Netizen Report: Press Attacks on the Rise in Djibouti

A street market in Djibouti. Photo by Didier DeMars via Picasa (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

A street market in Djibouti. Photo by Didier DeMars via Picasa (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Hae-in Lim, Lisa Ferguson, Bojan Perkov, Weiping Li, Lakshmi Sarah, Ellery Roberts Biddle, and Sarah Myers contributed to this report.

Global Voices Advocacy's Netizen Report offers an international snapshot of challenges, victories, and emerging trends in Internet rights around the world. This week's report begins in Djibouti, where journalists at newspaper and website La Voix de Djibouti havefaced a series of threats in recent weeks. On December 4, two journalists covering a police raid on market stallholders were physically beaten; on December 7, another was arrested “for no obvious reason”; and on December 12, another was arrested for covering a protest in a slum and his mobile phone and other electronics were seized. In the last case, the slum in question had been demolished [fr] by the government on November 22, leaving 4,000 people homeless—a tragedy that was only made known thanks to La Voix, which used social media to spread the story. Unfortunately this is nothing new. In 2011, six journalists affiliated with La Voix spent more than four months in prison. The northeast African nation is ranked 167th of 179 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ 2013 World Press Freedom Index.

Thuggery: Dozens of Cubans detained on Human Rights Day

Somewhere between a few dozen and a few hundred people — including punk rockers, intellectuals, dissidents, and a pair of Argentine tourists — were detained last week in Cuba. Twitter users reported that throughout Havana, opposition activists attempting to gather for international Human Rights Day were stopped and taken into temporary custody by state security officials.Conflicting accounts have made it difficult to confirm precisely how many people were detained.

Egyptian blogger and political activist Alaa Abd El Fattah, who was arrested two weeks ago in Cairo after helping to organize a demonstration, was charged under Egypt’s new “anti-protest” law, which prohibits public demonstration without prior authorization from government officials.

A story about self-censorship in Serbian media disappeared from the website of Centre for Investigative Journalism of Serbia when the site was hacked last week. OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatovic expressed concern about the incident, saying to reporters ““I trust the authorities will do their utmost to protect the culture of free Internet that exists in Serbia. A free Internet is a precondition for free media to thrive.”

Assaults on media workers, activists, and artists continue in Syria. Cartoonist Akram Raslan, who was arrested in October 2012 by the Assad regime, may have been killed following a show trial, though some have refuted these claims. Raslan won the Award for Courage in Editorial Cartooning (issued by Cartoon Rights Network International) this year for his work. Non-violent activistRazan Zaitouneh was kidnapped along with three others from Syria’s Violations Documentation Center on the outskirts of Damascus on December 9. Zaitouneh had received threats from both the regime and extremist groups. Syria’s Local Coordinators Committee demanded the release of the activists and has asked others to join their campaign.

Media workers at several prominent political radio stations and news sites in Syria are working with international press freedom groups to demand an end to media worker abuses in the country. Learn more about the Free Press for Syria campaign here.

Surveillance: New Spy Regimes for France and India?

Surveillance à la française: Article 13 of France’s defense law [fr], passed on December 11, vastly expands the scope of government surveillance, allowing more government entities to collect more types of information for more reasons. The law will allow intelligence agencies—as well as the Ministry for Economy and Finance—to monitor “electronic and digital communications” in real time without authorization from the National Commission for the Control of Security Intercepts, the body responsible for oversight up until now.

The government of India may soon seek to store all Internet data for Indian domain names within its borders. An internal note from the Subcommittee on International Cooperation on Cybersecurity read, “Mere location of root servers in India would not serve any purpose unless we were also allowed a role in their control and management. We should insist that data of all domain names originating from India…should be stored in India. Similarly, all traffic originating/landing in India should be stored in India.” Although NSA revelations were a significant trigger for this move, the government of India has long advocated for a changes in global Internet governance that would place the domain name system and the responsibilities of ICANN under a multilateral (rather than US-centric) governance framework.

Free Expression: New law limit speech in Spain, Kazakhstan, Romania

This week, draft legislation in Spain that would restrict civil rights and limit activism met dramatic public opposition. The bill prohibits organizing and participating in demonstrations online and offline without giving prior notification to the government.

