As autocratic regimes, hackers, trouble-makers and fools aim to bring down websites that challenge authoritarian rule, such spaces need to be nurtured and protected. Reporters Without Borders on an important project: Filtering, denial of service attacks, withdrawal of content – censors use many different methods to silence news websites. In addition to drawing attention to…
Showing all posts tagged internet
Anyone can make a revolution (but the web won’t be enough)
Last last year I was invited to chair a panel at the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas called, “Anyone Can Make A Revolution”. It was an attempt to understand the reality of the Arab revolutions and the influence (or not) of the internet: In Egypt and Tunisia we have seen ordinary people come…
Who is truly investigating Wikileaks (and why we have the right to know)
Because we need to put a serious check on out of control executive and corporate power (via the New York Times): This much is known: In its hunt for information about three people it believes to be associated with the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks, the Justice Department has sought to extract details about them and their…
What the internet can (and cannot) do to hasten revolutions
My book The Blogging Revolution was recently released in India in an updated edition.… Here’s a pretty good review of it by J Jagannath in a leading Indian newspaper, Business Standard: The little spark that the Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi ignited in December 2010 to torch himself in retaliation against corruption has engulfed the…
Big Brother shouldn’t be listening but he does 24/7
When this kind of information circulates around the world… Freedom of speech might allow journalists to get away with a lot in America, but the Department of Homeland Security is on the ready to make sure that the government is keeping dibs on who is saying what. Under the National Operations Center (NOC)’s Media Monitoring…
Iran takes a path towards internet isolation
Sigh (via the Guardian): Iran… is clamping down heavily on web users before parliamentary elections in March with draconian rules on cybercafes and preparations to launch a national… internet. Tests for a countrywide network aimed at substituting services run through the world wide web have been carried out by Iran’s ministry of information and communication technology, according…
#Occupy, Arab Spring and uprisings are here to stay
2011 was a year unlike many others. Change was in the air. Revolutions, protests and demands for equality. In the West. In the East. In the Arab world. It’s something I examine in the updated edition of my book The Blogging Revolution (recently released in India). A new book by Paul Mason, Why It’s Kicking…
First they came for the Tweeters
There are growing signs of collusion between the Zionist lobby, fundamentalists who want the government to tell us what to hear and see and politicians such as Joe Lieberman who never saw a war against Muslims they didn’t like. Now this. It must be resisted: Twitter has been threatened with legal action by an Israeli…