‘We want our cute cats and we want our rights too’

By BHRP

A crisp fall night turned out to be the perfect setting for the 2nd annual Vancouver Human Rights Lecture, co-sponsored by the Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Program, The Laurier Institution, the University of British Columbia Continuing Studies and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Speaker Ethan Zuckerman in his lecture “Cute Cats and the Arab Spring: When Social Media Meet Social Change” asked the question ‘if 2011 ends up being the year of revolution, is it possible that social media had something to do with it?’

He questioned the theory that social media had nothing to do with protests and activism in 2011 and the opposing theory that the Internet changes everything – that as soon as you have access to information and to the internet, people will mobilize.

The reality, he stated, is not black and white: social media is not irrelevant, nor is social media responsible for how (or why) people get together and protest; instead social media falls within a complex grey area.

Citing Mohamed Bouazizi and his act of self-immolation as a launch-pad or ‘patient zero’ in the movements that have swept through the Arab world, he noted that social media platforms make it possible for people to create and disseminate information at a low cost.  More importantly, they allow people to contribute to the wider media ecosystem (including traditional media), which can sometimes result in citizens mobilizing beyond a small protest movement to removing a dictatorship from power.

He argued that while the development of encrypted and specialized tools for activists is important, just as effective are the tools that are simple enough for anyone to use. The tools that allow persons to easily share their own content and interests to a wide audience, as in the case of the internet user sharing her pictures of cute cats, becomes an even more potent tool for the person who accidentally stumbles upon activism. That user may be already using the tools, and can now use them to share their concerns and express themselves. These platforms are often difficult for governments to censor.

Ethan challenged the audience to become empowered citizens and netizens of the online world and to call on governments to respect the idea of a networked public sphere where content and information can be shared but also to call on companies to run the private spaces in a manner consistent with freedom of expression and privacy.

Yahoo! recognizes that the Internet is a powerful space for free expression and for this reason is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder initiative comprised of ICT companies, human rights organizations, academics, investors and others. The GNI is a positive and collective step by these stakeholders to work together to challenge censorship and threats to privacy. The group has worked together to establish a code of conduct to guide technology companies in protecting and advancing freedom of expression and privacy across the globe when they encounter laws and policies that interfere with these fundamental human rights.

Over the next year, the Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Program will continue to explore how people, and more specifically women, are using social and digital media to support positive change in their communities and around the world. Our Change your World summits start in Cairo on January 18 2012, where, together with Yahoo! Maktoob and in partnership with Vital Voices we will focus on how women across the Middle East and North Africa are using technology, the Internet and various social and digital media platforms to create positive change in the world through four areas: leadership in governance and politics, human rights and social justice, journalism and entrepreneurship.  Join us for Change your World: Cairo 2012. Click here for more information.

To listen to the 2011 Vancouver Human Rights Lecture podcast, please click here or view the lecture video here

A Blogger at Arab Spring’s Genesis

By Nicole

Flickr Creative Commons|nosferata1969|

By Kristen McTighe| New York Times| Oct 13, 2011|

She felt the stinging fumes of tear gas billowing through the streets here nine months ago and saw police officers firing live ammunition at protesters. She watched families weeping in grief over the bloodied bodies of their loved ones left lying on the ground.

The violence could have silenced Lina Ben Mhenni with fear, but it drove her to speak louder and clearer.

“It was very dangerous to be a blogger under Ben Ali,” Ms. Ben Mhenni, a 27-year-old activist and blogger, said in a cafe here on the capital’s Avenue Habib Bourguiba. Tunisians had taken to this street and many others to rebel against the regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali just nine months ago. “Of course I had fear, but when I saw people killed by the police I forgot it and it gave me the strength to do my work,” she said.

Ms. Ben Mhenni is an example of how protesters helped break a regime’s stranglehold on the media and accelerate a revolution that brought down the 23-year dictatorship of Mr. Ben Ali and that went on to ignite much of the Arab world. It was a revolution that, in the case of Ms. Ben Mhenni, began even before the Arab Spring.

Now a teaching assistant in linguistics at Tunis University, she began the blog in 2007, the year her mother donated a kidney to her to replace the one that had failed two years before. Six months after that surgery, she competed in the World Transplant Games. (She competed again in 2009, winning two silver medals in race walking.)