Several Internet users in Kazakhstan are currently being prosecuted for libel. Critics see this as a new approach to information control by the Kazakh government, which has a long history of online censorship. Kazakhstan consolidated control of the Internet with a 2009 law subjecting Internet content to stringent controls.

The Romanian Chamber of Deputies recriminalized offenses of libel and insult through what critics described as a murky legislative process. Local press freedom and human rights groups are pushing to prevent the law from going into force — President Traian Basescu still has time to veto the changes.

NSA Files: They even spied on your XBox

The Snowden leaks saga has seen major developments in recent days. This week, Judge Richard J. Leon of the US District Court for the District of Columbia found the NSA’s bulk collection of communication metadata to be unconstitutional. Recognizing that his decision conflicted with those of other district courts in the United States, Judge Leon said he “find[s] comfort” in the US v. Jones (2012) GPS tracking case and its emphasis on preserving the “degree of privacy” in accordance with technological innovation. Regardless of what he described as the “almost Orwellian” nature of the program, Judge Leon stayed his injunction “in light of the significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues.” Judge Leon was appointed by former president George W. Bush.

NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that American and British spies have been donning the disguise of orcs, trolls, humans, and dwarves in massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft and Second Life. They use the games—described by the NSA as “an opportunity!” [emphasis in original] —to collect data and recruit informants with the hopes of tracking down terrorist networks and hackers among the millions of members of these online gaming communities. The leaks also show that NSA and GCHQ found the Xbox Live console network—with its 48 million players—particularly useful for anonymously monitoring voice calls and texts and using video cameras to corroborate biometric information with other data. Now there's a reason to keep your kids away from video games.

Internal NSA presentation slides leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that the US surveillance agency and the UK’s GCHQ have been taking advantage of private online commercial tracking “cookies” to identify people online. The presentation focuses on Google’s “PREF” cookie, which allows Google to track individuals for advertising and usage metric purposes. These and other unique identifiers are being used by NSA to track human targets, including through geolocation data.

Privacy: ECJ says retention looks risky

The European Court of Justice ruled that data retention obligations for telecommunication companies and Internet providers can constitute “a serious interference” in the right to privacy. The EU Data Retention Directive (2006) requires telecoms and ISPs to store communications data of their users for six months to two years. The court also stated that the Directive was incompatible with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Copyright: TPP pushes stiff penalties for “accidental” copyright violations

The US government is pushing full steam ahead on Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations, but the agreement's copyright and intellectual property proposals continue to be met with resistance from activists in the Americas and Southeast Asia. According to leaked documents from recent TPP talks in Singapore, the current language under debate proposes making “unintentional infringements of copyright” a criminal offense.

Industry: No more FreeWeibo for China's Apple Users

Apple removed the anti-censorship application FreeWeibo from its China app store in compliance with a request from the Chinese government. Developed by Radio Netherlands Worldwide and Chinese cyber-activists, the software allows users to read censored postings on Chinese microblog Sina Weibo.

Internet Insecurity: Hacking the G20?

Since 2010, Chinese hackers have been using malware to spy on the foreign ministries of the Czech Republic, Portugal, Bulgaria, Latvia, and Hungary, according to a report by US computer security company FireEye. The targeted “Ke3Chang” campaign allowed hackers to eavesdrop on foreign ministries in the lead-up to the September 2013 G20 summit.

Netizen Activism

Social networking tools have helped sustain the Euromaidan protests in the Ukraine, helping to protesters organize and inform the public about new developments.

Uncool Things

The US-made web filtering software SmartFilter is not so smart – the program has reportedly blocked web pages belonging to a church, a jazz music institute, and an adult rehabilitation center, all in the US, after wrongly identifying their content as porn. The filtering software has been deployed in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Publications and Studies

 

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1 comment

  • I don’t see enough coverage of what happened in Bahrain in relation to internet freedom. over the past weeks I didn’t see coverage of bloggers on trial for misusing social media. or the news of setting up a cyber monitoring room.

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