Adios, motherfuckers

After I talked to Andrew about my writing a farewell post, I started cycling through a series of possible pronunciamientos, essays and strident yowlings. The whole thing just seemed exhausting. And after all, haven’t I had four and a half years to say what I had to say? I’m not an “activist,” not – and this will shock some of the people whom I’ve dealt with over the years – terribly diplomatic. If I didn’t believe that free speech is the most important right we share I sure as hell would not have done this for so long. I don’t really know Andrew but he seems to possess the single most important qualification for the job of running the CPB. Not passion – the Venn diagram you’d draw of that would have a lot of shared shade with arrogance and self-regard – I mean a sustained organizational sense. It’s not sexy, but it’s what gets the job done in a world that, believe me, would really rather you didn’t. Read the rest of this entry…

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. Read the rest of this entry…

Tamer Mabrouk

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. Read the rest of this entry…

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. Read the rest of this entry…

James Buck

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.) Read the rest of this entry…

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.

We’ve got a problem.

Facebook gave up user info to the Moroccan secret police and announced that the user, Fouad Mourtada, had violated terms of service. The company also “clarified” these terms of service, announcing that anything posted on their site would become Facebook property. They later backpedaled, but only after a loss of credibility.

The latest move on the part of the social network is to allow a host of Nazi groups to use their services, saying that Nazis, by and large, do not violate Facebook’s terms of service.

So, let’s review.

• Facebook wants to steal all your stuff
• Facebook believes in cooperating with secret service groups with a history of torture
• Facebook believes imitating royalty is an evil act
• Facebook believes promoting Nazism does not violate their terms of service

Fantastic.

Generally speaking, we are slow to jump ship on a social media service because of a questionable action. That is because almost every large social media company is guilty of it and we think there is something to be said for attempting to change things from within. However, given this company’s record of relentlessly bad choices, is Facebook really the place for the CPB to communicate? We’d welcome your comments on the Committee to Protect Bloggers Facebook Causes page or in the comments on this post. I’d also welcome suggestions to an alternative way of keeping track of and communicating with members.