Turkey blocks sites like these wholesale, even if the offender is one single video, then requires their owners to jump through a preposterous number of hoops to get them unblocked. YouTube insists it’s complied and has still not been unblocked.

Additionally, two Turkish free speech sites, Antenna-tr and Ortakpayda, were hacked on July 24th by an ultranationalist group.

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 official document to the Turkish police, demanding that Ebrahimi be immediately deported to Iran.

Because of the intervention of an US diplomat and international NGOs, Ebrahimi was released at noon on Friday. He took a plane back to Berlin, Germany, and arrived there in the afternoon.

Ebrahimi has been imprisoned before in Iran. Originally a member of the paramilitary Basij and Sepah forces, Ebrahimi later got degrees in fine arts and international law. In 2000, he appeared in a controversial videotape where he confessed a link between the Iran’s religious and political leaders and the violent actions of a paramilitary group known as „Ansar-e Hezbollah“. Ebrahimi was subsequently sentenced to prison, where he spent two years. He then left the country to Germany, where he was granted political asylum. Amir Farshad Ebrahimi continued his work as a peace and human rights activist as a doctoral student at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, majoring in human rights.

Simon Columbus | Blogger for Freedom

***

Thanks to Simon, who wrote this report. He’s our first contributor. He has his own human rights site and has begun to help FreeKareem.org as well.

Slide is speaking to the Turkish government and reaching out to Turkish users. Let’s hope they don’t join YouTube/Google and Microsoft in accommodating censorship, but find a different way.

The popular video website YouTube has been blocked in Turkey once more. Several sources quote complaints against a video that insults Atatürk, founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, as the reason for the block. On Friday, internet users in Turkey found the website replaced by a notice saying:

“Access to this web site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2008/55 of T.R. Ankara 12th Criminal Court of Peace.”

A Turkish court issued a similar order in March last year, after a row between Turkish and Greek users escalated and resulted in insults of Atatürk. Internet service providers such as Türk Telekom (the largest and and formerly state-owned ISP) can use the domain name system to put the ban into effect.

It’s unclear what the rationale was for this block. The Wikinews piece also claims the block was in March and was ended after three days. But they seem to have missed the one in September. Have I got this wrong? Can anyone weigh in?

The decision followed a complaint by a resident in the eastern city of Sivas that the site hosted videos containing insults against Turkey’s founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, President Abdullah Gul, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the army, the Anatolia news agency reported…In March, the country’s largest telecommunications provider, Turk Telekom, blocked access to YouTube on a court order following a clip that allegedly insulted Ataturk.

As MEY notes, YouTube’s earlier ban was lifted after it agreed to assist in Turkish censorship efforts. YouTube denies this. (I know, I’m as shocked as you.) But considering their behavior in Thailand, where they did this very thing, the amoral company’s shill doth protest too much, methinks.