Global Voices Advocacy » Tunisia

Between Twitter and the Street: Tunisia Celebrates its Second Independence

Kacem Jlidi — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:06:06 +0000

Tens of thousands of Tunisians gathered just like the old days on the Habib Bourghuiba Avenue, Main Street of Tunisia’s capital. A year ago, on this same day and on this same street, Tunisians came united to shout “Dégage” (Leave), a key word of the Tunisian Revolution. Today, they come to celebrate the first anniversary of their revolution.

On the ground, the street is creating new rituals of celebration for what we claim to be the Second Independence Day for Tunisia. Different political parties are present along with a number of not-for-profit organizations and civil society organisations, each contributing a different gesture in this ritaul, patriotic songs, drawing workshops and revolutionary speeches.

By Wassim Ghozlani

There is a feeling of less unity among those present on the Avenue, a phenomenon easily noticed today. A year ago, Tunisians demonstrated together by waving the same flag and shouting the same slogans.

Twelve months later, and more diverse and divided groups belonging to different political parties and different ideologies are waving different flags and chanting different slogans. Such diversity is not alien to Tunisian society. Nevertheless, many would have preferred it except if everyone had decided for once to come together under the same umbrella of the Tunisian flag to celebrate such a day.

Haythem El Mekki, a journalist and well-known figure describes the Avenue: “Before the Ministry of Interior there are nationalists and communists chanting slogans against Qatar. Before the Municipal Theater (on the same street) nationalists and Islamists are chanting slogans against France.”

“I'll be back when there are Tunisians and nationalists against both Qatar and France and we are calling to continue the fulfillment of the objectives of the revolution,” he added.

The image of France, traditionally Tunisia’s favourite economic partner, has received a bit of a knock since Michèle Alliot-Marie, former French Minister of Foreign Affairs, offered French help to quell the uprising in Tunisia.

Qatar Leave Credit _Thierry Brésillon

Qatar too is getting its fair share of criticism over the biased coverage of events in Tunisia through its Doha based Aljazeera, news channel. Tunisians are watching with wide open eyes the deals taking place between the newly elected government and the Emir of Qatar, suspected to be financially supporting the Ennahda, Tunisia’s moderate Islamist Party.

On twitter, the revolution’s first anniversary is celebrated differently. The hash tag #BackToBenAli started trending quickly. Tunisian twitter users, or tweeps, started live-tweeting their memories of what they did, what they faced and what they fele one year ago on this same day, January 14.

Emna El Hammi, a blogger and doctor/engineer in biotechnologies tweeted [fr]:

“my mother dying of fear begging my father not to let me go to the avenue. My father said, this is important, let her go”.

Credit_ Thierry Brésillon

Slim Amamou, a blogger and former Secretary of State at the Ministry of Youth and Sports tweeted:

“it was the end of torture for @azyyoz and me. The Minister of Interior transferred us to the Ministry of Justice and then at night to Mornaguia prison”.

Afef Abrougui, a Global Voices blogger tweeted:

“I remember myself having a big fight with my sister because I shared an anti-regime song on Facebook: she was my own #Ammar404” (referring to the internet censor).

Emna Ben Jemaa, a journalist and marketing professor tweeted:

“A year ago, I stopped the lesson to listen to Ben Ali’s speech with my students in class and I was translating it for the foreigners”.

France24 covered the live tweet and tweeted:

“Yesterday, security forces killed 50 people in Kasserine and Thala. Today, the victims are buried”.

Amel Boussetta, a teacher and human rights advocated tweeted:

“In front of the Ministry of Interior, I was screaming out loud along with thousands of Tunisians #dégage #dégage #dégage #dégage #Jan14 #Tunisia

Moez Jaballah, a student, tweeted:

“A year ago, Tunisia was united and cohesive. Now, it is cut in two: The Islamists and others!”

Sameh Bel Haj Ali, a landscape and urban planning engineer, tweeted:

“A year later I am still looking for the man who put his jacket on the ground under my head when I fainted! Thank you”.

Credit_ Nicolas Fauque

As for me, I remember when I got arbitrarily arrested on the same Avenue by two secret policemen, for carrying a laptop and a Palestinian scarf. I wasn’t hurt but I will never forget the scenes of those young men heavily beaten, their big bruises, open cuts and their torn clothes in the cold winter. I will never forget the big blood drops almost everywhere on the ground of the Ministry of Interior.

Equally, I remember soon after Ben Ali fled the country the militias’ attacks, I remember the long cold nights young men spent outside watching their homes and streets and reporting to the soldiers camping in their trucks not so far away. I remember my mother up most part of the night making sandwiches and tea for the solders outside.

These are our celebrations of our new custom - Tunisia’s second independence day. We celebrate both online and offline, the way that our so-called Revolution actually happened.

Cross-posted on openDemocracy

2011: A Year of Triumphs and Struggle for Bloggers in the Middle East and North Africa

Jillian York — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 23:24:07 +0000

This article is was originally posted on Global Voices Online

With all of the social media successes throughout the Middle East and North Africa in 2011, it would be all too easy to overlook the struggles faced by bloggers and netizens throughout the region. And yet, 2011 was an extraordinary difficult year for free expression, from Egypt's shutdown of the Internet to the numerous harassed, arrested, and detained bloggers from the Maghreb to the Gulf.

Iran: No room for free expression

Less than a week into 2012, Reporters Without Borders puts the number of jailed netizens globally at 126. Within the list, Iran stands out, as my colleague Fred Petrossian writes:

In 2011, the Iranian regime was faithful to its reputation as an enemy of internet as it continued to repress bloggers and even threaten their lives. Blogger Sakhi Rigi got a record breaking 20-year jail sentence. Hossein Ronaghi Maleki, who is serving 15 years in prison, struggled for his health and for a period was deprived of contact with his family and lawyer. RSF talked about the plight of seven netizens in Iran in July 2011. These cases are just the tip of the iceberg. While a few bloggers likeShiva Nazar Ahari andHossein Derakhshanwere released on bail, others like Mohammad Reza Pour Shajari may face charges of ‘Waging War Against God' (moharebeh), for which a death sentence can be pronounced. As Omid Reza Mirsayafi's tragic death shows, the more a blogger is isolated and deprived of a network, the more he is in danger.

