In France, is Sarkozy spying on journalists?
Every Wednesday morning in France, rain or shine, half a million people eagerly wait for the satirical weekly, Le Canard Enchainé. Some wait for it nervously. The old-fashioned broadsheet, a venerable media institution that has no real equivalent in other European countries, posts its motto defiantly on its front page: “Freedom of the press wears…
Russian reporters beaten; both covered highway project
New York, November 8, 2010–The Committee to Protect Journalists denounces two attacks on journalists in the Moscow region and calls on authorities to end impunity in crimes against reporters in Russia. Both victims, Oleg Kashin of the business daily Kommersant and Anatoly Adamchuk of the independent weekly Zhukovskiye Vesti, have covered a contentious highway project…
CPJ condemns attack on Kommersant reporter
New York, November 6, 2010–The Russian government must act immediately to arrest the assailants responsible for a brutal attack today on a reporter for the Moscow daily Kommersant. The brazen assault, which left Oleg Kashin, left, so badly injured he was placed in an induced coma, is a product in part of the government’s failure to…
Internet Blotter
Turkey lifted its ban on YouTube and then re-asserted it within the same week. Digital technology is helping get news out of North Korea. Small digital cameras and tiny SD memory cards make it easier to smuggle images out. In China, meanwhile, Amazon’s Kindle 3G e-reader is reportedly being used to get the news in.…
Internet Blotter
A powerful advocate for press and Internet freedom, Persephone Miel sadly passed away in June. The Pulitzer Center, in partnership with Internews, has launched a memorial fellowship in her name. How the Great Firewall of China breaks the global Internet: stories of Chinese re-routing and censorship affecting services in Chile, the US, and even the…
Protecting journalists from Firesheep
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…
Internet blotter
Computers belonging to South Korean government officials have been infiltrated by targeted malware in email. Chinese hackers are suspected. Contrary to what this article says, I’m betting that the attachments were PDFs, which are currently the document of choice when attempting to infect journalists’ machines. Another intriguing academic paper, this time on the structure of…
CPJ, press groups: Release Eynulla Fatullayev
Dear President Aliyev: We are writing to express our strong concern regarding the continued imprisonment of Editor-in-chief Eynulla Fatullayev, which constitutes a breach of Azerbaijan’s international legal obligations and a violation of Mr Fatullayev’s rights.
Use your Blackberry to map global surveillance
The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab has announced a research project to analyze the global infrastructure of Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry. It’s looking for BlackBerry users from any country to take part–especially those in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, India, Indonesia, Russia and China. All of these countries have at some point…