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)

U.N. Delegates Debate Control of the Internet

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | CLUC

by Tom Gjelten | NPR | December 17, 2010

Among the little-noticed debates at the United Nations this week was one that focuses on a potentially explosive issue: the future of the Internet. On one side are those countries favoring more governmental controls. On the other are the advocates of Internet freedom.

The debate has its roots in the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), a U.N.-organized conference that addressed the “digital divide” between countries over their relative access to the Internet. One result of the conference was a mandate that the U.N. should explore ways to internationalize the governance of the Internet.

For all its power and worldwide reach, the Internet is still largely an unregulated space. But many governments, especially in the developing world, argue that it’s time to strengthen international oversight, with intergovernmental bodies such as the United Nations taking a lead role.

At issue is the extent to which private industry, civil society groups, and other nongovernmental actors should continue to play significant roles in the management of the Internet. At this week’s hearing, organized by U.N. Department of Social and Economic Affairs, some countries, including China, favored limiting the oversight role to governmental and intergovernmental bodies.

“The governments are located in the center of this process,” argued Tang Zicai, representing the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in Beijing. “This process cannot be accomplished without the meaningful participation of the governments.”

The current organization of the Internet, however, leaves little room for government control, and many civil society groups say it should stay that way.

“The Internet is a network of networks working cooperatively together, designed to operate without centralized control or governance mechanisms,” argued the Internet Society, a nonprofit international organization focusing on Internet standards, education, and policy.

In a statement prepared for the United Nations debate, the organization said the “intelligence” of the Internet is “predominantly at the edges, with the users. … This model has proven to be flexible, adaptable and responsive to users’ needs, and is itself the source of the tremendous innovation the Internet has created.”

But support for increased government regulation of the Internet is growing, especially among the developing countries who constitute a majority in the United Nations General Assembly. Several were outspoken in presentations this week at the U.N. hearing.

“Developments have not been supportive of increasing the leverage of developing countries in policy issues pertaining to the Internet,” said Mohammed Hussain Nejad, representing the government of Iran. “The few developed countries are either monopolizing policymaking on such issues or entering into exclusive treaties among themselves, while further marginalizing other countries, mainly developing ones,” he said.

For those governments who simply favor more control over the Internet and for those who want to see the network reformed for the benefit of less powerful countries, there is one obvious solution: the United Nations should take more responsibility. Among those backing such a move are Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, and other emerging powers.

On the other side, in addition to civil society groups, are the United States and its western allies.

“The worst case scenario would be the imposition of U.N. types of governance over the Internet,” says Philip Verveer, the Coordinator of International Communication and Information Policy at the US State Department. “[It would] inevitably bring with it tremendous slowness in terms of reaching critical decisions, because you can’t have decisions taken among nations on anything that won’t take a very long time. It would potentially [slow] changes in the architecture of the Internet, the adoption of technology, or the commercial arrangements that surround interconnection.”

Of additional concern to U.N. critics is the prospect of governments pushing for new international rules to limit the political impact of the Internet.

“[These governments] don’t like the idea of the free flow of information,” Verveer says, “and intergovernmental controls would be a way of controlling the content that passes over the Internet by requiring, by treaty if you will, other administrations to cooperate in terms of suppressing speech that they didn’t like.”

The government of Mauritania, in its contribution to the U.N. debate, proposed that “international policy in the field of Internet should urge each country to ensure control of Internet content” in order to block the dissemination of any information “not authorized by law and morality” in some other country.

Such views, however, may reflect some naivete. The WikiLeaks episode showed how hard it can be to keep content off the Internet. Upset as it was by the disclosure of state secrets, the US government had no real way to keep users from finding the WikiLeaks material.

Indeed, more broadly, the U.N. debate over the future of the Internet shows that governments are still figuring out which Internet policies make sense and which don’t.

“We’re getting an opportunity for governments to ask dumb questions,” says Gregory Francis, managing director of Access Partnership, a London-based lobbying firm that follows global Internet regulation issues. “If Mauritania asks Russia or France, ‘Is this possible?’ and the governments of those countries reply, ‘No, it ain’t,’ they’ll probably pipe down and go away.”

But the debate over the Internet’s future promises only to grow. Diplomats are already preparing for a World Conference on International Telecommunications, due to be held in 2012 in Malaysia.

New Rules to Rein in the Internet in Venezuela

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | nadiobolis

By Humberto Marquez | Inter Press Service | December 16, 2010

CARACAS — Controversy has flared up in Venezuela over planned reforms to the law on online media, especially because restrictions that already apply to the content of radio and television broadcasts would be extended to the internet. Portals and networks that transmit messages deemed to be illegal may face heavy fines, or even be shut down.

