Iran’s parliament is set to debate a draft bill which could see the death penalty used for those deemed to promote corruption, prostitution and apostasy on the internet…

One of the things I find the most amusing about Iran is its tortured relationship with language, one which makes U.S. President Bush’s “Department of Naming Things the Opposite of What They Are”* seem almost reasonable. Here’s how the official news agency, ISNA, describes the “law.” It will “toughen punishment for harming mental security in society.” (Tzara was a journalist.)

Considering the nature of “debate” (not to mention “parliament”) in Iran, it seems unlikely that it will be “voted down.” So, look for the first publicly murdered bloggers to be coming to a news source near you in about a year.

Cyrus’s story will air today (July 4) on The World.

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*This doesn’t really exist.

Or does it?**

**No, it doesn’t.

That means that if a comment is left on a site of this size on a comment field or in forum, a person who disliked that comment could sue the site for libel. To understand the import of this, it’s important to note that in Israel every major newspaper site, and most others, have functioning, open commenting enabled and those comments are often both anonymous and strongly-worded.

Lisa Goldman, an Israeli journalist and popular blogger wrote us about the bill:

I talked to Gal Mor and Jonathan Klinger a few days ago. They’re both well-informed and politically active, and they both think the law has a good chance of being passed because it was the initiative of a government minister, rather than an ordinary Member of Knesset.

Yisrael Hasson, the minister who submitted the bill, is a member of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party. However, this bill is still a *long* way from becoming law. It’ll have to go through three committee readings, then three readings on the Knesset floor.

My impression - and Gal agrees with me - is that Hasson is a dinosaur who simply does not understand the internet. None of the Israeli news sites can afford to hire full time staff to moderate the comments which sometimes come in at the rate of up to 150,000 per hour. Most of the comments are anonymous, and a high percentage are abusive. The wording of the bill highlights his ignorance of the internet: it refers, for example, to sites that receive a minimum of 50,000 hits per day - but it doesn’t specify page visits or unique hits.

As one commenter on Jonathan Klinger’s site put it: if Hasson wants to stop commenters from posting death threats, I can understand him; but if he wants to stop them from leaving comments along the lines of “Yisrael Hasson is a fascist and I hate him,” then we have a problem with an MK who does not understand democracy.

According to GV, the bill has already passed its “first reading.” Two more and it will become law. Should that happen, Israel’s vital online conversation will be muted and, distressingly, it will join Lebanon, Bahrain, Kuwait and Syria in prosecuting not bloggers but people who comment on blogs for illegal speech.

smaller courts have swung back in the other direction. First, a Divorce Court judge in Vermont, Thomas Devine, issued an injunction against William Krasnansky, forbidding him to continue posting fictionalized accounts of his divorce. Now, John Mutter, a Family Court judge in Rhode Island has instructed Anne Grant, a retired minister, to stop publishing her blog, which focuses on the perceived failures of her state’s Department of Children, Youth and Families.

Although the wording in this ruling instructs her to remove material and stop blogging material “pertaining” to children in a specific case, it is loose enough that there is significant doubt that general and well established free speech law in this country would not be abrogated pretty easily. It looks like another case of “prior restraint,” a type of censorship which is clearly unconstitutional and against which there is a tremendous amount of case law.

Additionally, a South Florida District Court judge, Joan Lenard, has forbidden an attorney, David Markus, to blog about a case, despite the fact that the attorney is not involved in it!

The Australian Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy announced on December 31 2007 that mandatory filtering of the Internet would be instituted there. This announcement follows the Rudd government’s plan to provide a “clean feed internet service for all homes” that was unveiled prior to the fall 2007 elections.

As in China, a great deal of the responsibility for censoring the Internet would be laid on the doorstep of the country’s ISPs but, as in Saudi Arabia, the pretext for this restraint is “protecting” the public against pornography. ONI notes that anyone who wished to see adult content would have to opt out of the system, thereby drawing attention to themselves. Considering the bugginess of filtering software, not to mention the vicious joy of the kind of person who believes they know what’s best for others, it doesn’t take much to imagine just what kind of detritus would be caught up in this sort of filtering regimen. If the Kingdom is any indication, get ready for an Australian Internet without women’s health information and online swim suit catalogs.

Another issue is the efficiency of the country’s Internet connections once national filtering becomes a reality. Considering how important electronic connections are to the global economy, there’s no way it won’t have an effect on the average Aussie’s pocketbook.

