Tag: Technology
YouTube blocked in Morocco
Update: It’s unblocked.
Guardian piece on Egyptian bloggers
I just wanted to note, if any Egyptian bloggers feel slighted by not being mentioned, I wanted to focus on a few cases and, as much as possible, ones that could be read by non-Arabic speakers. In any case, the comments on the piece are very interesting (well, aside from the ones about Israel.)
Syrian Cyber-Dissident Arrested
(RSF/IFEX) – Reporters Without Borders has called for the immediate release of arrested human rights activist Ibrahim Zoro, who regularly posts material on foreign-based opposition websites. It noted that two other people were in prison in Syria for posting similar material.
It said the state security service, whose agents arrested Zoro on 5 April 2007 in Damascus, were “as always, acting quite illegally” and his family had not been told why he was picked up or where he was being held. “It is more like a kidnapping than an arrest,” the worldwide press freedom organisation said.
Zoro, who belongs to Syria’s Kurdish minority, was helping to organise a seminar called “The Philosophy of Lies.” He has posted many articles in Arabic on websites such as the blog Tharway and Mengos.
Zoro, 47, has already spent seven years in prison, from 1987 to 1994, for belonging to the Syrian Communist Party. He is a member of the Committee for the Defence of Democracy, Freedom and Human Rights in Syria.
Journalist Muhened Abdulrahman and writer Habib Saleh are also in prison in Syria for posting material online.
Online Censorship Suit
http://www.hrinfo.net/
The Web site of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (hrinfo)
http://www.hrinfo.net/egypt/hmcl
The page of the Hisham Mubarak Center for Legal Aid, hosted on hrinfo’s site
http://www.afteegypt.org
Web site of the Nur Center
http://wwwshamsannews.net/newsdetails.asp?id=402http://www.eipr.org
The Web site of the Egyptian Inititative for Personal Rights
http://www.hrinfo.net/egypt/hmlc
A typo leads to a 404 page, but it’s named in the suit. The correct URL for the Hisham Mubarak Center is named above.
http://www.hrinfo.net/egypt/elmarsd/
The Urban Center [lit. “Observatory”] for Human Rights
http://www.hrinfo.net/egypt/eojl/
The Egyptian Center for Justice and Law
http://www.hrinfo.net/egypt/nadeem/
The page for the Nadim Center for Victims of Violence, hosted on hrinfo
http://www.hrinfo.net/egypt/eaat
The Egyptian Association Against Torture
http://elsaeedi.katib.org/node/48#comment
A page from a blog concerned with human rights issues
http://harakamasria.org/node/9062#comment-7416
From Kifaya’s Web site
http://gharbeia.net/ar/judgebookreview
Blog that has campaigned for democracy, human rights, and respect for the environment
http://www.alghad.org.eg
Purportedly the Web site of the Ghad Party’s newspaper. Incidentally, this URL was inaccessible from Egypt March 14 using the ISP LINKdotNET.
http://www.gn4me.com/nahda
The Egyptian Renaissance site
http://www.gn4me.com
The Good News company’s site, named as the owner of The Egyptian Renaissance, above.
http://www.alnoor.se/othernews.asp?year=200
Web site of the Nur Center
http://www.shamsannews.net/newsdetails.asp?id=402
Shmasan News
http://www.wna-news.com/inanews/news.php?item3699.6
Web site of the Iraqi News Agency
http://mohamed.katib.org/node/34
Blog post
http://taranim.wordpress.com/2006/02/22/kareemyagod/#comments
Blog post
http://bentmasreya.blogspot.com/2007/02/blog-post_14.html
Blog post
http://www.hrinfo.net/reports/net2004/egypt.shtml
The Egypt chapter of HRinfo’s 2004 report on Internet censorship in the Middle East
http://www.hrinfo.net/reports/re2006/re06-2.shtml
HRinfo report on April-May 2006 crackdown
http://www.hrinfo.net/reports/re2006/#egypt
HRinfo report on Bahrain, Tunisia, and Egypt
Send Spiders
- Abd al-Fattah Murad will likely not be the judge in Abd al-Karim Sulaiman‘s appeal. This would too nice a present to the defense team, who are engaged in a separate legal dispute with the judge and so could clearly not get a fair trial from him. If Judge Abd al-Fattah is on the stand next session, we can all start believing the rumors that the government never wanted to imprison Kareem in the first place. Or we should all be very scared because the government will have dropped its last shred of shame.