The single-chamber legislature, made up of over 90 percent pro-government lawmakers, approved the first reading of an amendment to the 2005 Social Responsibility in Radio and Television Law (Ley RESORTE), extending its provisions to electronic media.

Under the proposed amendments, radio, TV or internet messages that “could incite crimes against the president”, “could stir up unrest or disturb public order”, “defy the legitimately installed authorities,” or that promote law- breaking, war, hate or political, religious, racial, gender or xenophobic intolerance, will be actionable.

The reform bill is likely to be adopted at its second reading this week, along with other draft laws speeding through Congress in a race against time. Emergency sessions are being held this month at all hours, before the newly elected Congress takes office Jan. 5, with a strong opposition that is still in the minority, but will be vocal.

“No one need be afraid,” said the chairman of the congressional Media Committee, Manuel Villalba. “The reforms are to protect citizens against problems like pornography and paedophilia. There are those in the internet world who use technology to give free rein to the baser instincts, so the state must protect the general public.”

That is why “we are extending the Ley RESORTE to online media. If a blogger posts a message inciting murder, he or she must be held accountable, as well as the person administering the web page, because they ought to use the portal responsibly,” said Villalba, of the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

According to Reporters Without Borders, “the original version of the Ley RESORTE already encourages media self- censorship by defining offences in a very general and convoluted manner that is open to all kinds of interpretation. The new version develops this flaw to the point of caricature.”

Carlos Correa, the head of Espacio Público, an NGO that works for media freedom, told IPS that “stretching audiovisual media regulations to cover the internet is not compatible with international standards, and puts enormous discretionary powers in state hands. Furthermore, this reform bill affects substantive rights and should be widely discussed in society, instead of being rushed through Congress.”

The proposed amendment establishes the social responsibility of those who provide television, radio and internet services, and will affect all text, images, sound or content sent or received in Venezuela, including the content of advertising spots or material broadcast by independent producers that use their air time.  Internet providers are required to have mechanisms in place to restrict messages and access to websites that break laws, to be used at the request of the telecommunications regulator.

Meanwhile, there is a proposal to reform the Telecommunications Law, enacted in 2000 during President Hugo Chávez’s first term of office (he has been in power since 1999), which is ready for debate in Congress, and would require all radio and television operators to renew their licences.  Controls are to be stiffened and penalties will be more severe, ranging from mandatory airing of educational messages, to definitive closure and revocation of broadcasting licences.

The opposition bloc, private media critical of the government, journalists’ associations and Catholic Church leaders have criticised the tightening of state control and the penalties envisaged by the reforms.

“Who could be against protecting children and adolescents from harmful messages? No one is suggesting limiting access to the internet; the aim is to establish mechanisms to ensure it is used properly. This is a global debate,” said PSUV lawmaker and journalist Desirée Santos when she presented the new Ley RESORTE in Congress.

But in the view of critics like Correa, “the praiseworthy goal of protecting children and adolescents should not lead to measures that progressively reduce public access to communications and limit the variety of options to choose from.

“Penalties are being applied to content, even though the criminal code already provides for punishment for the same crimes, for instance for offences against public officials. Yet on the other hand, there are no measures to protect citizens from being bombarded by such officials in the media,” said Correa.

Early drafts of the reform bill, circulated among lawmakers over the past three days, set off alarm bells because they were even more restrictive than the draft finally presented to Congress for deliberation.

For example, earlier proposals called for the creation of a government-run internet hub to manage all traffic transmitted from and received in Venezuela; a ban on radio repeater services which would eliminate sports and news broadcasts on private national relays; and a ban on expanding coverage to the whole of Venezuela, by subscription viewing, of television channels licensed for a single city.

The United Nations rapporteur on freedom of expression, Frank La Rue, said he regretted the tenor of the reform bills before the Venezuelan Congress because, in his view, internet regulation should be kept to a minimum, in order to preserve its freedom.

Similar problems “arise when China bans on-line reports on the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to dissident Liu Xiaobo, or when the United States wishes to suppress Wikileaks. There is a failure to understand that criticism may be embarrassing, but this does not turn it into a security problem,” La Rue said.

In the same vein, Luis Pardo Sáinz, head of the International Radio Broadcasting Association (AIR), complained that “Venezuela is showing a lack of democratic will: instead of trying to silence dissident voices, it should encourage more and more of them, whether they are fair or not.”

Lebanese Bloggers Seek Freedom in Virtual World

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Don Toye

Al Arabiya | December 15, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

U.S. Urges Vietnam to Improve Human Rights

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Laurent Jegou

The Associated Press | December 9, 2010 

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

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

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

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

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

Hanoi maintains that only lawbreakers are jailed.

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.”