Committee to Protect Bloggers

In its never-ending pursuit of complete elimination of dissent, Iran is introducing a law to murder bloggers. Cyrus Farivar, preparing an story of The World radio program, sent us a note with a link to this story on iAfrica.
Iran’s parliament is set to debate a draft bill which could see the death penalty used for […]

Amir Farshad Ebrahimi, Iranian journalist and blogger living in Germany, was detained in Turkey for the last two days.
Ebrahimi was arrested at the request of Iranian authorities yesterday when he got off a flight from Germany at an Istanbul airport.
According to Ebrahimi, an Iranian intelligence officer who identified himself as Mohammad Taghi Esfahani presented an […]

The Committee to Protect Bloggers is happy to again co-sponsor the Iran Freedom Concert.

The concert will take place on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 8:00PM in the Edgerton Center for the Performing Arts at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Iran is among the worst offenders in terms of harassing, arresting and imprisoning bloggers, as well […]

In advance of the March 14 elections there, Iranian authorities have blocked Yahoo there, according to Norooznews (via OpenNet Blog). Yahoo’s search engine, its web mail service Yahoo Mail, and its groups function, Yahoo Groups, have all been blocked. Background, from the International Herald Tribune.

Update: Facebook responds. Kind of.
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Update: RSF is trying to find out how Moroccan prosecutors determined Mourtada’s indentity.
Reporters Without Borders wonders how the police identified Mourtada. “Did the police get his computer’s IP address? And if so, how? We have asked the ISP, Maroc Telecom, in which the French company Vivendi is a shareholder, to […]

According to Iran Focus (via Noisy Room), Iran has shut down 24 Internet cafes and arrested 23 people, 11 of them women, in the last couple of days in a new crackdown. After “inspecting” 435 coffee shops, the Iranian authorities gave warnings to 170 of them for allowing “immoral” activities on their computers.
The action […]

Hamid Tehrani was good enough to provide us with a status report on a number of Iranian bloggers who had been sentenced to time in prison.
Mojtaba Saminejad. Mojtaba was one of the people featured on CPB’s Free Mojtaba and Arash Day, the fifth leading meme in the blogosphere in 2005. He was arrested in […]

I discovered today via VentureBeat a Firefox plugin that works to circumvent Flickr bans without the use of a proxy.
According to Digital Inspiration, the plugin, called Access Flickr, was developed by Hamed Saber, an Iranian photographer who uses Flickr heavily.

The Access Flickr extension for Firefox substitutes the HTTP header parameters before sending a request […]

According to our friend Hamid Tehrani, Persian editor for Global Voices, Iranian blogger Reza Valizadeh was arrested today. Reza runs, or ran, a site called Baznegar.
Some bloggers, says Hamid, believe that Reza was the first blogger to reveal Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s overpriced dogs that his security team uses. They were said to have purchased […]

According to the Iranian Political Prisoners Association:
Soheil Asafi a blogger and a journalist was released on Saturday October 6th 2007 from Evin Prison after two months of imprisonment. He was released on 100 Million Toman bail.
Soheil Asafi was arrested on August 4th 2007. On that day he was summoned to court, where he was interrogated […]