In conjunction with FreeKareem.org, the Committee to Protect Bloggers is launching a mail campaign in support of imprisoned Egyptian blogger, Kareem Amer. (If you’re not familiar with the case of this unjustly-imprisoned blogger, please read FreeKareem’s FAQ.)

From April 7 through April 21, both organizations are encouraging their memberships to go analogue and write Kareem a letter or postcard.

There are several reasons for this departure from the digital.

First, Kareem can receive physical mail. Second, a sufficient amount of such mail will remind Egyptian authorities that this blogger, bloggers in general and prisoners of conscience over all, are not alone. When Kareem was being tortured several months ago, the focus of international media was instrumental in stopping it. Finally, it takes us out of our comfort zones and reminds us that what we do exists in the physical world with real consequences.

If you would like to write Kareem now, by all means do so, but we would also like to ask that, whatever you do, you write at least one letter to Kareem during the period from April 7 to April 21. Here is the address in English, followed by a link to the address in Arabic. (It goes without saying that the Arabic must be present on the letter to assure its delivery.)

Alexandria
Borg Al-Arab Prison
Room 1 Section 22
Prisoner Abdul Kareem Nabil Suleiman
The Arab Republic of Egypt
Kareem’s address in Arabic - mandatory to include on envelope

Read Alexandra Sandel’s article in Menassat. (She’s wrong about the dates - it’s two weeks, not one.)

Read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s article in ReadWriteWeb.

Read the Society of Professional Journalists’ post on their Press Notes blog.

Read DigiActive’s write-up.

A car belonging to YemenPortal, was vandalized today. Editor Walid Al-Saqaf indicated in a note that he believes official representatives of the Yemeni government directly responsible. He believes the action was a result of his attempt to provide alternative URLs for his site. He created an alternative domain and emailed it to several hundred subscribers in Yemen. Al-Saqaf is currently in Sweden. His car was parked outside YemenPortal’s office in Sana’a.

It’s bad enough to repress someone’s ability to freely report the news. Direct thuggery is beyond the pale, though, and the government of Yemen, and its leaders, especially President Ali Abdullah Saleh, should feel shame.

Al-Saqaf’s press release follows.

Press Release

Following the ban of its second domain

Unidentified men attack vehicle of YemenPortal.net Sana’a Office
Sanaa – February 11, 2008

Three unidentified men attacked and shattered the front glass (windscreen) of the vehicle operated by YemenPortal.net’s office in Sana’a, Yemen just before midnight on Sunday, February 10.

This comes after a third alternative website domain was set up in a record time after the Yemeni authorities banned the website’s domain for the second successive time. This resistance to the block may have been the motive behind the attack, the website founder and administrator Walid Al-Saqaf said.

Yemeni authorities had previously blocked the original domain of the website (http://yemenportal.net) on Jan 19 and proceeded to block the alternative domain (http://arabiaportal.net/yemen) on Feb 9. The third domain (http://yemenportal.org) was set up immediately after the second domain was blocked.

“We expect the authorities to go on blocking the third domain, after which we will simply launch a fourth. This will go on for as long as it takes.” Al-Saqaf noted.

The attack also comes in a time YemenPortal.net is leading a country-wide campaign against blocking Yemeni websites. The initiative was to allow all Internet users in Yemen to access the full content of all blocked news and opinion websites, which are accessible through the campaign’s website http://yemenportal.net/blocked. The authorities had initiated a new wave of bans against political websites without disclosing any reasons.

Al-Saqaf noted that eye witnesses said a taxi driver and two passengers, of whom one was masked, suddenly stopped near the car and kept on smashing the windscreen with rocks until neighbors started approaching. Then they returned to the taxi and quickly fled the scene.

None of the eyewitnesses were able to read the car’s plate number but some noticed a portrait of President Ali Abdullah Saleh on the back window of the taxi.

A complaint was filed at the closest police station immediately after the attack, which is believed to have been in response to the website’s successful initiative in launching the first anti-blocking campaign of its kind in Yemen.

It is worth noting that the authorities have in the past used various methods and means from sending SMS messages to beating journalists or smashing vehicles. “This is far too familiar”, Al-Saqaf said, adding that “If the attack is intended to threaten us or send us a message of intimidation, I would like to stress that it only strengthens our position and encourages us to continue our mission of fighting for the unblocking of more than a dozen websites that are banned by the authorities.”

Concerned human rights and press freedom organizations in Yemen have pledged to take action to condemn this attack and call upon the authorities to investigate the incident promptly and bring the perpetrators to justice. They also stressed on the need to release the blocked websites, whose ban constitutes a major violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was ratified by the Yemeni government.

“The recent attacks against the press in general and the online media in particular lead us to believe that the government’s inaction in the past have encouraged some elements to attack journalists and media professionals with a sense of immunity.” Al-Saqaf said.

