Thread: The Enemies of the Internet 2009 (summary)

For a more comprehensive version see : http://www.hellonam.com/press-releas...html#post65236

The Internet represents freedom, but not everywhere. Under the pretext of protecting morals, national security, religion and ethnic minorities,even the “spiritual cultural and scientific potential of the country”, many countries resort to filtering the Web in order to block some content.
Governments have no hesitation in allowing their citizens only partial connections. Use of the Internet can rest on a tacit agreement: Governments do not make websites inaccessible in exchange for self-discipline on the part of Internet users.
The 12 “Internet Enemies” presented in this report (Saudi Arabia, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam) have all transformed the network into an intranet, preventing Internet users from obtaining news seen as “undesirable”. All of these countries mark themselves out not just for their capacity to censor news and information online but also for their almost systematic repression of Internet users.
Ten governments which Reporters Without Borders has placed under its own “surveillance”, still alternate between censorship and harassment of Internet users.
But is blocking of news online still effective?
Through experience and thanks to their technical knowledge, Internet users have learned to get round some censorship installed on the Web by their governments. In countries where access to news is prized, it is not unusual to find software to defeat online censorship installed on computers in cybercafés, and also managers willing to put them to use if need be. Internet experts belonging to some of the most recognised institutions constantly create and fine-tune software versions so as to adapt them to the reality of the virtual world and to ensure that news is accessible to all.
Even major Internet sector companies, who cooperate either willingly or unwillingly with censorship within the countries of the “Internet enemies”, agreed a compromise at the end of 2008. By signing the Global Network Initiative, the US firms Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft publicly said that they wanted to respect their customers' freedom of expression worldwide. How much they may in reality defy the demands of authorities in countries to which they provide services remains to be seen. But it will no longer be as easy for governments of these countries to obtain confidential information about their citizens.
But for now, at least 69 people are behind bars for having expressed themselves freely online.
Australia and South Korea: democracies “under surveillance”.
The Australian parliament in January 2008 examined a draft law requiring service providers to systematically provide two connections per household, one for adults and the other for children, both of them submitted to strict, and above all secret, filtering. This draft was put forward against a background in which anti-terror legislation is already allowing serious inroads into the confidentiality of private correspondence. Since 2001, the law has allowed an agency independent of the government to intercept all suspect email and to carry out independent investigations, including in the absence of any prior judicial authorisation.
South Korea, one of the world’s most connected countries, also has recourse to some disproportionate measures to regulate the Net. A blogger was arrested on 7 January 2009 for having affected “financial exchanges in the markets” as well as the “credibility of the nation” because of articles he posted on one of the country’s biggest discussion forums. He is still being held in detention.
A participatory censorship
The most technically advanced repressive regimes know it well: playing the online censorship card means taking the risk of coming up against experts determined to develop the tools to guarantee access to news despite everything.
Most of the regions do not have the means to join an endless technological struggle.
So, in the face of the fad for social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and other online exchange platforms like the Arabic-language Maktoob and the Russian language LiveJournal, censorship operates through a battle of comments.
For example, in a bid to limit online criticism during the Beijing Olympics in August 2008, the government paid some Internet users to leave pro-government comments on the spaces reserved for online discussion where debates were being held. Called the “Five cents” – an ironic reference to the money paid for non spontaneous comments, they contributed to the manipulation of news and information. But there are other ways of manipulating online information.
During the Israeli offensive in Gaza in January 2009, hackers, chiefly Moroccans, Lebanese, Turks and Iranians launched hundreds of attacks against Israeli websites, targeting nearly Web 10,000 pages with the domain name “.co.il”. Since the conflict ended, Israelis have hit back. An army of bloggers have been bombarding the Net with the views of the Jewish state.

Reporters without borders - for Press Freedom 2009