Sami ben Gharbia, the advocacy director for Global Voices, asks that Washington cease its largely counter-productive campaign to assist dissidents around the world. Image problem, anybody? Many people outside of the U.S, not only in the Arab world, have a strong feeling that the Internet Freedom mantra emitting from Washington DC is just a cover…
Showing all posts tagged censorship
There’s no truly safe way to surf the web in the Islamic Republic
For anybody who writes about web censorship and finding ways around it, the lesson in this story is that skepticism towards new-found tools is vital. We’ve all been guilty of celebrating prematurely a piece of software that may help a dissident in Iran or China. Beware: A piece of software called Haystack, which claimed to…
Now why would China want to work with the US on net censorship?
Is this our web future? A Chinese writer calls for a global coalition to fight material that powerful interests don’t like, such as the recent Wikileaks revelations about the failed Afghan war.
Obama and Bush should dine together and share ideas about torture
The similarity between Barack Obama and George W. Bush in their prosecution of the “war on terror” is increasingly clear. Just in case it isn’t obvious how deep this illegality goes, here’s Michael Hayden, Mr. Bush’s last CIA director, talking to the Washington Times: You’ve got state secrets, targeted killings, indefinite detention, renditions, the opposition…
Get ready for the Ahmadinejad Google
Foreign Policy’s Evgeny Morozov explores the possibility of an Iranian search engine and the “growing politicization of the internet in general and of search space in particular.”
Nokia and their mates in Tehran
In my book The Blogging Revolution I examined the role of Western web multinationals in assisting repressive regimes censoring information. This latest story should therefore not come as a shock but how many Westerners realise that their mobile phone company is backing a dictatorship? A jailed Iranian journalist is suing phone company Nokia on the…
“Gaffes” by IDF soldiers
Rupert Murdoch’s news.com.au publishes this AP story that is surely designed to make the reader feel sorry for the Israeli state; they just can’t keep “secrets” secret anymore. The poor dears. What on earth should soldiers occupying the Palestinians do with their spare time? The security obsessed Israeli military is confronting a new adversary –…
Wikileaks needs all the defenders it can get
Following the controversy over the recent Wikileaks information dump, Reporters Without Borders attempts to get out of a hole created by itself: There has been a great deal of controversy about the Wikileaks website’s decision to post thousands of leaked reports that include the names of Afghan civilians who have collaborated with the international military…
Will the real please Hoder please stand up?
I’ve long followed the case of famous Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan – even meeting him at a conference in Budapest in 2008 – but this latest news adds yet more layers of mystery to a man with a confused past, tough present and uncertain future: Hossein Derakhshan, the Iranian Canadian who helped launch a blogging…
A little Wikileaks backlash (but missing the real target)
So it begins. The Pentagon warns Wikileaks not to release any more information, as the group is now threatening. Not something to be taken seriously, considering the source. Then there’s Reporters Without Borders issuing an open letter to Julian Asssange asking him to be far more careful in the future when releasing information and not…