Egypt, Syria, Bahrain among the region's worst

But while Iran may rank worst in terms of the number of bloggers detained, life for bloggers in much of the rest of the region has been no picnic. In Syria, where the uprising that started last spring shows few signs of abating, several prominent bloggers were arrested in 2011, threatening countless more into silence. Razan Ghazzawi, a former Global Voices contributor, spent fifteen days in prison in December until being released on bail, but still faces trial for “weakening the national sentiment,” among other charges. Hussein Ghrer, released in early December, also faces trial. Meanwhile, Tal Al-Mallohi, the teenaged blogger imprisoned in 2009, is serving a five year sentence.

Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah poses with his wife and fellow blogger Manal Hassan in Tunis just one month before his arrest

Egypt–where social media had arguably the largest impact in 2011–has also seen numerous bloggers struggle for their freedom. Blogger Maikel Nabil Sanad, who was arrested in March, was recently sentenced to two years in prison for criticizing the interim military regime on his blog. Sanad has spent much of his incarceration on hunger strike. Alaa Abd El Fattah, who was released on December 25 after nearly two months in prison, still faces trial on a number of trumped-up charges, a clear indication of his being a target for his outspokenness against the military. Another blogger, Ayman Youssef Mansour, was sentenced in October by a civilian court to three years in prison for insulting religion on his Facebook page. Several other netizens have faced military questioning for online postings. The Egyptian campaign to end military trials for civilians has been instrumental in highlighting such cases.

A third country in the region ranks among the worst in 2011, though one wouldn't know it from following mainstream media coverage. Bahrain, where a nascent uprising was all but quashed early in the year, levied harsh punishments on several bloggers in 2011, including Global Voices Advocacy contributor Ali Abdulemam, who was sentenced in absentia to fifteen years in prison and is currently in hiding.

Bahraini blogger Ali Abdulemam at the 2009 Arabloggers Workshop in Beirut

Similarly, Abduljalil Al-Singace was given the same sentence. Earlier in the year, authorities briefly detained prominent bloggers Mahmood Al-Youif and Mohamed El-Maskati, while closer to the end of 2011, Zainab Al-Khawaja was briefly imprisoned, her brutal arrest caught on video. And most tragically, Zakariya Rashid Hassan Al-Ashiri became the second blogger ever to die in prison in March.

Elsewhere in the region, the struggle continues

Though perhaps less systematically, other countries in the region targeted bloggers as well in 2011. Prior to the fall of Ben Ali, Tunisian bloggers Slim Amamou (a Global Voices Advocacy contributor) and Azyz Amami were briefly imprisoned. Amami was then arrested again and beaten by police in September. Though the arrest was not for his blogging but for a joke told near a police station, it demonstrated the tenuous state of free expression in the country.

In Morocco, a blogger and several activists were arrested in September, while Saudi Arabia went after video bloggers who had been documenting poverty in the oil-rich country. And in the UAE, a female blogger was summoned for interrogation over a tweet.

Fighting for a better 2012

Though this represents only a fraction of those intimidated, harassed, and imprisoned in 2011, it is illustrative of the continued struggle faced by bloggers, activists, and other netizens in the region. And as 2012 kicks off with such a large number of bloggers in prison, it is apparent that there is more work to be done to ensure that the right to free expression is guaranteed for everyone. And fortunately, a growing number of grassroots organizations in the region are taking up the fight for digital rights. But nevertheless, bloggers must be ever vigilant, and consider the risks they face as they take their activism online. Global Voices salutes these brave bloggers and will continue to make sure their voices are heard throughout the world.

Photo credits: Jillian C. York.

Tunisia: A chance to get things right?

Rebecca MacKinnon — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:27:18 +0000

This coming Sunday (October 23rd, 2011), Tunisia will hold elections for the constituent assembly that will be tasked with re-writing the country's constitution. While this election is only the first step in a long and winding path that may or may not succeed in establishing a vibrant Arab democracy in North Africa, reports are quoting election observers and human rights groups who are optimistic that people are serious about the process of holding a real election.

Censorship is a major topic in the Tunisian political discoure. There have recently been protests by conservatives demanding censorship of all media including TV, film, and Internet and protests by liberals against censorship. After Internet censorship was ended when President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled the country in January, some censorship of pornographic and incendiary web content resumed in May of this year, prompting heated debates over who has the authority to decide what goes on the censorship list and whether that power will inevitably be abused.

Photo by Mohammed Alaa Guedich

At the Third Arab Bloggers Meeting in Tunis earlier this month, Moez Chakchouk, Chairman and CEO of the Tunisian Internet Agency, gave an amazing presentation (slideshow included) in which he revealed that under Ben Ali, his agency had secretly tested censorship and surveillance software for Western companies. He would not say which ones, although according to Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Tunisia long used McAfee's SmartFilter to censor the Internet under the Ben Ali regime, and controversially has resumed some filtering in a much more limited way during the transition.

ATI (as the Tunisian Internet Agency is known according to its French acronym) was much reviled by activists under Ben Ali and nicknamed “Ammar 404″ - the Arabic equivalent of “Joe 404,” with “404″ referring to the “404 page not found” error message that appears on browsers when a web page has been blocked. Now Mr. Chakchouk says he is trying to turn the agency into a “transparent” and “neutral” Internet exchange point (IXP) that can support a robust public discourse in an evolving new democracy. He wants to put an end to web filtering at the network level and instead provide tools and services for households to filter their home Internet if they so desire, without engaging in blanket censorship for the entire nation. In general, he believes that Tunisia must foster competition and innovation in Internet services. He wants Tunisia adopt global “best practices” in Internet governance.

