Internet Blotter
Egyptian blogger Karim Amer is finally free after four years in prison. Iran launches yet another police force to deal with the Internet, headquartered with the Revolutionary Guard. Its commander says the state plans to quadruple its Internet control budget. Google lobbies U.S. policymakers to consider online censorship a free trade issue. Is breaking into…
Press Club honors jailed Iranian Kouhyar Goudarzi
The National Press Club next week will honor an Iranian journalist who is languishing in prison. Kouhyar Goudarzi, an online reporter and human rights activist, was pursuing an aerospace degree at Sharif Industrial University when security agents put him behind bars, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. Goudarzi, left, was an…
Egypt should free blogger held beyond his term
New York, November 10, 2010–Egyptian authorities must immediately release blogger Abdel Karim Suleiman, known online as Karim Amer, who completed his four-year prison sentence on November 5, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. CPJ also calls on authorities to investigate and punish a security officer who reportedly assaulted Amer on Tuesday.
That Nobel invite? Mr. Malware sent it
This weekend, staff at CPJ received a personal invitation to attend the Oslo awards ceremony for Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. The invite, curiously, was in the form of an Adobe PDF document. We didn’t accept. We didn’t even open the e-mail. We did, however, begin analyzing the document to see was really inside…
Moroccan authorities impeding Spanish journalists
New York, November 9, 2010–The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by an increasing climate of hostility for Spanish journalists in Morocco, highlighted by official measures to prevent Spanish journalists from covering clashes in the Western Sahara. CPJ calls on Rabat to allow journalists to do their work unimpeded.
Iraq shuts Al-Baghdadia after bloody church attack
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…
Morocco suspends Al-Jazeera operations indefinitely
New York, November 1, 2010–The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the Moroccan authorities’ decision to indefinitely suspend Al-Jazeera’s reporting in Morocco. The government withdrew accreditations from Al-Jazeera staff. CPJ calls on the Ministry of Communications to rescind its decision.
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…
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…