Committee to Protect Bloggers

As I posted here before, I have had to withdraw from the CPB in order to search for work. Between my lack of work and the demands of the work our deputy editor Victor has, as well as James’s inexperience, we are not proving capable of keeping up on the information you have come to expect from us on threatened bloggers and threats to bloggers.

Rather than look either inept, or like we can’t be bothered to fulfill our function, we would rather close down the organization with the hopes, however slim at this time, that we can restart it when things are better for us. (We will leave this blog, the Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, YouTube and del.icio.us accounts and the Facebook page up, at least for now.)

If any of you who are financially thriving would like to sponsor the CPB for a quarter or a year, by all means, please contact me. Please do so as well if you are hiring for a position in marketing communications, social media marketing or journalism.

I want to thank everyone who has helped to further the mission of the CPB, who include, but are by no means limited to: Esra’a and MidEast Youth, Tori, Hamid, Victor, James, Marshall, Clark and the World, and, most of all, the 1,200+ members of the CPB.

Sincerely,
Curt Hopkins
Founding Director
Committee to Protect Bloggers
curthopkins [at] gmail [dot] com

Tamer Mabrouk, a blogger in the Egyptian town of Port Said, has been levied a huge fine for writing about a chemical company in his country, Trust Chemical Industries, according to an email from the blogger. His blogging outlined irregularities in the company’s activities, including alleged dumping of hazardous materials into the Suez Canal. They responded by suing him and the Egyptian courts ruled against him.

Background from ANHRI, via Fustat:

Tamer Mabrouk was arrested on the 17th of July by police in Port Said. Mabrouk is currently involved in a libel lawsuit by the Trust company in Port Said, a company that he has dealt with extensively in his blog, al Haqeqa and done some really good investigative citizen journalism on workers rights and environmental impacts and responsebilities of the factory on the water nearby, and how it effects the fish in the lake.

Read the rest

Microsoft has confirmed that they have shut down their Live Messenger service to five Cuba, Syria, Iran, Sudan and North Korea.  They say this is due to the fact that US legislation forbids companies from working or operating or providing service to countries which US government sanctions against them.

First thing that comes to mind is, did Microsoft wake up today and realise that these countries had US sanctions against them?  Seeing as these sanctions have been in place for some time now.

This is the same situation with when Bluehost was taking down blogs from Iran and Zimbabwe.  We ask ourselves if these action go to help these sanctioned regimes further oppress their people or does it in any way help to nudge them into a more democratic direction.

What do you think?

Raja Petra Kamaruddin

Raja Petra Kamaruddin, the prominent Malaysian blogger has failed to show in court for the second time.  Kamaruddin, who had missed his first court appearance in April 23 and a warrant for his arrest was issued which has not been served as he has not been trace.

We had written earlier that Kamaruddin had indicated his plan to go into hiding as he was sure that the prosecutors would ask for his indefinite detention, which incidentally was what he was in before being released.

Keep up the fight, Raja Petra.

As you are all aware, The Australian government has plans to effected a filtering regime on the websites available for its citizens.  Among other things this will have a ‘white-list’ if I can call it that which will be a list of site netizens will be allowed to access, the other will have been blocked.  The plan is currently in test phase.

As a result of this the opposition party there has launched an anti-filtering site which aims to develop new policy on this.  The site, No Internet Censorship, offers a forum for users to discuss Australia cyber policy and oppose the government’s plans.  While we dont not do plugs for websites, opposition party sites or otherwise, we think this is a good way of having a agreeable internet policy rather thangoing by the government fiats.

The site states that,

No Internet Censorship is an initiative of the Australian Democrats to oppose the current Government’s Internet censorship/blacklisting program and develop alternative policy that will provide the cyber safety information and resources parents need to adequately protect their children.

This is encouraging.

Cases of bloggers being assaulted are on the rise, the most recent being in Cuba.  We received information of Cuban Blogger and Writer, Angel Santiesteban was attacked while walking down a street and is now nursing a broken arm.

Santiesteban was reported accosted by a man who attacked and as he defended himself the man pulled out a knife as he looked around for a stick or something else to defend himself with, another individual with a pipe from a parked car reportedly hit him.  Santeisteban suffer a broken arm and cuts after the attack.

He went to hospital and the doctor there treated him for a fractured arm, fearing more attacks he is now in hidding at an unknow place.