After a Tunisian court ruled in May that some websites must be blocked, the ATI appealed the ruling twice, but lost both appeals. It is making a further appeal to the highest court.

Click here for a video of Chakchouk's entire speech in French. Here is a shorter English interview he did immediately afterwards with Tunisia Online.

A team from the Tor Project who conducted security workshops during the Arab bloggers meeting stayed on in Tunisia for an extra day and visited ATI. Here is an excerpt of their report:

On our extra day after the workshops, we visited Moez [Chakchouk] at his Internet Agency and interviewed him for a few hours about the state of filtering in his country. He confirmed that they renewed their Smartfilter license until Sept 2012, and that they still filter “the groups that want it” (government and schools), but for technical reasons they have turned off the global filters (they broke and nobody has fixed them). We pointed out that since an external company operates their filters — including for their military — then that company not only has freedom to censor anything they want, but they also get to see every single request when deciding whether to censor it. Moez used the phrase “national sovereignty” when explaining why it isn't a great idea for Tunisia to outsource their filtering. Great point: it would be foolish to imagine that this external company isn't logging things for their own purposes, whether that's “improving their product” or something more sinister. As we keep seeing, collecting a large data set and then hoping to keep it secret never seems to work out.

One of the points Jake kept hammering on throughout the week was “if *anything* is being filtered, then you have to realize that they're surveilling *everything* in order to make those filtering decisions.” The Syrian logs help to drive the point home but it seems like a lot of people haven't really internalized it yet. We still find people thinking of Tor solely as an “anti-filter” tool and not considering the surveillance angle.

Tunisian activists attending the conference observed that whether Mr. Chakchouk will succeed in making ATI neutral and transparent or even keep his job, or whether the ATI will survive as an independent agency, will depend in no small part on the outcome of this weekend's elections and the continued political jockeying beyond.

Riadh Guerfali, co-founder of the citizen media platform Nawaat.org which played a key role in spreading protest information and who is now running as an independent candidate from his home town of Bizerte (and who features prominently in chapters 1 and 14 of the book), has made Internet access and online free expression a key goal, as have many other former activists who are now running for office. On the other hand, there are other candidates - on both the left and the right - calling for Internet censorship as part of an effort to attract more conservative religious voters. Who will prevail in the election remains to be seen… and how the constituent assembly will choose to handle the questions of censorship and civil liberties when they write the constitution is even less clear.

“Information infrastructure is politics,” writes Philip N. Howard of Washington State University in a recently published Brookings Institution report on authoritarian regimes and Internet controls. Tunisian politics over the coming year are likely to determine the shape of the country's information infrastructure - and decide just how different it will be from the past, or not. The shape of the infrastructure will in turn shape political discourse to the extent that it enables a full range of political viewpoints, debates, and even whistleblowing; or whether it enshrines censorship and surveillance mechanisms that can enable power-holders to subtly (or not so subtly) manipulate information and surveil Internet users.

Morocco: Militant Website Sustains DDoS Attack

Hisham Almiraat — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 12:09:21 +0000

The Moroccan militant website Mamfakinch! has come under a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Sunday 31 July, 2011, which blocked the access to its main platform for several hours. The website is now back online.

What is Mamfakinch! and why has it been attacked?

Mamfakinch!

In the wake of the Arab revolutions, a couple of Moroccan online activists launched a militant website on February 17, 2011. They called it Mamfakinch!, which in Moroccan Arabic means “We won't give up!”.

In the six months of its existence Mamfakinch! has attracted a record audience of over a million unique visitors across its two main outlets which comprise an online news portal and a blog. The site's goal, according to its members, is to provide a platform for free expression for opposition voices and pro-democracy activists.

Against the backdrop of the Arab revolutions, Mamfakinch! set about to aggregate, curate and disseminate citizen media material, emulating the work of similar outlets in the region, notably the celebrated Tunisian news portal Nawaat.org.

But as Mamfakinch! readers and supporters have grown in number, so too have its detractors. “The website has gained a lot of popularity in the Moroccan activist blogosphere but we had also attracted a lot of enemies. Attacks against the website have started very early on but they are becoming increasingly aggressive” says this site's co-manager who also explains that the platform is receiving regular threats and countless derogatory comments. [Please note: the Mamfakinch! representatives interviewed in this article wish to remain anonymous].

One video recently surfaced on the internet purporting to show an attack against Mamfakinch!. The site was quick to publish an article [Fr] in which it (very sarcastically) dismissed the alleged attack as “a miserable spoof”.

The Attack

This Sunday, while the website was securing the exclusive live coverage of the pro-democracy marches and demonstrations being held across the kingdom, access to its main portal was denied. The blockade lasted for several hours before the site again became accessible late in the evening.

According to the site administrators, Mamfakinch! came under a large-scale DDoS attack. “The attack seems to originate from thousands of dynamic IPs localted in Saudi Arabia (!)” says the website's webmaster. The site's server has, in the matter of a few hours, became overloaded with the amount of new automated IPs' requests.

“The site is now up and running and we have taken measures to insure that such attacks don't happen in the future… although no one can be absolutely sure” says this co-founder of the site who adds that his colleagues, “for obvious security reasons, prefer not to disclose details of the steps taken to secure access to the site.”

Like in Ben Ali's Tunisia

Before the revolution in Tunisia, Morocco was praised for the relative freedom enjoyed by its internet users. But the country is now seeing a surge in attacks against online dissidents, several of whom have had their Facebook or email accounts hacked into. Phishing techniques were probably used to harvest account passwords.