She named her blog “A Tunisian Girl” and wrote about censorship, women’s rights, human rights and freedom of speech. She soon found herself at odds with the government, which blocked her site inside Tunisia. She used proxy sites to access her pages, and in April 2010, she said, the police broke into her family home. “They took my computer, my cameras, my everything,” she said. “It was clear it was them because of the way only I was targeted and the way they went after my equipment.”

But Ms. Ben Mhenni — whose father, Sadok Ben Mhenni, was a political prisoner under Mr. Ben Ali’s predecessor Habib Bourguiba — fought on.

On Dec. 17, 2010, she and other Tunisians heard about a fruit vendor in Sidi Bouzid named Mohamed Bouazizi who set himself on fire to protest the confiscation of his goods and his constant harassment by municipal officials and police officers. Ms. Ben Mhenni called friends in the city to see what was happening. She reported what she learned on her blog, a Facebook page and her Twitter account.

On Dec. 25, she took part in the demonstration that erupted in the capital after Mr. Bouazizi’s death, uploading articles and photographs to social media sites. At the beginning of January, she went to Sidi Bouzid, Regueb and Kasserine, where the security forces’ response to the protests had been vicious. She took photos of people killed and wounded by the police and put them all online.

It soon became clear that the protests were not going to stop. “The social movement was spontaneous,” Ms. Ben Mhenni said. “There was no political party. It was just Tunisians. People were angry.”

Mr. Ben Ali fled Tunisia on Jan. 14. Censorship was lifted and Ms. Ben Mhenni and others could write freely.

Themeur Mekki, a journalist and blogger who worked with Ms. Ben Mhenni on an earlier campaign against censorship, said: “What she did was break the media blackout that the media aligned to Ben Ali had imposed during the revolution.”

Laetitia Matiatos, head of the new media desk at Reporters Without Borders, said: “Bloggers like Lina Ben Mhenni and Astrubal of the blog Nawaat during the Tunisian uprising played an important role in spreading information across the world, using VPN and proxies.” The bloggers, she added, not only were censored by the government, they also faced intimidation, arrest and physical attacks.

Kerim Bouzouita, author of ReadWriteWorld at blogspot.com, said Twitter and Facebook were important to the revolt. As in other uprisings, protesters were able to break the media blackout by spreading video, information and commentary through the Internet and social media operations.

But it was the government itself that lifted the blockade on the two sites and ironically allowed them to thrive.

“Ben Ali banned Facebook in August 2008 because of ‘disruptive people,’ according to the regime’s speech,” Mr. Bouzouita said. “We do not know why it was uncensored, perhaps because of popular discontent and mobilization.” But he said the government also hoped to use that openness to keep tabs on those who were using Facebook and Twitter to communicate and organize.

Ms. Matiatos agreed that the move was intended to open the door for surveillance. “Facebook has been unbanned in Tunisia mostly to spy on netizens,” she said. “For example, police also logged into Facebook accounts to steal activists’ passwords and infiltrate networks of citizen-journalists.” She said she believed the security forces in Syria and other countries use the same methods.

Ms. Ben Mhenni, however, said that though such sites played a role in Tunisia’s revolution, they did not spark it: “In Tunisia at least, the role of social media has been exaggerated.”

“Maybe in Egypt the call started on social media,” she added, “but here, everything started on the ground. Mohamed Bouazizi set his body on fire and everyone started to demonstrate. Social media didn’t start the revolution. It was just a tool that helped.”

Tunisian Bloggers Expect Role to Grow

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Linda Demers

By Karin Laub | Associated Press | March 23, 2011

TUNIS, Tunisia – At the height of the Tunisian uprising, dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali tried hard to silence the young bloggers who were driving the protests against him. His security agents arrested, even tortured, some of them and repeatedly shut down their sites.

But two months after Mr. Ben Ali’s fall, the caretaker government that is to lead Tunisia to summer elections has embraced the very tools its predecessor tried to destroy.

It has lifted Web censorship. Key ministries – including the Interior Ministry, once in charge of the feared political police – now communicate with citizens through Facebook.

Some of the bloggers, once under threat from Mr. Ben Ali’s secret agents, are courted as heroes. One serves in the interim government, others have been awarded an online media freedom prize, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with Internet activists during her first post-revolt visit to Tunisia this month.

The bloggers, many of them university graduates in their 20s, say they have an important role to play in the new Tunisia as government watchdogs or political activists.

