CPJ calls for independent probe of Aleh Byabenin’s death
New York, December 3, 2010–The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned that Belarusian prosecutors have closed their investigation into the September death of Aleh Byabenin, founder and director of the Minsk-based, pro-opposition news website Charter 97. Authorities said Wednesday that they did not find evidence of foul play.
Internet Blotter
Wikileaks hit by denial-of-service attack, turns to Amazon hosting… …but Amazon drops the site following pressure from a U.S. senator. Google extends its https encryption to YouTube, making video blocking harder. Censorship of the Net directly related to how authoritarian a regime is, claims a study. Venezuala’s telecom regulator proposes stronger takedown powers over Internet…
Facebook gets caught up in Egypt’s media crackdown
As CPJ has previously documented, journalists in Egypt have faced a deterioration in press freedom in the run-up to the parliamentary vote on Sunday. Editors have been fired, TV shows suspended, and regulations over SMS texting suddenly tightened. In the final few days, a new forum found itself caught up in this attempt to control…
CPJ’s Rebecca MacKinnon on ‘Internet freedom’ in WSJ
Here’s a quick pointer to an insightful Wall Street Journal op-ed about Internet freedom from CPJ board member (and former CNN colleague) Rebecca MacKinnon. She’s based in Washington these days, a Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation, so she has plenty to say about inside the Beltway funding issues. But she’s…
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…
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…
Internet Blotter
Microsoft allows users to turn on https by default in Hotmail, but it’s still couched in warnings. Meanwhile, Access starts its own global campaign for https to be turned on for the most visited websites. Thai censorship, originally aimed at a few hundred domains, now covers over 250,000 websites. China “unpublishes” previously approved online articles…
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…
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.…