DDoS attacks, infiltration techniques and blockage of dissident domain names were common during the Ben Ali era in Tunisia. Those types of attacks are increasingly becoming commonplace in Morocco. The site of the irreverent magazine Demain Online has not yet recovered from an attack it suffered over a month ago. The website 20Fevrier.com, believed to be related to the pro-democracy movement in Morocco, also came under attack several weeks ago. It has been offline ever since.

“The more they attacks us, the more we learn!”

Paradoxically, in the Arab world, the most experienced activists usually come from the most repressive environments. After a long confrontation with their governments, Tunisian and Egyptian activists have become experts in circumvention tools. This expertise is now being transferred to other countries in the region where militants are learning each day as they struggle against attempts to censor their voices online.

This statement from a member of Mamfakinch! sums up the situation quite well: “The more they attack us, the more we learn! Let them come!”

MENA Journalists & Cyber Activists: In the Line of Fire

Guest Contributor — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 13:14:19 +0000

This is a guest blog entry from Dr Agnes Callamard, executive director at ARTICLE 19.

From Morocco to Bahrain, everyday people have taken on the cast iron hold of dictatorships and absolute monarchies resulting in an extraordinary collective awakening that has paved the way for epochal change in the region. The youth movement, which lies at the core of the uprisings, continues to play a prominent role in the pro-democracy and pro-reform demonstrations, which have swept through the region, unabated by government clampdowns or concessions.

To date, there have been revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, a civil war in Libya, major protests in Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Oman, Iran and Yemen and minor protests in Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Western Sahara. The protests have also triggered similar unrest outside the region, including in Azerbaijan. Fuelled by unemployment, restrictions on freedom of expression and government corruption, the protests proved to be the ultimate litmus test for government’s tolerance of freedom of assembly and freedom of expression, across the Middle East and North Africa.

The response from a number of governments has included indiscriminately firing on protesters - resulting in at least a thousand deaths and thousands of wounded - shutting down the internet and phone lines, the jamming of Al-Jazeera’s satellite and other international broadcasters, and further clamping down on press freedom whilst also offering concessions in some cases. A clear example of this dichotomy is currently unravelling in Syria, where the entire Syrian cabinet resigned as a concession to protesters on March 29 2011 but where security forces killed at least 25 pro-democracy protesters in Homs on April 17 2011.

The determination of the protesters across the region to keep the movement “peaceful,” and their success at doing so despite significant state violence has been commended by the international community. These men, women and children who have taken to the streets are part of an unprecedented movement that has built sufficient momentum over the past months to influence the current scope of events. How we, the international community, respond to this movement and support the transition process in post-revolutionary countries such as Tunisia and Egypt, will come to define our work in the region for years to come.

ARTICLE 19 urges Arab states to grasp this opportunity to begin a process of real democratisation, with the respect of freedom of expression at its core. The transition and reform processes require, and should be based on, freedom of expression and freedom of the press, transparency, and the ability of all, men and women, religious and other minorities and vulnerable groups, to speak out and participate equally and without fear in the reform process and the democratic running of their country. The stability of the region relies on such stewardship.

ARTICLE 19 is also calling on Arab governments to hold an independent and transparent investigation into the violations that have taken place over the last months, determine all responsibilities, including the line of command, and bring to justice those responsible. The right to know is a fundamental human right which takes on particular importance in situations, such as those in the Arab world, where people are disappeared, imprisoned, beaten and tortured, or worse still, killed in mysterious circumstances and secrecy.

Social Media, Grass Root Activism and the Arab Uprisings

As one Egyptian activist succinctly tweeted during the protests there, “we use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.“

Today, more than ever, access to electronic media, the ability to spread ideas online and the cyber activism that this enables have emerged as essential elements to popular movements for greater freedom and, perhaps more surprisingly, even essential to 21st Century revolutions. This is the human rights revelation of the extraordinary cascade of revolutions which are springing up across the region.

In Tunisia, grassroots and independent digital activists such as Nawaat and Tunileaks and bloggers including Fatma Riahi, all of whom the regime had tirelessly sought to repress, played a key role in disseminating information during the uprisings. While the protests that eventually led to the toppling of Ben Ali took root in the rural and marginalised heartlands of Tunisia - far from the national and international spotlight - coverage of the subsequent police brutality, sniper shootings, and wounded protesters in hospitals first came via posts on Facebook and Twitter, and in footage on Flickr and YouTube.

Journalists & Cyber Activists: In the Line of Fire

Although the ripple effects of the uprisings differ from country to country, the ongoing persecution of journalists and cyber activists remains a serious cause for concern for ARTICLE 19. Against this backdrop of continued unrest, a disturbing pattern of violence, harassment and intimidation against journalists, cyber activists and bloggers covering widespread civil unrest is emerging.

There have been widespread allegations of human rights violations and disappearances during the prodemocracy protests, and many journalists, human rights defenders, bloggers and cyber activists have been detained in a number of countries, including in Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria. Accusations of torture of protesters and journalists especially in Syria and Bahrain are beginning to emerge, as the scale of government clampdowns is emerging.

ARTICLE 19 calls for the immediate release of all imprisoned peaceful protesters and political prisoners, including journalists and bloggers that are being detained in the context of pro-democracy protests. In addition, the authorities should immediately investigate and disclose the fate and whereabouts all those who are missing, and immediately inform their families.

Libya

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has documented more than 80 attacks on the press since political unrest erupted in Libya last month. They include four fatalities: Ali Hassan Al Jaber, a Qatari cameraman working for Al-Jazeera, Mohamed Al-Nabous, a Libyan journalist and blogger and more recently, two photojournalists were killed - Vanity Fair’s Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, a US photojournalist working for Getty Images.

According to reports, there has been 49 detentions, 11 assaults, two attacks on news facilities, the jamming of Al-Jazeera and Al-Hurra transmissions, at least four instances of obstruction, the expulsion of two international journalists, and the interruption of Internet services. At least 18 journalists and media workers, including at least six Libyan journalists and nine foreign journalists are missing or in government custody.