- The only source for the suit’s existence remains Egypt’s finest, Rose al-Yusef. Lawyers have had no communication from the courts. A scanned copy of the Rose al-Yusef article is here. It’s possible the lawsuit won’t progress, and that this article (in a paper whose meager readership consists mostly of those who have a professional interest in trying to guess what Security is thinking) is another shot over the bow. [Update: AFP cites “a judicial source” and “sources” to confirm the story]
- His honor reportedly has very good wasta in the Interior Ministry—but less so in the Judge’s Club. It’s unclear whether he has the clout to get the government to change its current policy of not censoring the Internet.
Let’s hope this one dies on the vine. In the meantime, reason enough to be vigilant and for techies abroad to start archiving sites. Release the spiders.
And if anyone from the ICT or information ministries is reading, please read Nart Villeneuve‘s excellent discussion of the pitfalls of Internet censorship for governments. To these I would add economic ill effects. Egypt’s perception as a friendly country for ICT investment, a perception the government has spent millions on fostering, rests in no small part on its policy with regard to online censorship, which is free… and costs nothing. All the Smart Villages, slick IT projects at the Alexandria Library, and UN-prize-winning Web sites will seem like so much expensive window dressing if the government starts censoring blogs, newspaper Web sites, and the Web sites of human rights organizations. Telecom Egypt is looking for a partner to modernize the country’s Internet backbone, at a cost of US$1 billion. And let’s face it, Egypt isn’t China. China will become the largest broadband market in 2007, with 79 million broadband users. When Egypt launched a program to expand broadband access in 2004, it set itself an initial goal of 50,000 users. The difference in GDP is about US$2.13 trillion. Bad publicity ought to seem like more of a liability here.
For the sake of the greater good, Judge Abd al-Fattah, and for the sake of the rights to impart and receive information, please drop this lawsuit. Your good reputation will be better served if you’re known as the man who forgave an insult than if you’re known as the man who censored the Internet.
The same president whose honor you’re so anxious to defend has himself spoken about the importance of ICT in “supporting national efforts toward more freedom, democracy, and respect of human rights.” So, your honor, for the sake of the president and patriotism, for the sake of the next generation of honest, hardworking Egyptians from Aswan to Alexandria, and for the sake of your good reputation, please drop this lawsuit.
URGENT: Lawsuit to be filed to block 21 Egyptian blogs
Rumors have been reaching me for days now, and I received confirmation only today from lawyer Gamal Eid, executive manager of Arabic Network for Human Rights Information.
It seems that Judge Abdel Fattah Morad, head of Alexandria Appeal Court, has started a lawsuit against the government in Egypt’s Administrative Courts in order to block a number of Egyptian websites. The list, 21-websites-long, includes the blogs and sites that took part in the discussion around the book the Judge has written, and the wide plagiarism evident in the book copying HRInfo’s report on Internet Freedoms in the Arab World, and a how-to-blog guide written by blogger Bent Masreya.
Of the 21 blogs and website, I was able so far to confirm Kifaya’s and HRInfo’s websites, in addition to the blogs of Bent Masreya, Yehia Megahed, and my own.
The lawsuit is started by Abdel Fattah Mourad, one of Egypt’s most senior judges–and head of the Alexandria Appeal Court, where imprisoned blogger Abdul Kareem Nabil Soliman’s case is heard next week.
