April, 2011

Stories from April, 2011

Azerbaijan Deports Swedish Television Crew

  25 April 2011

The Commitee to Protect Journalists reports that Azerbaijan has deported a Swedish television crew which had arrived to film a documentary on human rights situation in the country. “According to CPJ sources and local press reports, plainclothed men detained journalists My Rohwedder Street, Charlie Laprevote, and Charlotta Wijkström at a protest...

US National Science Foundation Blocking GV Advocacy

  21 April 2011

Recently, the Global Voices  team learned that this site, https://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org, is blocked at the headquarters of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Washington, D.C.  As is common practice for many companies and organizations, the NSF uses filtering software to block a number of websites.  Such filtering typically targets pornography and...

Bahrain: Pro-Government Activists are Blogging too

  18 April 2011

Demands for change in Bahrain and recent incidents of violence against those demanding reform is being chronicled by number of bloggers. They present struggle within the country and also how external forces are influencing events. Adding another dimension to the discussion, pro-government and pro-establishment bloggers are also making their side heard online. Suhail...

Spam Bots Flooding Twitter to Drown Info About #Syria Protests [Updated]

  18 April 2011

After recent protests demanding freedom and democracy in Syria and the regime's brutal crackdown started, information warfare has been taking place on twitter. This post attempts to analyze the proliferation of twitter spams bots especially designed to flood the #Syria hash tag on twitter in order to make information about the events harder to find, and stop the conversation about them.

Over the Firewall and into the Fire

  14 April 2011

The Freedom House report Leaping over the Firewall is a new report designed to help users understand, evaluate and select a tool or series of tools for security, privacy and most importantly, for circumventing Internet censorship. As a long time developer with The Tor Project and as a member of the circumvention community, I feel that it is important to set the record straight about a number of issues. My motivation for writing this response is to inform readers of the serious concerns that many people, myself included, have about the recent Freedom House report. I am always pleased to see more analysis of censorship circumvention and Internet security tools, but I have concerns about this report’s methodologies and resulting conclusions. The report in its current form could be dangerous to the users it aims to help.

Middle East Feels Threatened by Bloggers

  11 April 2011

Such has been the role of bloggers and citizen journalists in fueling the region's season of fury against dictatorship, they are being seen as a threat to status quo. Now a campaign of arrest, intimidation and harassment is being launched against them. In Bahrain, cyber activists and bloggers are facing...

Egypt: Blogger Sentenced to 3 Years for Insulting the Military

  11 April 2011

Along the many years where the former president Hosni Mubarak ruled the country we didn’t witness large scale of cases where a blogger gets jailed for a blog-post. The first case in Egypt was in 2007 when Kareem Amer was sentenced for 4 years in jail based on blog-posts, he was charged for insulting Islam and Mubarak.

China: A Typical Online Political Harassment

  9 April 2011

Not only do Chinese dissidents and human rights activists face political prosecution from the government, they are also subjected to daily harassment from the so-called 50 cent party. Tsering Woser (@degewa) is a Tibetan poet and writer in China. She has been very outspoken in criticizing Chinese government policy on...