The disappearance of foreign media workers started taking place shortly after the Libyan authorities asked journalists from different international news outlets to leave the country within 24 hours. The government has also decided not to issue new visas for journalists who wish to cover the unfolding conflict.

Amongst the scores of disappearance cases, ARTICLE 19 received reports from Benghazi that three journalist Hassan Zeitouni, an Algerian journalist, Majdi Hilal, Egyptian cameraman and Mohammad Al-Shoueihdi, 26-year-old Libyan cameraman from Benghazi went missing in Ajdabiya in the late afternoon of April 6 2011 when they drove out of town towards the frontline around al-Breiqa. The first news of their detention came on April 8 2011 at midnight, when Libyan national TV showed Zeitouni criticising Benghazi and praising Tripoli.

According to reports, there are good reasons to believe that he did so under pressure. Since then, Zeitouni has been released, but the whereabouts of Hilal and Al-Shoueihdi have yet to be established. The families of the disappeared journalists have not heard from either of them.

ARTICLE 19 is calling on Libyan authorities to immediately provide information on the whereabouts of all journalists detained or missing in Libya.

Egypt

In post-revolution Egypt, the freedom of expression situation in the country took a major blow when the Egyptian military introduced a new requirement requesting that local print media obtain approval for all mentions of the armed forces before publication. In a letter to editors dated March 22 2011, the director of the Morale Affairs Directorate of the Egyptian military, Maj. Gen. Ismail Mohamed Othman demanded that they do not “publish any (topics, news, statements, complaints, advertisements, pictures) pertaining to the Armed Forces or to commanders of the Armed Forces without first consulting with the Morale Affairs Directorate and the Directorate of Military Intelligence and Information Gathering, as they are the authorities specialized in reviewing such issues, [in an effort to] ensure the security and safety of the homeland.”

The first casualty of this law is Maikel Nabil, a blogger who campaigned against conscription and criticised the army's role during anti-government protests , and who was arrested on March 28 2011, after criticising the military in his blogs. According to reports, his blog posts and comments on social networking website Facebook were used as evidence against him in the trial.

ARTICLE 19 is calling on the Egyptian military authorities to remain true to the spirit of the revolution, to repeal the requirement requesting that local print media obtain approval for all mentions of the armed forces and to immediately release blogger Maike Nabil. ARTICLE 19 is concerned with the slow pace of reforms initiated, particularly with regard to the 30-year-old state of emergency which is still in place. ARTICLE 19 calls for all provisions of the Emergency Law to be repealed.

Syria

As the crackdown on human rights defenders, political activists, protesters and journalists reporting on anti-government protests continues across the country, cases of torture and ill treatment in detention are emerging. In Madaya, a suburb of Damascus, the capital, four seventeen-year-olds, were recently handcuffed and taken from their classrooms for spraying anti-government graffiti. This follows on from an incident last week which saw fifteen teenagers arrested for writing anti-government graffiti on walls in Daraa.

ARTICLE 19 has also received reports from family members of journalists who have been forcibly disappeared and whose whereabouts remain unknown, including the Alabiya.net reporter Mohamad Zaid Mastou. Zaid Mastou was arrested on April 6 2011 by Syrian authorities while he was in a cyber cafe in Damascus. According to eyewitness reports, Zaid Mastou was beaten by government authorities during his abduction before being taken off to an undisclosed location.

Zaid Mastou had returned to Syria few days before the outbreak of demonstrations in the last month and was covering the confrontations between security forces and protesters for Alabiya.net. His family have not received any news from him since his arrest. Despite numerous requests, government authorities have refused to provide his family with any information. The situation in the country remains critical: Over 350 individuals have allegedly been killed since the protests began, at least 120 since Friday alone. The security forces have shown no restraint, using live fire ammunition against unarmed protesters. The vast majority were killed for expressing their views in the context of peaceful protests

ARTICLE 19 is calling on the Syrian government to put an immediate stop to the heavy handed and violent crackdown on the protests and the protesters and resulting violations of key human rights, including the right to freedom of expression. In addition, ARTICLE 19 is also calling for an immediate independent investigation into the killings, use of torture and ill treatment, and other violations committed by government forces.

Bahrain

At least 30 people have been killed since anti-government protests by Bahrain's Shiite majority began in February. Hundreds have been detained in the crackdown on the rebellion. Last month, the Sunni-led state saw the worst sectarian clashes since the 1990s after mainly Shia protestors, emboldened by uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, took to the streets. As part of a crackdown on pro-democracy protestors in the Gulf Arab Kingdom, a human rights lawyer and at least two doctors have been detained, and there have been at least 4 reported cases of deaths in custody.

In addition, Zakariya Rashid Hassan al-Ashiri, a blogger who moderated and wrote for a website that covers news and other developments in his village of al-Dair, died under mysterious circumstances while in government custody on April 16 2011. He was charged with disseminating false news and inciting hatred, the BBC reported. Karim Fakhrawi, founder and board member of Al-Wasat, the country's premier independent daily, also died in custody under mysterious circumstances. The government has accused AlWasat of “deliberate news fabrication and falsification.” Since then, the government has announced it will file criminal charges against three of the paper's senior editors and has deported two other senior staffers.

Fakhrawi died on April 12 2011, a week after he was apparently taken into custody.

ARTICLE 19 is calling on the Bahraini government to put an immediate stop to the heavy handed and violent crackdown on the protests, and the violation of the right to freedom of expression, including the right of the press to report on the events. ARTICLE 19 calls on Bahraini authorities to conduct an independent and transparent investigation into the death in state custody of both Al-Ashiri and Fakhrawi, and into the killings, use of torture and ill treatment, and other violations committed by the Bahraini security forces.

