Global Voices Advocacy » Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan: Filtering of the blogs expands

Adil Nurmakov — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:10:59 +0000

Blogs on mail.ru - popular Russian information, entertainment and mail portal - have become the second victim of blockage campaign in Kazakhstan after LiveJournal. Access via national telecom operator is denied only to blogs, all other services of the portal work fine. Access to the blogs section is possible via anonymizers.

Livejournal (Kazakhtelecom has never admitted filtering of this website) is widely believed to be a victim of political battles between the authorities and Rakhat Aliev, a runaway former presidential son-in-law and media tycoon, sentenced to 40 years in prison for kidnapping and preparation of a coup. The man has a couple of blogs on Livejournal.

But the reasons for filtering blogs.mail.ru is much harder to be perceived. They ususally have low-profile content and are assigned to every owner of a mailbox automatically. There is no dissent, and - as believed - there was no Aliev's blog there. Why it was necessary to block it then? Is it a policy of protectionism in favor of the much more obedient domestic blog platforms? Nobody knows.

Interestingly, on the first day of the blockage of blogs.mail.ru somebody tried to register an account rakhataliev on the Kazakhstani blog platform called yvision.kz. In an hour or two, the account was deleted. Although, hardly it was Aliev himself or his confidants.

“This is the right way, comrades!!!”, megakhuimyak quotes Vladimir Lenin [ru]:

“Paranoia of the Agency for Informatization and Commiunication will lead to enormous popularity of Mr Aliev - and to enormous shame on the country and its leadership. The whole staff of the Agency should be resigned forever. When the country has such “friends”, it doesn't even need any enemies”.

Eev has a bitter irony in her anxiety that soon Internet might be issued on points - like sugar during perestroika. Cyber-gorynych has a said joke that if the tendency persists, it would be possible to access only information about weather from Kazakhstan: “You enter open the online search engine, send your request and the returned result suggests: “Sorry, nothing has been found. Did you mean weather?” [ru].

Programmila also draws parallels with Livejournal [ru]:

The picture is the same… It stinks like idiotism. Seriously, when people debate the issues of idiocy and Agency for Informatization and Communication, I don't even argue… I now think about installing a tiny DNS server at home…

It is indicative that in the case of Livejournal the whole portal was blocked, not a separate “problematic” URL. This time, the censors managed to filter only blogs.mail.ru. According to the experts, it is because the filtering in Kazkahstan is excercised in a very unsophisticated way - by the server's IP number. The portal of mail.ru has several channels and physical machines - blogs are powered by a separate server.

Also posted on Neweurasia

Livejournal inaccessible in Kazakhstan

Sami Ben Gharbia — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:06:05 +0000

This screen shot of a Kazakh Blockpage was taken when access to the popular blogging platform Livejournal.com has been blocked. Source: Blockpage Gallery

Kazakh Internet users seem to be unable to access the popular blogging platform and social network Livejournal.com through Kazakh major ISPs. According to Reuters Canada, only a small number of Kazakh Livejournal bloggers still can access the website through smaller ISPs or through the use of proxies. Livejournal.ru, however, seems to be accessible.

Kazakhtelecom's IT Director denied that his country is blocking access to Livejournal, while a spokesman for Russian online media firm SUP, which owns the blogging service, said “Livejournal itself was not blocking Kazakh users.”

Kazakhstan blocks opposition websites

Sami Ben Gharbia — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 23:01:49 +0000

On October 18, 2007, Kazakhstan has blocked access to a number of independent websites switching off main opposition outlets including kub.kz, geo.kz, zonakz.net and inkar.info.

“All those websites published links to audiofiles of telephone conversations of high-ranking officials in Kazakhstan, freely available on the Net” Rachid Nougmanov, from the International Freedom Network, said in an email.

According to Reuters: “In the transcripts, officials use strong language to discuss Nazarbayev's ex son-in-law, Rakhat Akiyev, who fell out with the Kazakh leader this year and currently lives in exile in Europe.”

On October 23, Kub.kz has been officially notified of its closure by the Kazakhstan Network Information Center (KazNIC). Here is a copy of the letter:

It seems that this is not the first time that Kub.kz has been blocked. According to the last report (PDF) from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe - “Internet Governance in Kazakhstan”, by Rachid Nougmanov - which paints a grim picture of the Internet situation in the country, “kub.kz was blocked for more than three years by Kazakhtelecom and Nursat, from January 2002 to April 2005.”

“The situation with the four sites points directly at the violation of people's constitutional rights,” the blocked website owners said in a statement issued jointly with human rights activists and online journalists during a press-conference in Almaty. “It is clear that whoever ordered them to be blocked did not think much about the legality of their actions. They were most likely driven by political considerations.”

In December 2005, the right to use the domain name borat.kz owned by the English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, who had made the controversial film “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan“, was suspended by the Association of IT Companies. “We’ve done this so he can’t badmouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name,” the Association’s President Nurlan Isin said. “He can go and do whatever he wants at other domains.”

European study on legal frameworks for censorship released

John Kennedy — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 10:47:08 +0000

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe has issued a lengthy report looking at the legal and constitutional frameworks on which state governments are basing practices of internet censorship. For Kazakhstan, the report finds, domestic threats to information security are defined as widely as “unlawful activities of political and economic organizations in creating, disseminating, and using information” and “the system whereby political parties and civic organizations popularize their views in the media.” Before moving on to look at legal linguistic loopholes in other countries such as Georgia and Latvia, the segment on Kazakhstan explores the cases of three bloggers who had previously been arrested—beaten and jailed in one case: Sergey Duvanov, Kazis Toguzbayev and Andrey Sviridov.