Annual report : everyone's interested
in the Internet - especially dictators
The Internet has revolutionised the world's media.
Personal websites, blogs and discussion groups have given a voice to
men and women who were once only passive consumers of information.
It has made many newspaper readers and TV viewers into fairly
successful amateur journalists.
Dictators would seem powerless faced with this explosion of online
material. How could they monitor the e-mails of China's 130
million users or censor the messages posted by Iran's 70,000
bloggers? The enemies of the Internet have unfortunately shown
their determination and skill in doing just that.
China was the first repressive country to realise that the Internet
was an extraordinary tool of free expression and quickly assembled the
money and personnel to spy on e-mail and censor "subversive"
websites. The regime soon showed that the Internet, like
traditional media, could be controlled. All that was needed was
the right technology and to crack down on the first
"cyber-dissidents."
The Chinese model has been a great success and the regime has managed
to dissuade Internet users from openly mentioning political topics and
when they do to just recycle the official line. But in the past
two years, the priority of just monitoring online political dissidence
has given way to efforts to cope with unrest among the population.
The Internet has become a sounding-board for the rumblings of
discontent in most Chinese provinces. Demonstrations and
corruption scandals, once confined to a few cities, have spread across
the country with the help of the Internet. In 2005, the
government sought to counter the surge in cyber-dissidence. It
beefed up the law and drafted what might be called "the ten
commandments" for Chinese Internet users - a set of very harsh
rules targeting online editors. The regime is both efficient and
inventive in spying on and censuring the Internet. Other
government have unfortunately imitated it.
The Internet's jailers
Traditional "predators of press freedom"
- Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Libya, the Maldives, Nepal, North
Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and
Vietnam - all censor the Internet now. In 2003, only China,
Vietnam and the Maldives had imprisoned cyber-dissidents. Now
more countries do.
A score of bloggers and online journalists
have been thrown in jail in Iran since September 2004 and one of them,
Mojtaba Saminejad, has been there since February 2005 for posting
material deemed offensive to Islam. In Libya, former bookseller
Abdel Razak al-Mansouri was sentenced to 18 months in prison for
making fun of President Muammer Gaddafi online. Two Internet
users have been jailed and tortured in Syria, one for posting photos
online of a pro-Kurdish demonstration in Damascus and the other for
simply passing on an e-mailed newsletter the regime considers
illegal.
A lawyer has been in jail in Tunisia since
March 2005 for criticising official corruption in an online
newsletter. While a UN conference was held in Tunis in November
2005 to discuss the future of the Internet, this human rights activist
was in a prison cell several hundred kilometres from his family.
A grim message to the world's Internet users.
Censorship of the Web is also growing and
is now done on every continent. In Cuba, where you need
permission from the ruling party to buy a computer, all websites not
approved by the regime are filtered.
The situation has worsened in the Middle
East and North Africa. In November 2005, Morocco began censoring
all political websites advocating Western Sahara's independence.
Iran expands its list of banned sites each year and it now includes
all publications mentioning women's rights. China can now
automatically censor blog messages, blanking out words such as
"democracy" and "human rights."
Some Asian countries seem about to go further than their Chinese
"big brother." Burma has acquired sophisticated technology to
filter the Internet and the country's cybercafés spy on customers
by automatically recording what is on the screen every five
minutes.
Complicity of Western firms
How did all these countries become so expert at doing this?
Did Burma and Tunisia develop their own software? No. They
bought the technology from foreign, mostly American firms.
Secure Computing, for example, sold Tunisia a programme to censor the
Internet, including the Reporters Without Borders website.
Another US firm, Cisco Systems, created China's Internet
infrastructure and sold the country special equipment for the police
to use. The ethical lapses of Internet companies were exposed
when the US firm Yahoo! was accused in September 2005 of supplying the
Chinese police with information used to sentence cyber-dissident Shi
Tao to 10 years in prison.
China is now passing on its cyber-spying skills to other enemies of
the Internet, including Zimbabwe, Cuba, and most recently Belarus.
These countries will probably no longer need Western help for such
spying in a few years time.
Democratic governments, not just the private sector, share
responsibility for the future of the Internet. But far from
showing the way, many countries that usually respect online freedom,
now seem to want to unduly control it. They often have laudable
reasons, such as fighting terrorism, child sex and cyber-crime, but
this control also threatens freedom of expression.
Without making any comparison with the harsh restrictions in China,
the Internet rules recently adopted by the European Union are very
disturbing. One of them, requiring Internet service providers
(ISPs) to retain records of customers' online activity, is presently
being considered in Brussels and seriously undermines Internet users'
right to online privacy.
The United States is also far from being a
model in regulation of the Internet. The authorities are sending
an ambiguous message to the international community by making it
easier to legally intercept online traffic and by filtering the
Internet in public libraries.
The reason these fundamentalist are upset is because creating a picture of Mohammad is blasphemy because it encourages idolatry. But it seems making death threats that one intends to carry out or drawing images of impaling people through the throat is not. So much for the religion of peace that should be so strictly followed. 
