Footnote: could happen almost anywhere. Even here in NL such a law could pass on the virtue of balancing safety and order with basic human rights in a fair manner.
Footnote2: censorship being possible and even easy makes censorship happen. Defend or die must be part of the tech warrior's creed (sharing Mutual Equal Assured Destruction is a potential exception). I suppose Belarus works differently for things to pass so fast and so clearly in violation of international human rights laws. Good luck out there. On Dec 21, 2014 12:26 PM, "Anton Nesterov" <[email protected]> wrote: > Today President of Belarus signed a law which provides heavy regulation > to freedom of speech. Basically, it makes any website media and forbids > "information aimed at the propaganda of the war, extremist activities, > or the calls for such activities, pornography, violence, cruelty, and > any other informations which distribution can harm national interest of > the Republic of Belarus, or forbidden by this law, or by any other > legislative act of the Republic of Belarus". It also force owners of > websites to moderate user-generated content. Any website which violate > this will be blocked. Also the law forbids any media with more than 20% > of foreign investors. > > The law was passed really fast, only on 17st it came info parliament, > and today, 21st, it's already signed by president. Nobody ever heard > that such law are coming, even in the rumors. > > The law will came into force on 1st January. > > Yesterday domain name onliner.by, which hosted Belarusian media portal, > was seized. They moved to onliner.ru. > > Media portal 21.by was also blocked. > > Two days ago some media was blocked, including charter97.org (they was > already blocked for years for some users), belaruspartisan.org, > gazetaby.com, zautra.by, udf.by, naviny.by, belapan.com, belapan.by. > > Minister of Information Liliya Ananich asked media to use only official > sources and write articles in the national interest of the country. > > Besides media censorship, there is some financial problems because of > Russian financial crisis. So the govt blocked 13 online markets which > posted prices in US dollars, also 3 websites (deal.by, migom.by, > kufar.by) was warned as they had ads on goods with price in $. > > prokopovi.ch, p2p currency exchange, was also blocked. > > http://www.pravo.by/main.aspx?guid=12551&p0=H11400213&p1=1 — text of the > law (Russian) > http://www.belaruspartisan.org/politic/289548/ (Russian) > http://belapan.by/archive/2014/12/21/748603/ (Russian) > http://www.belaruspartisan.org/politic/289548/ (Russian) > http://www.belaruspartisan.org/politic/290031/ (Russian) > > -- > https://nesterov.pw > GPG key: 0CE8 65F1 9043 2B11 25A5 74A7 1187 6869 67AA 56E4 > https://keybase.io/komachi/key.asc > >