NOTES TO EDITORS:

For more information please contact: Mona Samari, Senior Press Officer ARTICLE 19 + 44 207 324 2510 or email mona@article19.org
ARTICLE 19 is an independent human rights organisation that works around the world to protect and promote the right to freedom of expression. It takes its name from Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees free speech.

How Much Does Internet Access Matter?

Jillian York — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 13:43:40 +0000

Amidst the ongoing debate of the role of social media in revolutions across the Middle East and North Africa lies another question: To what degree does Internet access matter in determining the role of the Internet and social media in these revolts? In Egypt and Tunisia, many attribute an important role to online tools while others debate their worth; most observers fall somewhere in the middle, recognizing the value of the Internet but remaining realistic about its limitations.

On my own blog, I framed the question slightly differently, asking:

The normative question in relation to the Internet (mobile is obviously a different story) is, then, how much do basic indicators like Internet and mobile penetration affect the effectiveness of such tools for organizational or revolutionary purposes? Or, can a tiny group of Internet users influence a countrywide movement?

But in comparing the role of the Internet in Egypt (where most accounts* put Internet penetration between 20-25%) and Tunisia (which hovers closer to 35%) to the potential role of the Internet in other countries, one must take into consideration the access in that country. In Libya, for example, access to the Internet is only available to about 5% of the population. Statistics on individual social media sites are also important when analyzing their role in a protest movement. CNN has an excellent map of Facebook and Internet penetration in the Middle East and North Africa here.

This chart compares Internet and mobile penetration in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya

Blogger Andrew Trench recently presented a theory on the threshold of when Internet penetration starts to matter, writing:

Social networks have also been given plenty of credit for the revolution unfolding in Egypt.

So I went and had a look at the numbers over on www.internetworldstats.com to see what they could tell us about these two scenarios. Well, fascinatingly, both Egypt and Tunisia have seen a massive growth in internet users and internet penetration over the last 10 years.
Both have now got internet penetration of over 20% and in Tunisia's case it was as high as 34%.

While it is clearly simplistic to over-state this factor and there must be many more drivers contributing to such a rapid political uprising, it is obviously a factor as evidenced by the Egyptian regime pulling the plug on the country's internet access to try and block the rising tide of revolt.

My back-of-napkin theory is this: that a rapid increase in internet penetration in a repressive regime does play an important role as it provides an unfettered channel of communication allowing disaffected citizens to share views - and more importantly - to rapidly organise and mobilise.

If Egypt and Tunisia are valid case studies, it looks like internet penetration of around 20% is the mark.

Geopolitics & Macroeconomics adds:

Internet penetration: Social networking sites were critical to sustaining the momentum in the recent protests. The internet penetration in Egypt is 16%. In Libya, it is a meagre 5% [1]. The unrest in Libya has thus far remained concentrated in regions that are geographically distant from the seat of ‘real' power (see more on this below). The dependence of momentum on internet communication is far greater in Libya than in Egypt where protests began in Cairo itself.

Taking the conversation to Pakistan, Sabene Saigol writes, on BrandRepublic:

Perhaps one reason for this is that we're still not that used to communicating via the ‘net - maybe we need greater broadband and internet penetration. Personally I think it is more to do with culture - while Pakistani internet users are savvy to using social media to connect with friends, I feel they have not yet ‘crossed over' to seeing SM as a means for professional communications - or even wider social communications that go beyond their immediate circle. Yes, there are no doubt savvy people - both within marketing and tech circles, and outside - however, these people are likely a tiny proportion of the total number of ‘net and social media users.

One map compares the number of people at university to the number of people online

The role of mobile receives perhaps even less media attention than the role of other technologies. And yet, mobile penetration is higher across the region than Internet, with only Yemen, the occupied Palestinian territories, and Syria reporting fewer than 50% mobile subscribers. Several countries in the Middle East and North Africa, including Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the UAE, boasted mobile subscriber rates of over 100%. MobileActive has detailed mobile data by country.

Micah Sifry, writing for TechPresident, has also considered mobile, arguing:

The biggest factor in the unfolding events, to me, appears to be the emergent power of young people, compounded by how urbanized they are and how connected they are by mobile phones.

If you look at the available data on degree of internet penetration, number of mobile cellular subscriptions per 100 people, percentage of population under the age of 15 and degree of urbanization, what jumps out is how the last three factors seem to matter more.

Image from Micah Sifry; Sources: MobileActive.org, InternetWorldStats.com, GlobalHealthFacts.org

Sifry adds:

With the exception of Yemen, mobile coverage in the other five countries I've focused on–Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Jordan and Iran–hovers between 98% and 100%.

Finally, the pace of mobile phone penetration has exploded, far faster than internet penetration. With the exception of Jordan, which boasted a 23% mobile phone subscription rate in 2002, in the other five countries mobile ownership was in the single digits–just six percent in Egypt and Tunisia back then. That has skyrocketed in 2007 to 76% in Tunisia and 40% in Egypt, according to MobileActive.org.

Could it be that what we're witnessing is the political coming of age of Generation TXT?

*For those interested in learning more about Internet penetration globally, there are two main organizations which track such data: the International Telecommunications Union, and the World Bank. Their statistics sometimes differ. The website Internet World Stats aggregates their data, as well as the data from smaller or more localized institutions.

This article was originally posted on Global Voices.

Is the Tunisian internet censorship regime shutting down?

Ben Wagner — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 20:41:27 +0000

Following persistent widespread protests in Tunisia in recent days and the impending general strike tomorrow, Tunisian President Ben Ali held a speech on the state television chanel Tunisie7 this evening with a long list of highly unusual concessions. Among other points he announced that he will not seek presidency for life, a lowering of the prices of basic foodstuffs, that police and soldiers will stop using live ammunition, and that media and internet censorship will be halted.

