Blacklooks tells us that Elendu is now free, and is receiving treatment.  Here at CPB we are in solidarity with Elendu and all Nigerian bloggers.

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Blacklooks reports that the Nigerian Blogger who’d been arrested has now been transferred, to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency. Now that he is in EFCC custody, Jonathan has reportedly been tortured. EFCC is supposed to deal with economic crimes and not repression of free speech. It looks like the Nigerian Government is trying to find something, anything to charge him with.

EFCC has denied him access to his lawyer and the Nigerian Human Rights Writers Assosciation says that, Elendu has been tortured and other information we are getting is that his health has deteriorated considerably, though it is not know if this is because of the torture or due a ‘hunger strike’ he said to be on.

Nigerian Curiosity from whom we have been getting updates has organized to have Friday October 31st as ‘Free Jonathan Elendu Day’ The essence of the campaign is to try and generate as much awareness about the detention as possible. What you can do to help is to:
1. Title all blog posts on 31st October - ‘Free Jonathan Elendu Now’
2. On Facebook, title your status updates - ‘Free Jonathan Elendu Now’

So on Friday we here at CPB will be joining the campaign., and we urge you to join in.

The ISPs, Kazakh Telecom and Nursat are regulated by the government and it is thought that they did this on the government’s behest.
According to Reporters Without Borders, RSF, the blocking affects neighbouring Krygystan as it depend on connectivity from Kazakhstan.

This blocking also affects Kyrgyzstan, which depends on the Kazakh Internet. This is a deliberate act of censorship that is intended to have a dissuasive effect

Worrying trend with governments we are seeing here.

We were a little optimistic that the Malaysia Cabinet decision to rescind the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) to block Malaysia Today and all other blocked sites was a step in the right direction but the arrest of Raja Petra Kamaruddin now under the country’s tough internal security act (ISA), this is on top of the sedition and defamation charges he is facing.

According to Committee to Protect Journalists, blogger and human rights lawyer, Harris Ibrahim was also arrested for posting about Raja’s arrest.

ZDNet Asia writes

The opposition Democratic Action Party (DAP) condemned the arrest of Raja Petra and said the move “smacks of desperation” by the BN government.

Tony Pua, opposition member of parliament and economic advisor to the DAP secretary-general, said: “The government is flip-flopping and is seen as a headless chicken. They realized they did a stupid thing by banning Malaysia Today, and now they are compounding it by trying to ‘neutralize’ Raja Petra under the ISA.”

Pua reckoned that the action Raja Petra signaled the start of a crackdown not only on bloggers and Web site operators, but also on those deemed a threat to the ruling elite.

This has raised ire with Malaysia’s bloggers and opposition and we hope that the government realises it folly and ceases fighting its political wars on the internet and arresting critics.

We are monitoring this situation and we’ll give more updates as we get them.

This is due to a statement made on Bluestone’s blog referring to a malpractice case against Marina Tylo.

The Citizen Media Law Project sees the case as frivolous.

Unless I’m missing something, this looks like a purely frivolous case, perhaps a situation where sanctions against Tylo are appropriate. As explained in our legal guide [6], section 74 of the New York Civil Rights Law [7] codifies the fair report privilege [8]. Under the statute, speakers cannot be held liable for giving a “fair and true report of any judicial proceeding, legislative proceeding or other official proceeding.”

We will monitor the case and give you further updates.

In their suit Gremach states that the blogger has been on a ‘hate campaign’ and wants Google to unmask the blogger going by the name, ‘Toxic Writer’.  Google in turn have taken down the blog and their Indian subsidiary claims it is not responsible for the Blogger.com service, which is also a subsidiary of Google.

Wired writes that the suit which was filed at Bombay High Court would have far reaching implications on how Google operates in India.

Seeing as Yahoo was all but willing to hand over its user’s information to the Chinese authorities we hope that Google & Co. will resist the urge to focus more on profits than free speech.

The ‘Facebook Youth’ attest to this fact.  This is a group of youth numbering about 64,000 linked to the opposition April 6 Movement, who have and are still using the internet, and are members of a facebook group opposed to  Hosni Mubarak’s government’s human rights and democratic track record.