“We’re not stopping our fight, and we are the first line of defense of freedom,” said blogger Wissem Zghaier, 29, who was beaten and tortured during the uprising.

Social media were key to the Tunisian revolt and the anti-government protests it inspired across the Arab world.

In Tunisia, the protests erupted in impoverished outlying areas in mid-December after a fruit vendor railing against official harassment and confiscation of his wares set himself on fire outside a government building.

The protests were ignored at first by the national media, but bloggers uploaded videos and photos of police violence against the demonstrators, sharing them on Facebook, one of the only social networks functioning under Mr. Ben Ali. The images fueled more protests, which reached the capital, Tunis, and eventually drove out Mr. Ben Ali on Jan. 14.

During Tunisia’s transition to democracy, the Internet is bound to play a key role as a forum of political debate: About one-third of the population of 10 million has Internet access, and fundamental issues are at stake in July elections.

Voters are to choose a national assembly that will write a new constitution and determine, among other things, whether Tunisia gets a parliamentary or presidential democracy and whether gender equality is enshrined in the basic law.

Even after Mr. Ben Ali’s ouster, protests largely driven by social media have continued. For example, demonstrators forced the resignation of the first caretaker prime minister, Mohammed Ghannouchi, a holdover from the Ben Ali era some feared was trying to hijack the revolution. They also got the government to dissolve the former ruling party.

Ahead of Mrs. Clinton’s visit, the blogosphere was abuzz with efforts to organize protests against U.S. policy in the Arab world, including Washington’s previous support of Mr. Ben Ali and other dictators in the region.

During Mrs. Clinton’s visit, a few dozen demonstrators marched along the capital’s Avenue Bourguiba, a tree-lined boulevard with Parisian-style cafes and site of many demonstrations. “Clinton, get out,” they chanted, echoing the central slogan Tunisians used against Mr. Ben Ali, who had ruled for 23 years.

“Clinton came here to manipulate our politics,” said activist Hussein Hagbei, whose blog is called Sidi Bouzid, after the provincial capital where the Tunisian uprising began. “We don’t want Clinton to interfere in our politics.”

The 29-year-old has a degree in archaeology, but like many young Tunisian college graduates has not found work in his field. Instead, Mr. Hagbei runs a small Internet cafe to make a living.

But the experience of shaping history has galvanized him and his friends. Earlier this month, they gathered in a cafe near Avenue Bourguiba to discuss the possibility of forming a new party to give a voice to young activists.

Another blogger, Tarek Kahlaoui, is seeking training and funding for a news website that he hopes will meet Tunisia’s need for independent journalism. Bloggers can be influential in Tunisia if they seize the moment, said Mr. Kahlaoui, an assistant professor of Islamic history at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Some are going into politics. Mr. Zghaier, the activist who was tortured, belongs to the Democratic Progressive Party (PDP), a key opposition movement during the Ben Ali era. The 29-year-old, who adopted the middle name “libre,” French for free, is also a member of the PDP’s Facebook Committee, which is to help spread the party’s message of a market economy tempered by social justice.

The turnaround of Mr. Zghaier’s fortunes is particularly dramatic.

On Jan. 7, a week before the fall of the old regime, he was snatched from a Tunis street by plainclothes security agents who put a sack over his head, bundled him into a car and took him for interrogation.

For the next six days, Mr. Zghaier said, he was alternately beaten, threatened, cuffed to a wall, forced to strip and photographed in humiliating positions.

Much of the mistreatment, he said, took place in the basement of the Interior Ministry on Avenue Bourguiba – decried during the Ben Ali years as a torture chamber.

Today, the ministry is ringed by barbed wire and guarded by the military, but in a sign of the new times, its officials communicate with citizens through Facebook.

The ministry’s page, with more than 150,000 followers, explains how to apply for civil-service jobs, describes police activities and gives updates on the approval process for parties seeking to run in the elections.

As of this month, 37 were approved, the ministry said. It also listed nine that have been rejected, including some with a radical Islamic bent.
One of those behind the outreach is Sami Zaoui, minister of technology and communications in the interim government. Mr. Zaoui, a former consultant for an international accounting firm, told a French radio station last month that his first decision on the job was to lift the Internet censorship that had been enforced under Mr. Ben Ali.

The government is aware it’s being watched closely by the activists, said Fatma Azouz, a journalism professor at Manouba University in Tunis. “I am sure that those who went to the streets are capable of going again,” Mr. Azouz said. “Any government will be aware of the possibility.”

