2010

It’s hard to trace things to their origin. But had I not met exiled Colombian journalist Fernando Garavito in early 2004, I don’t know that I would have chosen to work, professionally, as a defender of freedom of expression.

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.…

On his blog, El Oso, David Sasaki has just finished up the third and last part in his series, “Internet Censorship and Freedom of Expression in Latin America.” It’s a brilliant overview of current political and social pressures on free speech and online reporting in the region. Some key observations: Direct governmental censorship in Latin…

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…

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…

Back in 2004, Iraqi gunmen loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr abducted U.S. freelance photographer Paul Taggert because, as they later told The Associated Press, they thought he was a spy. Now, a new poster from the U.S. Transportation Security Administration reinforces dangerous misconceptions by depicting a photographer as a terrorist.

UPDATE, OCTOBER 22, 2010: CPJ’s board of directors sets policy for the organization. At the October 18 meeting of the board, directors discussed the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, known as COICA. The September 30 blog post below incorrectly stated that CPJ had “joined with other press freedom and civil liberty organizations and the…