Being out about being an atheist can put you on the outs with a lot of theocratic-minded authoritarian types. We received reports this weekend that the outspoken and occasionally controversial blogger Fariborz Shamshiri, who blogs at Rotten Gods, has received threats on his life. Fariborz has a long online career in standing up for human rights including work with Amnesty International Blogs and Freedom House. Read the rest of this entry…

Search Engine’s Jesse Brown: “Canadian/Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan has been held and tortured in a Tehran prison for over a year, without being charged. Both the Canadian and Iranian governments seem content to let him stay there. The media has also largely forgotten his case. Hoder’s imprisonment begs the question: do we only fight for the freedom of dissidents whose beliefs we agree with?” (via Boing Boing)

Canadian/Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan has been stuck in  prison in Iran for over a year and has still not been officially charged with a crime.  What we know to be true is that Hodor has an independent voice that has at times been critical of Iran as well as other governments and individuals.  That the Canadian government should have no complaint about one of its citizens being jailed largely on the basis of content posted online while living in Canada should be an embarassment. We urge the Canadian government to press Iran on the issues and work to free one of its citizens.

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This one is ok, but we would love to host any mashups of otherwise censored information escaping Iran. Send it to us via our contact form and we’ll feature it here and collect the best of them at our forthcoming project on Iran.

Herdict Web is a crowdsourcing site that gathers user-generated reports about Web site accessibility (and filtering) from around the world to draw a real-time image of which sites are accessible and inaccessible, where, and for how long.¬† Users interested in discovering where Twitter is currently blocked, for example, or what news sites are blocked in Iran, can easily find out using Herdict’s Explore function.¬† Although an inaccessible report is not a guarantee of government filtering (many users in the United States, for example, might be reporting from behind workplace filtering), a great number of reports on an ISP in a given country is a good indicator.¬† The Herdict Discussion Board allows users to dig deeper to discover more information about an instance of inaccessibility.

Today, Herdict Web has launched new interfaces in Persian and Russian.  The Persian site is particularly relevant; the Iranian government is said to block nearly 3 million Web sites.  Herdict has already received over 10,000 visits from Iran since its launch in 2009.

The site is also available in English, Chinese, and Arabic.

Today is Hossein Derakhshan‘s 35th birthday. Today also marks one year, two months, and six days since his imprisonment.¬† He has been illegally detained since November 2008. During his confinement he has been tortured, both physically, and psychologically.¬† He has never been charged, or brought before a court.

Today, on his birthday, let’s honor him publicly.¬† Tweet.¬† Blog.¬† Speak out.¬† Call your elected representatives.

“Dear God, In 2009 you took my favourite singer Michael Jackson, my favourite actress Farrah Fawcett, my favourite actor Patrick Swayze, my favourite voice Neda. Please don’t forget my favourite politician Ahmadinejad and favourite dictator Khamenei [Iran's supreme leader] in the year 2010. Thank you.” – Message left on hacked Ahmadinijad website

The Iranian govenment has banned citizens from contact with 60 organizations (on top of previously banned organizations), including Human Rights Watch, the BBC, Voice of America, Radio Farda, Wilton Park, Yale University, the Brookings Institution and the George Soros Open Society Foundation. We haven’t seen the entire list yet, but the fact that the Committee hasn’t appeared in media reports about it indicates that we didn’t make the cut this year. Our new year resolution for 2010 is to make the next round of censorhip picks.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” РMahtma Gandhi

via The Guardian.

Crowdsourcing information for the growing revolution in Iran

Beta launch of Shafaf.org: Crisis mapping for Iran.

Shafaf.org is still under development but the crisis map tool is working, and we’d really appreciate it, in light of events in Iran, if the URL for it was spread around some. Using a beta version of Ushahidi, we’ve started the crisis mapping service for Iran in Farsi, English and French at http://shafaf.org/ushahidi/.

Please pass this around to people inside and outside Iran who have up-to-date information to add regarding acts of repression, violence and censorship.

This site will be undergoing revisions in the new year and will be fully launched with the first non-Beta release of Ushahidi, and are looking forward to it being a showcase site of that tool. In the meantime, we’d like to see it start becoming a resource for grassroots information gathering.