Eradicating a Government Responsibly

By BHRP

Bassem Bouguerra is a Software Architect at Yahoo! and online activist for human rights in Tunisia and the Arab world.  The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily of Yahoo! Inc. 

Sam Bouguerra

History books are packed with accounts of revolutions dethroning rulers and governments that alienated themselves from their people. Each uprising was motivated by a variety of religious, social, economical and political drives. Some of them were engraved in the human memory as achievements, others as disappointments. Nonetheless, they all had something in common: a story to tell and lesson to teach. So what lesson can we learn from the Tunisian revolution? 

You can exterminate a whole government with all its institutions abruptly and responsibly even in countries with no real political opposition.  

I realize how unfounded, logically, this statement can be. How can you annihilate the foundation of structure in a modern society and claim responsibility? Furthermore, how can a major political transformation take place in a scene lacking political inspiration? 

To help answer these questions, let’s quickly examine the Tunisian socio-political scene prior to the dawn of the revolution. The ousted president wanted to be perceived by his people as omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent.  Censorship was atrocious and popular websites such as Flickr and YouTube didn’t make it through the tight filters. Every nomination starting from ministers all the way down to school directors would have to be first blessed by the president and his cohorts. A president with a corrupt agenda had wedged a huge gap between the rich and the working class. 

In the midst of this, the Tunisian youth escaped the trenchant reality by surfing the Internet and popularizing artists such as Amel Methlouthi who inspired a whole generation of political activists. This young educated group ended up forming an influential decentralized political ecosystem as its core but apolitical on the surface, mainly to avoid confrontation with the police. 

Bloggers created a new trusted source of information for Tunisians and used that trust to fuel devotion and perseverance. Popular virtual mass movements started to see the light. Some of these movements transcended to real life such as the popular “Ammar Day” that denounced internet censorship; others were conceived and expired on the Internet. 

Bloggers from different religious and political backgrounds experienced an unprecedented unity: as a Tunisian blogger, one knew that others would rally to support if ever arrested.  This solidarity was seen in the “I am Fatma” solidarity movement that helped to liberate the Tunisian blogger Fatma Arabicca from her unlawful detention. 

Initiatives like these and many others emboldened bloggers and online activists and lent a feeling of “I can”.  In addition, they helped in recruiting a huge mass of Tunisians to the point where over 20% of the Tunisian population created a Facebook account and joined virtual political groups and assemblies to break a decades-long taboo reigning over Tunisians. 

Information about corruption and police brutality started to circulate in a much broader scale and a sense of awakening hit the silent majority. 

Ben Ali’s regime alienated itself from the revolting masses and an unexpected element filled the leadership void. Most of the new leadership emerged from the online community and organized initiatives such as financial and food donations, street cleaning, and neighborhood watches to protect the communities from looters and troublemakers. 

Photos on the Internet began to appear, showing food vendors assisting people in need and young people cleaning up the aftermath from the street protests. Images of these responsible citizens inspired other Tunisians to do the same in concurrence with the ‘extermination’ of the corrupt regime. 

Tunisians have shown the world a new way of eradicating a dictatorship. And if I would have to describe it in 4 words I would use: spontaneous, responsible, peaceful and deadly. 

Bassem Bouguerra can be followed on Twitter (http://twitter.com/#!/tunisien).

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)

Bahrain, Tunisia Filtering Individual Twitter Pages

By BHRP

From Open Net Initiative’s Blog:

Over the past few weeks, reports have trickled in to Herdict and via Twitter, alerting us of the filtering of individual Twitter pages in Tunisia and Bahrain (as well as, possibly, China). In Tunisia, the accounts of exiled activist Sami Ben Gharbia (@ifikra), engineer @Ma7moud, and popular independent news source Nawaat (@nawaat) have been confirmed inaccessible, while in Bahrain @FreeBahrain was allegedly blocked on New Year’s Day, but has since become accessible.

Twitter is no stranger to being blocked: Both China and Iran have blocked the social networking/microblogging site in the past, and Saudi Arabia reportedly blocked two individual Twitter users’ pages in mid-2009. What is particularly interesting is that the governments of Tunisia and Bahrain have now demonstrated capability to block individual Twitter pages, thus silencing certain voices while still keeping a major communication platform open. Only time will tell if this is to become a trend globally.