Since this speech there have been multiple independent reports that previously blocked internet sites such as YouTube or the OpenNet Initiative are now accessible without receiving the typical ‘404 messages. Nevertheless further tests are required to ascertain whether the Tunisian regime follows through on Ben Ali's statements.

Of course, these ‘promises' do little to change the massive human rights violations that have taken place recently in Tunisia. Rather they are are a sign of the massive pressure the regime is currently under.

Several news organizations have started to pick up on the story:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12187084
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/news/article.aspx?feed=AP&date=20110113&id=12601387

Tunisia : Blogger, Global Voices contributor, Slim Amamou arrested today

Guest Contributor — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 23:11:30 +0000

This is a guest blog post written by Malek, from the Tunisian collective blog nawaat.org, and translated from French by Jillian C. York.

Slim Amamou

Activist and blogger Slim Amamou [and Global Voices Advocacy contributor] was arrested today, January 6, around 1pm. At this time, his friends and colleagues have no news from him, nor do we know the exact circumstances of his arrest. He had to go to work after completing a technical inspection of his vehicle. The latest news from Slim was a tweet around 1pm.

tweet: “404L fails the exam because of the light on the license plate. I am becoming a TV star.”

At 6pm, Slim Amamou revealed the position of his phone on the FourSquare social network, which allows its users to report their locations using geolocation. The position of Slim’s phone stated that he was at the premises of the Ministry of Interior on Avenue Habib Bourguiba as evidenced by this screenshot.

Slim Amamou warned friends that his home was being guarded by police since yesterday and that this morning, a police presence was noticed around the home of one of his friends. Several anonymous calls reached his workplace.

tweet: “There were cops around my house and a friend’s yesterday and this afternoon, they called the office this afternoon.”

Again, Slim Amamou is one of the best known Tunisian bloggers. He denounced last year a phishing operation of Tunisian email accounts. He was also among the initiators of “Operation Nhar 3ala 3ammar” and one of the organizers of the protest against censorship on the 22nd of May, 2010 in Tunis.

The day before that event, he was arrested with his co-signer Yassine Ayari and detained for more than 12 hours, at the end of which he was forced to record a video calling for the cancellation of the event

Tunisia: Censorship Continues as Wikileaks Cables Make the Rounds

Lina Ben Mhenni — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:46:08 +0000

Tunisian activists pounced on the latest Wikileaks US Embassy Cables, dedicating a new website to republish and discuss the revelations related to their country. Tunileaks, was launched by Nawaat one hour after the whistle-blowing site unleashed the cables on Sunday, November 28th.

The first release contained 17 cables issued from the US Embassy in Tunisia. The majority of these cables show the exchanges between the embassy and the US State Department. The classified documents were transmitted between May 28th, 2008, and February 9th, 2010. Two of the documents were written by the present Ambassador Gordon Gray whereas the remaining 15 were by his predecessor.

They mainly dealt with the neglect of human rights in Tunisia and the restrictions on freedom of expression. On Twitter, the hashtag #tunileaks was created. There, people shared different secrets revealed by the site.

The Tunisian government, known for its restriction on freedom of expression, rapidly blocked the access to Tunileaks. They first blocked http://tunileaks.appspot.com/ (without the https). One day later, they blocked Google App Engine's IP address (209.85.229.141) in order to block Tunileaks under https, making appspot.com partially unavailable in the country.

Even the electronic version of the Lebanese newspaper ‘Al akhbar' has been censored in Tunisia after the publication of some cables released by Tunileaks.

Will more of the Tunisian cyberspace become restricted as more cables and secrets are revealed and published?

A First glimpse at the Internet Filtering in Tunisia

Sami Ben Gharbia — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:43:32 +0000

We learned that the censorship imposed illegally on hundreds of Tunisian blogs and websites, both Tunisians and foreigners, was “shut off” temporarily for few hours on Monday, August 16, 2010. And although the information on this brief lifting of the censorship in the country is still contradictory - as some claimed they had no access to certain websites, while to others the same websites were accessible- it is still early to determine what really happened at the top level of Tunisian censorship, which is, remember, dark, top-secret, centralized at the highest level of the state and is never in the control of the several Tunisian ISPs, though, with an excess of zeal, they have the ability to add an extra layer of censorship to their customers.

Thus, we learned that access to Flickr, the photo sharing site (censored April 22, 2010) and video-sharing sites, blip.tv and wat.tv (respectively censored on the 22nd and 28th of April, 2010), has been restored. Ditto for many French and Arabic news websites. Curiously, during this same period, which lasted only a few hours, access to the two popular video-sharing websites, Dailymotion and Youtube (respectively censored September 3, 2007 and November 2, 2007) has not been restored. Something that raises some questions - but mostl importantly, provides some answers - about the nature of Tunisia’s secretive censorship infrastructure.

During this period, which lasted only a few hours, prompting hope amongst Internet users in Tunisia, many have raised the question of why YouTube and Dailymotion have remained inaccessible while other social websites like Flickr, became available from Tunisia. Why was the French Wikipedia page of Ben Ali inaccessible while the websites of Tunisian opposition parties, now censored, became available? Why was the blog Nawaat accessible while Nawaat’s Twitter page remained barred?

To understand what really happened, and then ascertain if any change in strategy at the organ level of censorship occurred, it is useful to clarify first the filtering techniques applied in Tunisia.

We will summarize the four Tunisian censorship processes. These four techniques have been adopted by the Tunisian censors at various times in the history of Tunisian Net, then gradually combined to form one of the most repressive online censorship machine.