“The wave of website bans and other types of intimidation against the online media is in clear contradiction to the government’s pledges and commitments to bolster freedom of expression. We call upon the government to respect those commitments and urge the international community to help us resist this unprecedented wave of attacks.”

Attack on Burmese Blogs by SPDC (Military regime in Burma)[Original Source – niknayman – http://niknayman.blogspot.com]

Translated by Burmese Bloggers w/o Borders (http://bbwob.blogspot.com)

Before the recent “Saffron Revolution”, there were approximately around 2000 blogs and most of them concentrated on writing about the topics of their own personal interest and their personal experiences in life.

In September, Burmese people could no longer endure the years of poverty and as a result of increase in diesel prices, many of them took to the streets for peaceful demonstrations. Such demonstrations were shown to the world through the Burmese blogs in the form of instant news, pictures and videos. After that, everyone, including SPDC, became aware of the significant role that Burmese bloggers played in this “Saffron Revolution”.

After seeing the impact that Burmese blogs can have as transmission medium for news, SPDC declared that they will retaliate in a similar manner, that is, to “fight media (blogs) with media (blogs)”. They began to see the urgent need to implement actions according to their declaration. Therefore, they chose a group of their trusted people and gave them training on blogging. They then asked those people to write blogs according to their tune, thus resulting in the rise of various pro-SPDC blogs in Burmese bloggers’ community. Not only do those blogs were asked to write pro-SPDC posts, but also asked to attack the posts written by pro-democracy bloggers and to incite discord among the Burmese bloggers’ community.

Their techniques also included writing vulgar words, writing spam, impersonating identities of certain bloggers and writing nonsense under their nicknames in commonly-used message boards (aka c-boxes).

Knowing their techniques, many Burmese bloggers have simply ignored their provocations in c-boxes by just deleting their messages.

Hence, they decided to attack from another direction, that is, to block certain Burmese blogs so that the people in Burma would not be able to view them. Many well-known pro-democracy blogs were their first targets.

However, with the advanced technology, the people in Burma found a way to overcome such restrictions. Subsequently, SPDC resorted to slowing down the internet speed for their networks and even to the extent of limiting the internet usage by shutting down their networks for public usage.

They also restricted the usage of internet cafes by asking the users at those places to register using their identity card, filling in their personal details, keeping a log of visited sites and taking screenshots of various pages.

Their latest attacks include blocking the access to the whole of www.blogger.com from Burma and the possibility of increasing the price for usage of internet in Burma.

Pro-SPDC group has also tried to hack into the Gmail accounts of well-known pro-democracy Burmese blogs. After being successful, they would change or redirect the URLs of those blogs to porn website addresses and advertised addresses for businesses.

In addition, they have also tried to create bogus blogs with similar addresses of pro-democracy blogs by adding some words to the URL. The well-known prodemocracy blogger, niknayman’s blog, fell victim to such attack recently. As shown in the picture below, they created a bogus blog with the URL
(http://niknayman.blogspot.com.corp.st) and put the name of the blog as “This is myanmar NLD stupid sucking blog”. If you open the bogus blog, you will be directed into a porn site.

[Disclaimer: Women are advised not to open the bogus blog’s link as it contains a lot of porn materials. The screenshot of the bogus blog is shown in this post just to prove as evidence of SPDC’s doing.]

They have also advertised this bogus blog’s address in various c-boxes of Burmese people, especially women, under the nickname of “admin” as shown
below in picture. By doing that, they tried to trick people into misunderstanding that Niknayman has changed his blog’s address and he, himself, was the one going around informing the people of this new address.

When the check was done on the identity of the person who went around advertising the bogus blog’s link, the person turned out to be a pro-SPDC
blogger, by the name of Opposite Eyes. Though he used a fake IP address, his lie was exposed as shown below.

Niknayman has also discovered how the pro-SPDC group created the bogus’s blog address. They registered as a member of a French business company and made use of the domain name given by typing “niknayman.blogspot.com” in the blank in front as shown in picture below.

Niknayman has declared that such lies and attacks by pro-SPDC groups in Burmese websites, forums, blogs and emails definitely will be exposed after
gathering enough evidence. With such evidence, their cases will be presented to international internet usage authority and human rights authority, etc.

Finally, Niknayman urged his fellow Burmese bloggers to be careful of such attacks from SPDC side and to unite against SPDC and their lackeys.

In a bid to stop the flow of information outside Burma one of the most popular blog sites www.blogger.com has been banned by the Myanmar Post and Telecomm Ministry as of Thursday morning, according to bloggers in the former capital.

In the wake of ‘Saffron Revolution’, another Internet Service Provider ‘Bagan Teleport’ has blocked this blog website. And now the remaining ISP under the MPT has blocked this website which bars computers in Burma from accessing the blogs.

Both the ISPs are under the control of the military regime but under two different administrations.

Can anyone confirm?

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.