Incase you are not on the list peruse through in your free time :-) .
Sorry if you already got it.
R
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PGP Fingerprint: 6695 794A B84E D922 88FB 73CC 6CBD 8036 B3CD 7304
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
--Isaac Newton
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--- Begin Message ---
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fra: rsf.Internet [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sendt: 2. maj 2006 15:20
Til: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Emne: Internet annual report
English
May 2nd 2006
Annual report : everyone's interested in the Internet - especially dictators
The Internet has revolutionised the world's media. Personal websites,
blogs and discussion groups have given a voice to men and women who were
once only passive consumers of information. It has made many newspaper
readers and TV viewers into fairly successful amateur journalists.
Dictators would seem powerless faced with this explosion of online
material. How could they monitor the e-mails of China's 130 million users
or censor the messages posted by Iran's 70,000 bloggers? The enemies of
the Internet have unfortunately shown their determination and skill in
doing just that.
China was the first repressive country to realise that the Internet was an
extraordinary tool of free expression and quickly assembled the money and
personnel to spy on e-mail and censor "subversive" websites. The regime
soon showed that the Internet, like traditional media, could be
controlled. All that was needed was the right technology and to crack
down on the first "cyber-dissidents."
The Chinese model has been a great success and the regime has managed to
dissuade Internet users from openly mentioning political topics and when
they do to just recycle the official line. But in the past two years, the
priority of just monitoring online political dissidence has given way to
efforts to cope with unrest among the population.
The Internet has become a sounding-board for the rumblings of discontent
in most Chinese provinces. Demonstrations and corruption scandals, once
confined to a few cities, have spread across the country with the help of
the Internet. In 2005, the government sought to counter the surge in
cyber-dissidence. It beefed up the law and drafted what might be called
"the ten commandments" for Chinese Internet users - a set of very harsh
rules targeting online editors. The regime is both efficient and
inventive in spying on and censuring the Internet. Other government have
unfortunately imitated it.
The Internet's jailers
Traditional "predators of press freedom" - Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Iran,
Libya, the Maldives, Nepal, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia,
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam - all censor the Internet now. In
2003, only China, Vietnam and the Maldives had imprisoned
cyber-dissidents. Now more countries do.
A score of bloggers and online journalists have been thrown in jail in
Iran since September 2004 and one of them, Mojtaba Saminejad, has been
there since February 2005 for posting material deemed offensive to Islam.
In Libya, former bookseller Abdel Razak al-Mansouri was sentenced to 18
months in prison for making fun of President Muammer Gaddafi online. Two
Internet users have been jailed and tortured in Syria, one for posting
photos online of a pro-Kurdish demonstration in Damascus and the other for
simply passing on an e-mailed newsletter the regime considers illegal.
A lawyer has been in jail in Tunisia since March 2005 for criticising
official corruption in an online newsletter. While a UN conference was
held in Tunis in November 2005 to discuss the future of the Internet, this
human rights activist was in a prison cell several hundred kilometres from
his family. A grim message to the world's Internet users.
Censorship of the Web is also growing and is now done on every continent.
In Cuba, where you need permission from the ruling party to buy a
computer, all websites not approved by the regime are filtered.
The situation has worsened in the Middle East and North Africa. In
November 2005, Morocco began censoring all political websites advocating
Western Sahara's independence. Iran expands its list of banned sites each
year and it now includes all publications mentioning women's rights.
China can now automatically censor blog messages, blanking out words such
as "democracy" and "human rights."
Some Asian countries seem about to go further than their Chinese "big
brother." Burma has acquired sophisticated technology to filter the
Internet and the country's cybercafés spy on customers by automatically
recording what is on the screen every five minutes.
Complicity of Western firms
How did all these countries become so expert at doing this? Did Burma and
Tunisia develop their own software? No. They bought the technology from
foreign, mostly American firms. Secure Computing, for example, sold
Tunisia a programme to censor the Internet, including the Reporters
Without Borders website.
Another US firm, Cisco Systems, created China's Internet infrastructure
and sold the country special equipment for the police to use. The ethical
lapses of Internet companies were exposed when the US firm Yahoo! was
accused in September 2005 of supplying the Chinese police with information
used to sentence cyber-dissident Shi Tao to 10 years in prison.
China is now passing on its cyber-spying skills to other enemies of the
Internet, including Zimbabwe, Cuba, and most recently Belarus. These
countries will probably no longer need Western help for such spying in a
few years time.
Democratic governments, not just the private sector, share responsibility
for the future of the Internet. But far from showing the way, many
countries that usually respect online freedom, now seem to want to unduly
control it. They often have laudable reasons, such as fighting terrorism,
child sex and cyber-crime, but this control also threatens freedom of
expression.
Without making any comparison with the harsh restrictions in China, the
Internet rules recently adopted by the European Union are very disturbing.
One of them, requiring Internet service providers (ISPs) to retain
records of customers' online activity, is presently being considered in
Brussels and seriously undermines Internet users' right to online privacy.
The United States is also far from being a model in regulation of the
Internet. The authorities are sending an ambiguous message to the
international community by making it easier to legally intercept online
traffic and by filtering the Internet in public libraries.
_______________________________________
--
Julien Pain
Bureau Internet et libertés / Internet Freedom desk
___________________________________________
Reporters sans frontières / Reporters Without Borders
TEL: ++ 33 (0) 1 44 83 84 71
FAX: ++ 33 (0) 1 45 23 11 51
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.internet.rsf.org
Read our handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents :
http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=542
Consultez notre guide du blogger et du cyberdissident :
http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=527
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