We condemn this attack wholly and wish Santiesteban the quikest of recoveries.  These kind of attacks only goes to show the state of fear bloggers live in Cuba, where the regime brooks no dissent.

This should stop.

Fresh from passing a cyber crime law, France plans to pass a law that will make it allows the state to install software that ‘observe, collect, record, save and transmit‘ keystrokes from computers on which it is installed.  The law dubbed ‘Loopsi 2‘ essentially allows the state to snoop and know whatever you have been doing online or even offline.

In a perfect society this shouldnt be a bad thing, but the potential abuse of this law is what galls us.  No government the world over is a saint and it is not beyond them to use such legislation for spying purposes on critics, perceived or otherwise.

The French authorities say that this law is essentially for protecting minors from pornography but, there are no checks in place to guard against this law being abuse by rogue government functionaries.  The bill also allows for the creation of a database where information gatheres from Loopsi 2 and other databases the government has to in the end have what Ars Technica have called a ‘super dossier‘ on the French people and the web habits.

All this in  CPB’s view shows the length to which authorities and governments are going to control what they view as a ‘dangerous’ online culture.  One where on is free to speak their mind on whatever issue.  We strongly condemn this and ask the French legislators not to pass the bill and consign it to where it belongs - the dustbin.

I have some very bad news. I was laid off at the end of January but always thought I would find new work. That has not happened. I am now face-to-face with the reality that if I do not spend every single waking minute in the pursuit of a new job we will wind up living on the street. I wish that were a poetic exageration. It is not.

As much concern as I have for people I don’t know, far and away my most important commitment is to my wife and our family. From now until after I am re-employed, I cannot spend a single second on anything but my search for employment. I should have realized this before but “thinking positively” can sometimes function as simple delusion. Today things happened that brought it all home.

I apologize for starting something I can’t finish, and making commitments I can’t honor, but there is nothing for it. My wife is more important than anything else in the world to me.

I hope that this hiatus on my part is temporary. Victor and James may elect to continue the coverage that this organization has provided now for four-and-a-half years. But that is solely up to them.

The CPB is very happy to announce that James Buck is joining the organization as our second Deputy Editor.

James, a photojournalist and multimedia producer, blogs at Journalism is Not a Crime, and is a Twitterer, probably best known for his arrest at the hands of the Egyptian police while covering a protest. He Twittered “arrested” which caused a brushfire of attention. (Then “free” when he was released.) He spent the next several months agitating for the freedom of his friend and translator, Mohammed Salah Ahmed Maree, who was arrested with him. He was ultimately successful. He is currently a graduate student at University of California Berkeley.

James’s initial primary duty will be to spearhead the development of an Imprisoned and Threatened Bloggers Database, a searchable, dynamic resource for bloggers, activists and journalists. James will also design and implement the sub-site that will make the database accessible to the public.

The Imprisoned and Threatened Blogger Database is a co-production of the CPB, MidEastYouth and OR318 (more news about this undertaking later). Professor Phillip Howard of the University of Washington’s Department of  Communications and his students, who developed the WIA Report, will contribute to the database’s creation and maintenance.

BoingBoing reports that a Guatemalan Twitter user, Jean Ramses Anleu Fernández (@jeanfer), was arrested for “inciting panic.” The charge was levied based on this Tweet, which encourages people to withdraw their funds from Banrural bank.

The Guatemalan bank Banrural is at the center of the country’s current political crisis: the recently assassinated attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg represented a finance expert, Khalil Musa, who was said to have refused to participate in corrupt transactions involving that bank. Musa, was assassinated in March. After continuing to make statements about alleged government complicity in that murder, and in the financial crimes Musa protested, Rosenberg was himself shot to death this past Sunday. Days before his murder, Rosenberg recorded a video saying he believed he would soon be assassinated by forces acting at the orders of Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom. After his death, the video spread virally on YouTube, sparking widespread protests on and offline.

Today, Twitter user “Jeanfer” was arrested for suggesting in a tweet that people who had money deposited in Banrural should remove those funds, and by doing so, break the control that corrupt entities have over the state-controlled financial institution.

It seems clear that the arrest was far less about any alleged financial panic than it was about culpability for the murders of Musa and Rosenberg and the possible link of those assasinations to the office of the Guatemalan president.

Email, write or call Gert Rosenthal, Guatemala’s Ambassador to the United Nations, and let him know you’ve got your eye on @jeanfer.