The problem with this is that there has been no hearing for defamation or any other imagined crime. It is “prior restraint” which flies in the face of First Amendment (to the U.S. Constitution) law and free speech tradition and case law in the U.S. There seems to be a real sense that those elements of law which apply to everything from radio to newspapers to signs in your yard somehow stop at the keyboard.

Mr. Krasnansky has declned to abide by Judge Devine’s injunction.

We don’t know Mr. Krasnansky. For all we know, he’s a turd. We also don’t care. We care about our free speech and the tradition of free speech in this country and the timely extension of those rights into the electronic environment. If Mr. Krasnansky has broken the law, a prosecutor or private citizen should take him to court and, in due process, require him to remove the libelous or defamatory material. But Judge Devine is not president-for-life and sure as hell ought to know better.

Congress returns to Washington DC this week, and with them returns the battle over telecom immunity. Recall that on the eve of a key vote in December 2007, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid delayed action on the surveillance bill until January, giving Senators additional time to hear from their constituents.

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Update: Excellent news. According to EFF, a Dodd-led filibuster pressured Democratic head Harry Reid to postpone the vote on this bill.

Right on, Doddmeister! (or His Doddness, or Dodder, or El Dodderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.)

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According to Threat Level, the bill currently wending its way through the U.S. Senate that allows the government to spy with impunity on its own people and gives immunity to communications companies that have cooperated in ostensibly illegal spying activities.

The bill provides “amnesty for telecoms that helped the government spy on Americans without court orders and greatly expand the government’s ability to spy using American telecom facilities and communication services.”

If you’re a U.S. citizen, by all means contact your Senator and ask him or her to join Christopher Dodd (D-Connecticut), in opposing this asinine bill.

Arizona Affirms Strong Protections for Anonymous Speech Online (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Congress to examine “the Internet” as a tool for homegrown terrorism (Ars Technica)

EFF Moves to Block New Jersey Township’s Attempt to Unmask Critical Blogger (Electronic Frontier Foundation) Judge rules in favor of blogger.

RAB & BTRC pinpointing internet users with fast connections.
ISPs instructed to reveal admin password, user data.
“Traffic scanners” to monitor internet users.

The Bangladesh Telecommunications regulatory commission are even going house to house to find users with fast connections, according to E-Bangladesh, who received a leaked memo from the agency.

Update: There seems to be a pretty pronounced crackdown country-wide in Bangladesh which has been fabulously underreported (unreported would probably be closer to the mark) in the U.S. According to Voice of Bangladeshi, that country’s military commander, Gen. Moeen Ahmed is currently visiting the U.S. I am a pretty regular consumer of media and I have not heard one word about this in the traditional media.

Since the military coup of Sept 19, 2006, Thailand has almost caught up with China as a world leader in the field of internet censorship and control, particularly with regard to freedom of political expression. This is a completely unacceptable environment for the promised return to democracy at the end of this year.

On the day after the coup, the Council for Democratic Reform that took over the country ordered the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT) to “control, intercept, suppress and eliminate the distribution over all information networks of articles, text, speech and other forms of communication that might adversely affect administrative reform of the democratic system under the constitutional monarchy”.

This order has never been rescinded.

According to Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT), by May 28 of this year, the MICT was blocking access by the Thai public to a total of 11,329 websites.

He goes on to talk about the implications of the Computer Crime Act, passed in July, under which Thai blogger Phraya Pichai was arrested in August.

Article 14 of this act makes it a crime punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment and a maximum fine of 100,000 baht for anyone to import into a computer system, or to forward or propagate:

1) False information or forged data likely to cause damage to others, or to the general public;

2) False information likely to damage national security or cause undue public alarm;

3) Any information contravening national security or anti-terrorism laws;

4) Obscene materials which are publicly accessible.

Internet service operators who knowingly allow such crimes to take place on computer systems under their control are also liable to the same punishment.

Such vaguely defined and all-encompassing grounds for criminal charges will surely encourage discriminatory use of the law by those in power to punish political opponents and dissidents.

Website hosts will obviously be reluctant to allow controversial political views on any websites connected to them.

He mentions two arrests, though he does not indicate who the second arrestee was.

Shockingly, neither case attracted the attention of the mainstream media. It was mainly on internet sites and in email circles that the news of their arrests became known.

The fact is that in Thailand today, political expression on the internet is more subject to censorship and control, and carries a greater risk of criminal penalties than similar expression on mainstream media such as the printed press.

Read the full essay here.