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.

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.

Ahead of Hanoi visit, Hillary Clinton urged to raise cases of imprisoned journalists and cyber-dissidents

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Sean Hobson

Reporters San Frontiers | October 29, 2010

Reporters Without Borders has written to U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton in advance of her visit to Hanoi on 30 October urging the United States to press the Vietnamese authorities to release imprisoned journalists and cyber-dissidents and suggesting that it should raise the cases of Le Cong Dinh, Nguyen Tien Trung and Pham Minh Hoang in particular.

Le Cong Dinh, a cyber-dissident and well-known lawyer, was sentenced to five years in prison on January 20. Nguyen Tien Trung, a blogger and pro-democracy activist, is serving a seven-year jail sentence. Their jail terms are to be followed by three years of house arrest. Both were convicted of endangering national security and “organizing campaigns in collusion with foreign-based reactionary groups aimed at overthrowing the people’s government with the Internet’s help.”

Pham Minh Hoang, a blogger (www.pkquoc.multiply.com) with French and Vietnamese dual citizenship, was formally charged on 29 September after six weeks in detention, during which his family was without any news of him. He is also accused of activities aimed at overthrowing the government. His wife says the real reason for his arrest was his opposition to bauxite mining by a Chinese company in Vietnam’s central highlands and its impact on the environment. Other journalists and bloggers who have tried to cover this subject, such as Bui Thanh Hieu, have also been arrested.

The human rights situation is getting worse in the run-up to the Communist Party congress scheduled for early next year. Vietnam nonetheless agreed to reconcile economic development with respect for its citizens’ fundamental rights when it was admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2006.

The government has been reinforcing its control over the media and Internet since last year and there has been an increase in cyber-attacks on websites critical of the government.

In her historic speech last January, Clinton very clearly affirmed U.S. support for online freedom of speech and opinion, saying the United States had a duty to defend this tool of economic and social development. Reporters Without Borders urges her to defend these principles now in her contacts with Vietnam, the world’s second-largest prison for netizens with a total of 16 cyber-dissidents and three journalists detained.

Reporters Without Borders unveils first-ever “Anti-Censorship Shelter”

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Mirry

Reporters Sans Frontieres | June 25, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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