Reuters reports that the¬† Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reported Turkey was blocking 3,700 websites for “arbitrary and political reasons.” What better way to tell the EU you’re ready to hop on board?

“In its current form, Law 5651, commonly known as the Internet Law of Turkey, not only limits freedom of expression, but severely restricts citizens’ right to access information,” said Milos Haraszti, media freedom monitor for the 56-nation Organization. While a number of the sites are pornographic (partial list of blocked sites. It is a work-safe link), blocked sites also include YouTube, GeoCities and Google sites among other political and social focused sites.

The full report can be found here(pdf 636 KB). Web censorship is nothing new in Turkey as CPB member Jillian York pointed out for OpenNet Initiative in 2008. Richard Dawkins’ site was blocked there as well as WordPress, Google Groups and others at various times.

The Committee to Protect Bloggers has signed on to the Libel Reform Campaign in England, which calls on drastic changes to the law. “Freedom to criticise and question, in strong terms and without malice, is the cornerstone of argument and debate, whether in scholarly journals, on websites, in newspapers or elsewhere. Our current libel laws inhibit debate and stifle free expression. They discourage writers from tackling important subjects and thereby deny us the right to read about them.”

Tracey Brown, Managing Director, Sense About Science: “We have to show politicians that small tinkering with the libel laws won’t do – we need a real public interest defence. Otherwise, there will be more cases like those against Simon Singh and Peter Wilmshurst, and the libel laws will continue to be the tools of well-funded bullies who want to silence criticism.”

You can read and sign the petition here.

A Chinese Internet user browses for information on the popular search engine Google. Photograph: Reuters/Corbis

Google announced today that it would stop  sensoring search results in China following a hack attempt the company said appeared to be aimed at gathering information on human rights activists.

On its own blog, the company stated “We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech.”

Great news. A little late and after some bad business, but a step in the right direction, none the less. Maybe only Nixon could go to China.

While google says it will be discussing with China how it will be able to allow unfiltered results into the country from here on out, it seems clear that the government has no intentions of allowing the free flow of informaton to continue without attempts to track who is accessing it. Google should immediately unfilter results and move its offices out of the country, and then more safely promote unfettered web access by channeling some of their incredibly smart staff’s efforts toward projects that protect privacy in China and help more websurfers there quickly and safely bypass firewalls.

Facebook has threatened one of the best ideas online with its legal hounds unless it closes shop. SuicideMachine.com allows people to kill their social profiles on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and LinkedIn with the push of a button instead of hunting through all these sites to do so manually.

Social networks are powerful tools for communications and sharing, and pretty much everyone on the Committee uses one or more of them regularly. I’ve got profiles on 12 or more. Four I actually look at regularly. But it’s easy to see how the habit can get out of control, and the ability to opt out should always be in plain sight, but unfortunately it’s usually buried somewhere under a mound of setting options. Suicidemachine.org’s aim is to bring the option back to the forefront.

I attempted to kill my long dorment Myspace page as the site has grown disgustingly bad and I haven’t looked at it in about a year now. As of this writing, a message pops up saying the service is down due to too many service requests, but one wonders whether it has anything to do with the Cease & Desist order sent by Facebook legal bullies. Read the rest of this entry…

Electronic Frontiers Austrailia reports that the government will begin blocking websites listed in a top-secret document beginning in 2010.

EFA says that “while this is sold as a kid-friendly measure, to ‘improve safety of the internet for families‚Äù, it‚Äôs clearly nothing of the sort. A few thousand URLs hardly constitutes a national net nanny. The list would almost be laughable if it was not only mandatory but secret ‚Äì unlike censorship decisions made in other media, blocked URLs will remain secret and expressly excluded from freedom of information requests. Just as worrying is the fact that once this list is in, a conga-line of special interests will be approaching the government to have their pet peeves added to the list. It‚Äôs not much of a stretch to imagine AFACT (Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft) clamouring to have bittorrent trackers added, and several parliamentarians are on record calling for a ban on pro-anorexia sites and pornography in general.”

I guess we will have to wait for the inevitable Wikileaks leak to see who really makes the list.

WSJ.com reports that Iranian expats are being targeted through social networks by the government. This journal story includes one Facebook user they identify as “Koosha,” who received threats from the government over his criticism of the repression of demonstrations in Iran, which he posted on Facebook. He received a message stating his family in Tehran would be arrested if he didn’t stop criticizing the government.

“Two days later, his mom called. Security agents had arrested his father in his home in Tehran and threatened him by saying his son could no longer safely return to Iran.

‘When they arrested my father, I realized the email was no joke,’ said Koosha, who asked that his full name not be used.”

The evidence is more than annectdotal. The Wall Street Journal investigation found that the Iranian intelligence agency is keeping tabs on nearly 900 critics of the Iranian regime in Germany alone, according to a report from that government.

The report itself should send a chilling message to people wanting to express their opinions about the internal situation of Iran online. The Committee does not suggest that people refrain from publishing their honest opinions online. In fact we encourage it. However, people should go in with eyes open and take whatever precautions they feel necessary.

“To cut communication between Iranians inside and outside the country, Iran slowed Internet speeds so that accessing an online email account could take close to a half-hour. It blocked access to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. For a while, an automated message warned people making international phone calls not to give information to outsiders.” – WSJ.com

Creating different accounts with false names may be a better way of expressing outrage or posting content that may put a person or their family at risk.¬† The Iranian government is looking to match social profile photos to photographs they’ve taken of demonstrators at their embassies abroad. It may be a wise decision to up the security settings of your online photos or change your profile photograph to an illustration or image that doesn’t depict you.

If you’re being targeted by the government, we’d like to hear from you. Contact us via our form online.

The left is Google's search results in China and on the right it's how an unfiltered view would be.

Click on the image above (or here) to see the full size. On the right we see what results would display when a Google image sercher in China searches for “tiananmen square protest” and on the left we see what someone would see without the government mandated filter. (From the Censorship Research Center’s twitter page)