Government Control
Media Censorship: Vietnam Journalist Held For ‘Graft’
Vietnamese authorities have arrested a journalist who wrote a series of exposes on corruption for allegedly bribing a traffic cop, according to a state media report. The official Thanh Nien newspaper said Hoang Khuong, 37, whose real name is Nguyen Van Khuong and who writes for the Tuoi Tre newspaper, was detained on Monday. He [...]
Censorship: 2011 in Review – Internet Freedom in the Wake of the Arab Spring
| By Jillian C. York | Sourced from EFF.org (Creative Commons License) | As the year draws to a close, EFF is looking back at the major trends influencing digital rights in 2011 and discussing where we are in the fight for a free expression, innovation, fair use, and privacy. For several years, discussions about global Internet [...]
Political Censorship: China Faces Ongoing Tension in Restive Xinjiang
Members of the Uyghur ethnic minority walk past a Muslim mosque near the Erduoqiao neighborhood in Urumqi in northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. China’s far northwestern Xinjiang region is settled primarily by the Muslim Uighurs who have long chafed under Chinese rule. In recent years, there have been episodes of violence between locals and [...]
Censorship in America: ‘Word on Street’ Impacted Language in 2011
Global grassroots movements coin new words, phrases. Occupy Wall Street protesters at Three World Financial Center in New York. While 2011 is over, some of the words that came to define the past year are still very much with us, and may be for years to come. Occupy Grant Barrett, vice president of the American [...]
Tunisia: Censorship and Freedom of Speech in the Year That Was
| Written by Afef Abrougui | Sourced from Global Voices (Creative Commons) | Former Tunisian President Zeine El Abidine Ben Ali was an enemy to freedom of speech. With its heavy tactics, his regime attempted to silence all dissidents. The Tunisian Internet Agency (known as the ATI from its French acronym) spent significant resources on [...]
Media Censorship: Unrest Spreads In Southern China
Residents protest a power plant they say is polluting their village in China’s Guangdong province. Thousands of angry residents surrounded government buildings and blocked roads in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong on Tuesday in protest at a coal-fired power plant they say is polluting the environment, officials and protesters said. Police clashed with large [...]
Internet Censorship: Chinese Netizens Jailed for Wedding Video
Chinese authorities move quickly to discourage ‘negative’ postings online. Two men who posted a video of columns of police they said were a guard of honor at a wedding party in the central province of Hunan have been sentenced to five days’ administrative detention for using the Internet to spread rumors and “disturb public order.” [...]
Internet Censorship: Lamar Smith Still Thinks It’s Just Google That Opposes SOPA / PIPA
| By Mike Masnick | Sourced from TechDirt| It’s really quite stunning to watch Lamar Smith pull out really out-dated talking points as he gets more and more desperate to defend SOPA, as he discovers that all the vaunted “support” that the US Chamber of Commerce promised him there was for the bill melts away. [...]
Free Speech: Mass Anti-Government Rallies Spike Across Syria
Large crowds of anti-government protesters poured into the streets of many Syrian towns and cities Friday, heeding calls by opposition leaders to make a show of strength, as Arab League observers pursue their mission. Government forces fired on protesters causing a number of casualties. Tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered in the northern Syrian [...]
Internet Censorship: State of the Arms Race Between Repressive Governments and Anti-Censorship Tor Technology
| Sourced from boingboing (Creative Commons) | By Cory Doctorow | Wednesday night’s Chaos Computer Congress (28C3) presentation from Jacob Applebaum and Roger Dingledine on the state of the arms race between the Tor anti-censorship/surveillance technology and the world’s repressive governments was by turns depressing and inspiring. Dingledine and Applebaum have unique insights into the workings [...]
Internet Censorship: Meet Telecomix, The Hackers Bent On Exposing Those Who Censor And Surveil The Internet
| By Andy Greenberg, Forbes Staff | Read the full article on Forbes | One morning in mid-August, seven months into the Arab Spring protests and government crackdowns in which thousands have been killed, something strange happened on Syria’s Internet. As users aimed their Web browsers at Google and Facebook, they instead saw a page [...]
Internet Censorship: Turkey Blocks Web Pages Touting Darwin’s Evolution Theory
The blocking by Turkish state authorities of Web pages advocating the theory of evolution has put the focus on wider concerns by teachers and academics that the ideas of Darwin increasingly are being undermined by the Islamic-rooted government. Numerous web pages advocating the theory of evolution recently were deemed unsafe for children by Turkey’s regulatory [...]
