Chinese hackers targeting human rights news sites
Nart Villeneuve has published a detailed summary of recent malware attacks on media and human rights groups who work on Chinese issues. He highlights a disturbing new trend. On Wednesday, Amnesty Hong Kong’s website was repurposed by hackers to infect visitors with a wide variety of nasty malware. The Nobel Prize’s website was also defaced earlier…
Communist Party elders urge end to China’s censorship
Twenty-three senior Communist Party members have published a letter calling for sweeping reforms of China’s media censorship policies. “Our core demand is that the system of censorship be dismantled in favor of a system of legal responsibility,” the letter said, according to an English translation by Hong Kong University’s China Media Project. Widely distributed by e-mail and posted…
Google’s Chinese wake-up call
On Monday, Google made good on its promise to stop censorship of its Chinese search engine, Google.cn, by rerouting viewers to its unfettered Hong Kong site. According to the company’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, the move was “a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced—it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information…
Defamation ruling reversed against Time Asia in Indonesia
Indonesia’s Supreme Court reversed its own 2007 ruling on April 16, 2009, and dismissed a $106 million case against the Hong Kong-based Time Warner publication that had been filed by the country’s late President Suharto and continued by his heirs.
How diamond rings silence Zimbabwe’s foreign press
The Hong Kong police announced on Monday they would investigate the alleged assault on photographer Richard Jones by Zimbabwe’s first lady, Grace Mugabe, while she was on vacation. On January 15, Jones claimed Mugabe ordered her bodyguard to hold the photographer down while she punched him repeatedly in the face near Hong Kong’s exclusive Shangri-la…
Olympics-China Media Watch: Re-education scrubbed from Web, mostly
Bob Dietz called attention to the Chinese propaganda department’s recent 21-point press directive, first reported by the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. The whole thing in English and Chinese is posted today at Berkeley’s China Digital Times. Among the orders given to the domestic media during the Olympic Games is that they are not to report on…
CPJ: Chinese police should halt obstruction of photographers
Hong Kong, August 22, 2008—Chinese police should halt ongoing harassment of photographers seeking to document pro-Tibet protests in Beijing, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today in the wake of reports that two video bloggers have been detained and two Associated Press journalists obstructed. Video bloggers Brian Conley and Jeff Rae were detained early Tuesday…
With Games nearing end, RFA Tibet service reporter still denied visa
Hong Kong, August 20, 2008–Despite appeals from his employer and questions from the International Olympic Committee, Chinese authorities have continued to bar Radio Free Asia reporter Dhondup Gonsar from traveling to Beijing to cover the Games. Gonsar, an American citizen of Tibetan ethnicity, was one of two journalists for the U.S. government-funded broadcaster whose applications…
News Wrap for 8/20/08
China returns to the forefront this morning as the Olympic Games are nearing an end. The Associated Press has a story about human rights groups’ frustration at the lack of outcry, along with protests against myriad rights abuses. The story quotes CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, Bob Dietz, who is working out of Hong Kong. “In…
Olympics: RFA reporter still barred
We released another alert about Dhondup Gonsar today. He’s the Tibetan RFA reporter who is stuck in Hong Kong waiting for a visa that RFA was told had been set aside for him and RFA’s Mandarin service reporter Jill Ku Martin. We first raised Dhondup’s case on August 7, and have stayed in touch with…