Middle East & North Africa

New York, November 2, 2010--The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the Iraqi authorities' decision to close down Al-Baghdadia TV offices in Iraq. The closure of the Cairo-based satellite channel was announced after it broadcast the demands of gunmen who attacked a church in Baghdad on Sunday. Fifty-eight people were killed during the siege, according to news reports.

There's been a great deal of coverage in the last day or so of Firesheep, a plugin for Firefox that lets you take over the Facebook and Twitter accounts of others on your local network. If you use Firesheep, you can pick one of the people on, say, the same open wireless at your nearby cafe, and then easily view, delete, and add comments using their name on these sites.

New York, October 21, 2010--The Committee to Protect Journalists is gravely concerned about the health of imprisoned Tunisian journalist Fahem Boukadous. We call upon the Tunisian government to release him immediately.

• CPJ protested the arrest of Bahrain blogger Ali Abdel Imam back in September -- The Wall Street Journal has a story on his continuing detainment.
• Activism around the imprisonment of Canadian-Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan continues: PEN Canada is  focusing on his case and Canada and France's foreign ministers have urged his release.
• Local Thai ISPs are being called in by the government to help block the country's rapidly expanding website blacklist. The authorities want them to respond 24/7 to censorship requests.
• The Journal of Democracy has published Ron Deibert and Rafai Rohozinski's overview of the pros and cons of new technology in authoritarian societies. It's available here in PDF format.
• The New York Times has more info on US law enforcement's request to broaden its Internet interception powers.
• Jared Cohen, the US State Department's advocate for high-tech diplomacy, has moved to Google. Foreign Policy interviews him on his new job.

• Omid Memarian gives insight into the Iranian hardliner in-fighting that led to "blogfather" Hossein Derakhshan's arrest and sentencing.
• Pakistan blocks Facebook, but doesn't block militant jihadi sites.
• What happened when the authorities shut down the Internet in China's Xinjiang province.
• "Deleted" Facebook photos can stay available for years (from the excellent Ars Technica, now banned in Iran).
• Quote of the week, courtesy of Index on Censorship's Free Speech Blog. When asked about Egypt's new pre-election restrictions on mass SMS messaging, government adviser Mahmoud el-Gweini told reporters "We are not making life difficult. We are making life organized, that is all."

Access, a global Internet freedom advocacy group, has launched a "No To Nokia" petition as part of a campaign supporting Iranian journalist Issa Saharkiz's lawsuit against Nokia Siemens. The Saharkiz lawsuit claims that Nokia Siemen's sales of mobile tracking technology to Iran was instrumental in allowing the Iranian government to locate the journalist when he went into hiding, and led to his subsequent "inhuman and degrading treatment" in prison. Access' petition demands that Nokia and the countries of the E.U. and U.S. "completely end all sales, support, and service of tracking and surveillance technology to governments with a record of human rights abuses. "

The Saharkiz case is being pursued through the U.S. court system using that country's Alien Torts Act, a statute from 1789 that lets American courts hear human rights cases brought by foreign citizens for conduct outside the United States. It's not the first time this 18th-century law has been used to address 21st-century press freedom issues. The mother of Shi Tao, the Chinese journalist arrested after information taken from his Yahoo! email account was passed onto the Chinese authorites, sued the American search engine under the same law in 2007. Yahoo! eventually settled that case.

Saharkiz is currently serving a three year sentence for "insulting the Supreme Leader" and "propagating against the regime". In May, Saharkhiz was transferred to a prison in Rajaee Shahr, near Karaj, according to the reformist news website Kalame, where he reportedly suffered a heart attack. CPJ has been unable to determine his current state of health.

(Image: Isa Saharkhiz, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from sabzphoto's photostream)

New York, October 12, 2010--The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Iranian authorities to immediately disclose the names of two Germans who were arrested on Sunday and described as journalists in several news reports. CPJ also asked Iranian officials to clarify the circumstances surrounding the arrests of the two individuals and to state what, if any, charges were filed against them.

New York, October 7, 2010--The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the deterioration of press freedoms in Egypt ahead of November's parliamentary elections and next year's presidential vote. In particular, CPJ is concerned over the firing on Tuesday of Ibrahim Eissa, the editor-in-chief and founder of the independent daily Al-Dustour.

The World Association of Newspapers on Wednesday honored the jailed Iranian journalist, Ahmad Zaid-Abadi with its Golden Pen of Freedom Award in the German city of Hamburg. Zaid-Abadi, right, was sentenced in 2009 to six years in prison, five years of internal exile, and a lifetime ban on working as a journalist. He is behind bars in Tehran's Evin Prison where, he told Xavier Vidal-Folch, president of World Editor's Forum, "the desperation that jailers create is such that you are convinced it's the end of the world."