Thirty members of the group were arrested on July 23 as they were demonstrating opposing Mubarak, arrests have continued till August 4 though most of them have not been formally charged.

Due to ISP connivance with the government most have been using internet cafes to access Facebook though, with new rules requiring the users to fill out their names, email addressess and phone addresses before the use the internet cafes they may now be in jeopardy.

According to Menasaat, many big internet cafes are already enforcing this rule.  The cafes have given out the lame excuse of trying ….”to decrease credit card and identity theft.”

Further to this a draft media bill has leaked to the Egyptian media, which if passed will have the president controlling all video and audio transmissions in Egypt, including the internet.  This will spell doom for Facebook activists, bloggers and website publishers as they will face legal repercussions.

Despite this the activists are undeterred, often checking and passing information to each other about internet cafes which do not enforce the rules, so that others can use them.

According to an email on the UK’s National Union of Journalists’ mailing list, Tom Feely who runs the anti-war and altrenative news site; http://informationclearinghouse.info, was threatened by men who told his wife, ‘….Tom must stop what he is doing on the web…’ and more to that effect.

Two days ago, Tom’s wife found three well dressed men in their kitchen. The man who did all the talking, told Tom’s wife (I won’t give her name) that Tom must “Stop what he is doing on the Internet, NOW!” As crazy as it sounds, he pulled back his lapel and showed her a gun of some kind which she could not identify. Like I said, Tom has been threatened before, but nothing like this. 4 years ago, he was in a parking lot at Long’s Drug store in Southern California and when he tried to open his door to get out, a man in a car next to him opened his door at precisely the same time which prevented Tom from getting out. Then, a 40-ish year old man got out of the passenger side of the vehicle and approached Tom saying, “You need to stop what you are doing on the web”.

Truthseeker tells us that Tom has gone underground, fearing for his life.

We hope that Tom comes out of this all in one piece and that the word gets out.

We will continue to update you on this matter.
 

CPB friend Antony Loewenstein has a new book coming out in September. It’s called “The Blogging Revolution” and will be of interest to anyone blogging in repressive countries or interested in those who do. Here’s the low down from publishers, Melbourne University Press.

The Blogging Revolution is a colourful and revelatory account of bloggers around the globe who live and write under repressive regimes-many of them risking their lives in doing so.

Antony Loewenstein’s travels take him to private parties in Iran and Egypt, internet cafes in Saudi Arabia and Damascus, to the homes of Cuban dissidents and into newspaper offices in Beijing, where he discovers the ways in which the internet is threatening the rule of governments.

Through first-hand investigations, he reveals the complicity of Western multinationals in assisting the restriction of information in these countries and how bloggers are leading the charge for change.

The Blogging Revolution is a superb examination about the nature of repression in the twenty-first century and the power of brave individuals to overcome it.

We have been aware of Antony’s efforts since before he started the book and are looking forward to reading it.

Since Yahoo CEO (for the nonce) Jerry Yang was spanked in public, at a Congressional committee meeting in the U.S. led by Tom Lantos (G-d rest his soul - we’ll miss him before long), at which Yang was forced to apologize to Shi Tao’s mother and was called, along with his confederates, “moral pygmies,” the company has set up a fund for the vicitms of internet repression.  And all it took was a lawsuit and public humiliation by the United States Congress.

I may be wrong, but I can find no current information that this “humanitarian relief” fund has actually been set up. (If anyone has evidence that this thing is real and it’s actually handed out money, please let us know.) I suspect this newest PR move by these companies will be about as sincere as the relief fund. I’d be delighted to shout how wrong I was from the rooftops. Here’s hoping.

More from ReadWriteWeb.

From WalesOnline (via Miss Wagstaff Presents…)

AN Assembly Government civil servant who was sacked for running a political blog is taking his case to an Employment Tribunal…

The former Assembly Government employee, whose real name has not been disclosed but who ran a blog called Christopher Glamorganshire, provided what readers saw as a neutral running commentary on last year’s coalition negotiations involving Labour and Plaid Cymru.

It seems that the civil servant’s contract may have contained language that forbade any activity like blogging. However, others, including a former Assemblyman, described the blog as “written in a sensible and rational manner.”