Slim Amamou

Legislation for Internet security can quickly turn into a weapon against the free press. Cybercrime laws are intended to extend existing penal codes to the online world, but they can easily be broadened to criminalize standard journalistic practices. By Danny O'Brien

So much has happened in Tunisia since I last blogged on the large-scale phishing attacks against activists and journalists in the country. With the fall of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and a new interim government in place, online censorship seems to be ending. Opposition media and human rights sites are viewable, and CPJ's Tunisia reports are now available in the country (although it was always possible to access them through our https service). Social networking sites such as Facebook are available without the password-stealing code of the previous cybersecurity regime. I've yet to hear of any site that remains blocked, although Tunisia's filtering system was so byzantine, it's hard to conclusively tell whether it has been completely shut down.