Selective blocking by URL: such as is the case of Wikipedia. Indeed, rather than blocking the entire online encyclopedia, the censors selectively block the most “offensive” pages. This is why the French Wikipedia page on Ben Ali or the page relating to the practice of censorship in Tunisia remain inaccessible. Same for the Google video. If the majority of videos are still available, some, however, are blocked.
DNS Filtering: At the second stop, the Tunisian censors block the site by banning the domain and subdomain attached to it. This is the method most commonly used, especially to ban Tunisian bloggers emitting unpleasant opinions […] A situation that caused a cat-and-mouse game between bloggers and the censor through the successive creation of new sub-domains, which soon subsequently, are added the the block list.
IP Filtering: With the step above, the total blockage of the IP address of the site in question, whether or not the subdomain is used; this is the case of youtube.com, dailymotion.com and many others.
Keyword Filtering: Finally, we practice, for the most recalcitrant, a radical blocking through both, DNS and Keyword Filtering that block access to any URL path containing a specific keyword. This is the case with Tunisnews.net or Nawaat.org. With the latter procedure, any URL containing the string “Nawaat”, regardless of the domain, is systematically blocked. With this technique, the censors are trying to block every scrap of information on the keyword level that could appear on the screen of Tunisian Internet users.
The Keyword Filtering when applied for example on the “Nawaat” string in any URLs results in a 404 page. Which practically means that @nawaat Twitter account is automatically blocked, as is the Nawaat Facebook account and all Google cache and search result pages that contain “nawaat” in their URL paths. […] In addition, the keyword in the URL blocks any image related to “Nawaat“, including those hosted on Google’s image search servers. Similarly, the string “Tunisnews” produces the same effects. Note that Keyword Filtering can be applied to block any content containing that specific string on any domain or subdomain.

So, in order to answer the questions raised above, let's now recall the following facts that occurred during that brief lifting of the censorship in Tunisia, on monday, August 16th, 2010:

All sites censored by DNS filtering, including Flickr, were temporarily unblocked.
Both video-sharing websites, YouTube and Dailymotion, which are blocked in Tunisia by DNS and IP filtering, were not unblocked.
Ben Ali's page on Wikipedia, which is censored by selective URL filtering, has not been unblocked.
Nawaat’s page on Twitter, which is subjected to a keyword Filtering, was also not available during the brief “lifting” of censorship.

This very revealing incident of the brief lifting of censorship has offered us, and for the first time, some insights about the extraordinary sophistication of the technical infrastructure of filtering in Tunisia. Thus, if the temporary “lifting” was a matter of a maintenance procedure, this leads us to note that there are at least two independent sub-facilities: one dedicated to DNS level filtering, and the second dedicated to keywords and IP filtering (and perhaps there is a third layer specially dedicated to the IP filtering). Thus, if a layer of these filters fails or is deactivated for some reason, such as maintenance or a server update, the independent secon–and possibly third–layers continue to operate.

Consequently, we can assume that this latest incident, the temporary “lifting” of censorship, has affected only one layer of the Tunisian censorship machine, the one responsible for the DNS filtering. This is what was observed on Monday. If we take the example of Nawaat (one of the few Tunisian sites censored by DNS and keyword filtering), we discovered that the DNS filtering was not working during that period, but during the same time, the keyword filtering within the URL was functioning efficiently. Thus, during this brief “lifting” of censorship, nawaat.org was accessible at the domain name level, but any URLs carrying the string “nawaat” were blocked (see below screenshots of the test on nawaat.org from Tunisia):

Click to enlarge

Now the other question that may arise, and that is important, is to know why the DNS filtering system stopped working for several hours while the other one or two layer(s) continued to ban “normally” all sites covered by IP, URL and keywords filtering?

It is possible that the Tunisian censors are currently improving their control over the network infrastructure for a better monitoring of “sensitive” topics, or even a more rigorous analysis of data packets traveling between the Tunisian network and the international one. A sophistication of the infrastructure could be very useful for mass logging and control of the online activities of users in Tunisia. With over one million and a half Tunisians on Facebook, hundreds of blogs (which are increasingly critical), more than a hundred of which are already censored, and a rather politicized stream of Tunisians on Twitter and other social web sites, the Tunisian regime has no choice but to increase its control over the network through a sophistication à la chinoise of its filtering and tracing infrastructure. Still, if there was an update of the infrastructure, such as another notch of sophistication, do not hesitate to all be vigilant and attentive to the processes used.

It is also probable that this was a “simple” update server; and rather than unblocking all of the traffic, the censor has maintained a layer or layers of URL, keywords and IP filtering while unblocking the other layer, that of DNS blocking. Once the update or change to the server made, everything was back to “normal”.

Other extrapolations, such as the Forum on Democracy and Trade Union Policy, could explain the temporary lifting of censorship:

It seems that international delegation is visiting our country to discuss freedom of the press and the veracity of allegations of civil society activists on Internet censorship …. we therefore expect that the lifting of censorship is temporary just long enough to fool the delegation mentioned above.

It is indeed possible, but unlikely for the following reason: in some circumstances, the Tunisian censors have unblocked sites to fool the international community. This happened during the WSIS and in certain international events in Tunisia. But each time, this was limited to certain sites such as those of political parties currently censored. Thus, the temporary lifting has never been as systematic as we experienced on monday, but rather on a site by site basis. In any event, during the interlude of “freedom”, neither the blog Nawaat nor Tunisnews have escaped the vile censorship filters.

Obviously all of these assumptions are mere speculations. This is an effort on our part to try to better understand one of the most secretive system of repression in Tunisia and to help demystify its processes. And obviously, we invite anyone with further information to make them public, and a fortiori, it may be that former collaborators of this repressive system finally reveal what can help Tunisia to get rid of this evil.

It is only a matter of time and, sooner or later, revelations, from those who are now involved in the censorship taking place, will occur. Also, remember our email Nawaat [@] gmail [dot] com. Our site is always open to any collaborator. It goes without saying that these collaborators have the absolute assurance about the confidentiality of their identity.

Written jointly by Sami Ben Gharbia and Astrubal. Translated from french by Jillian C. York .