lead to Internet Censorship?

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Miroslav Petrasko

by Dana Kennedy | AolNews | December 20, 2010

Ed Vaizey, Britain’s communications minister, told the Sunday Times the government is considering a plan to restrict pornography websites to protect children from seeing them.

“This is a very serious matter. I think it is very important that it’s the ISPs that some up with solutions to protect children,” Vaizey said.

Vaizey plans to meet with the country’s Internet service providers soon about a proposal that would mean blocking porn sites so children wouldn’t be exposed to them rather than relying on existing parental controls. Customers would have to “opt-in” if they wanted access to pornography sites.

“I’m hoping they will get their acts together so that we don’t have to legislate,” Vaizey said. “But we are keeping an eye on the situation and we will have a new communications bill in the next couple of years.”

Opponents of the measures say the government is using legitimate concerns over kiddie porn and the early sexualization of children who access adult porn online as a way to gain control of the Web. Britain has already had success with measures designed to block kiddie-porn sites.

“It’s like they want to play God on the Internet,” Gilles Lordet, the Paris-based chief editor of Reporters Without Borders, told AOL News today.

“Nobody wants to be seen as fighting an attempt to cut down on kiddie porn or on children watching porn online. But it’s a very slippery slope to more censorship. We know that in a lot of undemocratic countries they start with censoring porn and they move on to other sites,” Lordet said.

Last week, France’s National Assembly passed a bill that is part of the controversial LOPPSI 2 — a law on guidelines and programming for the performance of internal security — allowing the government to filter the Internet without any judicial oversight.

The bill, expected to be approved by the Senate and become law next year, is designed so that the Ministry of the Interior can draw up a blacklist of kiddie-porn sites and tell the ISPs to block them.

Some ISPs in the U.S. reached a more open agreement in 2008 with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to purge their servers of child-porn-related newsgroups as well as kiddie-porn websites identified by a regularly updated registry.

But critics of the French bill worry that giving the government unfettered power in making a blacklist could mean increased blocking of other undesirable sites.

“If you can suppress any content on the Internet you can suppress it all,” John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told AOL News today. “What these laws will do is requires ISPs to become censorious.”

During a parliamentary debate last month in the U.K., Claire Perry, a Conservative MP who wants stricter Internet controls, said that 60 percent of 9- to 19-year-olds had watched porn online, calling the Web “the Wild West.” Perry also said that only 15 percent of computer-literate parents knew how to use filters to block access to certain sites, the Guardian reported today.

Such statistics are hard to argue with, but experts say the larger picture is more complicated.

“Anytime you see countries move in the same way restricting access to information, it may be with the best of intentions,” said Erik Sherman, a BNET analyst. “But suddenly it becomes about other things. And look clearly at the U.K.’s plan to let people ‘opt-in’ for porn sites. Opting in is a way to register people. Think about that.”