Follow this story as it develops at Arabawy, where the full email is posted. This is the most serious development against bloggers to take place in Egypt, and if a court rules in favor of the lawsuit it will not only be difficult to overturn but also encourage more lawyers to make a name for themselves by filing lawsuits against other sites. As Amr says:
What worries me, however, is that this is a judge whose ruling cannot be appealed. He can silence, imprison or execute people, and he oversees our elections.
Once the blogs are found offensive by the court, then in light of the Egyptian’s regime reputation, it is automatic to prosecute the bloggers. This is an early warning.
Muslim Brotherhood blogs
Until not too long ago there were very few Islamist bloggers in Egypt; it seems this is changing fast.
Bahraini blogger Mahmoud interrogated, sued for libel
I was a guest of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in Adliya this morning. I was called yesterday and asked – very politely – to present myself at the CID’s Anti-Economic Crimes Unit “for a chat and some tea” which I accepted with alacrity and with not a little trepidation. The fear; however, was unfounded.
. . .
Well, a public figure has taken umbrage with what I have written against him, and rather than contacting me to complain, or even entered a public comment refuting what I have written, he went through the legal route and lodged a case against me with the police, which is fully his right of course; however, that is not going to change the subjectivity of calling someone “stupid” or any other adjective used to describe someone or change the fact of his performance in the previous Shura council nor the fact that he has had business cases levied against him at some point of his life.
I am rather disappointed with this situation of course and I am unsure what The Right Honourable Minister His Excellency Mr. Mansour bin Hassan bin Rajab, Esquire, is going to gain from this. This action to me is nothing more than trying to shut his critics up by force of law – if any of these cases actually go to court in the first place – waste the courts’ time and efforts as they do have much more important cases going through them that take years, or at best terrorise his critics into submitting to never criticising him again! Well, this ain’t gonna work with me! I criticise to better this country as a concerned citizen, and shall continue to do so regardless of these frivolous cases.
Good luck to him.
Azimi on Egyptian bloggers
But how threatening, we may wonder, can a handful of bloggers be–and how much of a threat could they be to the twenty-five-year-and-running rule of a leader like Mubarak? After all, many of them are simply tech-savvy twentysomethings recently out of university. And besides, how big a role can bloggers play in a country in which they number just over 3,000–a mere fraction of whom write political content?
Hossam el-Hamalawy runs arabawy.org, a blog that has been central to documenting what he has dubbed Egypt’s very own Videogate. “We’re exploding,” he tells me. “The government didn’t see it coming, and it’s creating a domino effect. You read bloggers in Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, and they take pride in the Egyptian gains. Once you get this far, there’s no going back. You can’t take the plug out.” As recently as January 2005, there were only about thirty blogs in the country. “My dream is that one day there will be a blogger with a digital camera in every street in Egypt.”
Exploding or not, this sort of electronic activism defies facile definitions. No longer simply an upper- or middle-class phenomenon, blogging has become an outlet for expression among a broad spectrum of people. Some bloggers post exclusively from Internet cafes (those without PCs), some are without a university education, many are women. Today there is a blogger in every urban center in Egypt–from the stark Sinai Peninsula to Mansoura in the Nile Delta. Most write in Arabic. Recently one blogger went so far as to set up a site devoted to bringing attention to police brutalities taking place in the Sinai following bouts of terrorism (hundreds, even thousands of Bedouins have been disappeared by state security, often locked away and abused with impunity). Other blogs broach the sensitive subject of how the country’s religious minorities are treated–particularly the Copts, who make up Egypt’s Christian community. Blogs have also been a crucial space for engaging such uncomfortable topics as sexuality, race and beyond. Suddenly, the (improvised) Arabic word mudawena, signifying a blogger, has found its way into the lexicon.
Read it all. One small criticism: quoted stats about print media are not accurate, independent newspapers now play a much bigger role and state press figures are believed to be over-inflated. I don’t think we should underestimate the importance of the feedback loop between the new dailies with websites such as al-Masri al-Youm and bloggers.