Graphic on who is being blocked by the Great Firewall of China by David McCandless at Information is Beautiful. Based on data found here.

In September 2008, the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, saw considerable pre-emptive arrests of activists and journalists, including raids on independent media spaces and the Tin Can Comms Collective office, which coordinated a series of Twitter feeds during the surrounding protests relating to activist actions, legal support, and street medic teams. This update from an anarchist collective in New York, who saw members raided and arrested for a similar Tin Can Comms Twitter deployment during the September 2009 G-20 protests in Pittsburgh, PA, was reposted anonymously with the above title on Twin Cities Indymedia’s website. Local charges had been dropped against the Pittsburgh G-20 Twitterers because of an ongoing “national” investigation, presumably in lieu of pending but not yet announced federal charges. Read the rest of this entry…

Search Engine’s Jesse Brown: “Canadian/Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan has been held and tortured in a Tehran prison for over a year, without being charged. Both the Canadian and Iranian governments seem content to let him stay there. The media has also largely forgotten his case. Hoder’s imprisonment begs the question: do we only fight for the freedom of dissidents whose beliefs we agree with?” (via Boing Boing)

Canadian/Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan has been stuck in  prison in Iran for over a year and has still not been officially charged with a crime.  What we know to be true is that Hodor has an independent voice that has at times been critical of Iran as well as other governments and individuals.  That the Canadian government should have no complaint about one of its citizens being jailed largely on the basis of content posted online while living in Canada should be an embarassment. We urge the Canadian government to press Iran on the issues and work to free one of its citizens.

Originally posted at Global Voices Online.

For six years, Syrian users have been affected by U.S. government trade sanctions that exclude certain goods from the Syrian market. Specifically, the Syria Accountability Act (SAA) of 2004 prohibits the export of most goods containing more than 10% U.S.-manufactured component parts to Syria, with the exceptions of food and medicine. Sudan, Cuba, North Korea, and Iran are all also affected by similar sanctions.

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This one is ok, but we would love to host any mashups of otherwise censored information escaping Iran. Send it to us via our contact form and we’ll feature it here and collect the best of them at our forthcoming project on Iran.