Is it helpful to include arrests like those of Fatah, McClellan, and Aljughaifi in the WIA survey?  I’d argue no.  While it is commendable to analyze the efforts of governments around the world to muzzle bloggers, it is the repression of free speech that is the concern.  By including the arrests of those who happen to be bloggers in their count, the WIA researchers diminish the impact of their report, because they blur the value of that which they mean to defend.

He may be right. Our feelings have always been that, short of arrests for criminal activities such as violence and assault (and child pornography, certainly), we’ll cover threats to bloggers and threatened bloggers and not restrict it to people who were arrested for their blogging. For one thing, it is very difficult sometimes to distinguish the “crimes” bloggers who’ve been arrested have been charged with. What a tyrannous government claims as its motivation and what its real motivations are are quite different.