Category Archives: Arrests and Imprisonment

“Total Censorship in the Air”: How the Thai Junta Has Policed Online Media

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It has been over a month since Thailand’s military junta, the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), overtook the country’s government during a May 22 coup. Since then, the NCPO has aimed to consolidate political control of the country, an impulse that has filtered down to controlling nearly every minute facet of citizens’ public and private life. Citizens in Thailand can’t gesture with Hunger Games-like salutes, nor can they read such texts as Orwell’s 1984 and Filipino revolutionary Jose Rizel’s Noli Me Tangere in public spaces. Those acts, the junta claims, are expressions of radicalism.

2014 Thai Coup, via Wikimedia Commons.

The NCPO has increasingly moved this strategic policing online. They have ordered Thai ISPs to shut down over 200 sites. Some casualties of this call for censorship include Prachatai, an independent online newspaper; the Asia and Thailand subpages of the Human Rights Watch, which published an incriminating report detailing the country’s 2010 Red Shirt protests; and Facebook, which was blocked for a day on May 28 before the NCPO swiftly unblocked it, citing a “glitch” that activists have chalked up to a social media “kill switch.” When the government tried to set up a meeting with Facebook and Twitter to discuss tactics for censoring anti-junta impulses on social media, the companies in question didn’t show.

Police forces have warned citizens against “liking” any anti-government posts on social media. Last week, news emerged of a Facebook phishing ploy orchestrated by the government – one in which Thai netizens were tricked into giving their personal information, contained in their Facebook accounts, by being asked to “log in via Facebook.”

Access Now recently reported that the junta is now organizing governmental panels that will surveil all facets of national media, extending to online media platforms. The junta is offering monetary incentive to those citizens who turn in photos, videos, or other incriminating evidence of people criticizing the junta.

Lisa Gardner of PBS MediaShift attributes this censorship to the junta’s desire to foster a sense of allegiance towards its regime. For many citizens, the Internet is largely losing its function as a forum through which netizens can access information, share opinions, and fight against the climate of fear engendered by the junta, whom Gardner claims is trying, in earnest, to convince Thailand’s citizenry of its good intentions.

2010 Red Shirt Protests, via Wikimedia Commons.

Writing in Global Voices Bridge, an anonymous Thai journalist described firsthand the current situation as one in which citizens can “feel total censorship in the air.” The journalist notes that Thailand’s history of military takeovers, such as 2010’s aforementioned Red Shirt protests, saw a similar shutdown of media outlets. This created a political climate in which lack of informational access, coupled with an online media milieu that is curated excessively by Thailand’s junta, led to citizen compliance with human rights atrocities – a risk the anonymous journalist feels may be presented by the NCPO’s current hold over online communication outlets.

#IMWeekly: June 27, 2014

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Australia
A potentially invasive surveillance bill due to be introduced to Australia’s parliament in July is inspiring resistance within the country. The bill aims to target potential jihadists and other terrorists who may be spreading violent rhetoric in their online networks. Prime Minister Tony Abbott claimed that jihadists who have been radicalized by their experiences with al-Qaeda and its offshoots may threaten national security, spreading their hateful rhetoric online. As such, this bill would give the Australian government power to store public metadata.

Egypt
In a climate of political uncertainty, the Egyptian government has sought to extend its hold over its citizenry by creating a media monitoring software that will understand multiple forms of written Arabic. The system, built to read both colloquial and Romanized Arabic, would allow the government to access the digital footprints of various citizens who may be harboring oppositional thoughts online. Human Rights Watch’ Cynthia Wong warns that such a move would restrict Egyptian’s netizens from expressing themselves fully and totally online, noting that the Internet has played a significant role in empowering independent voices of reform in Egypt.

Iraq
As the reality of stifled internet connectivity intensifies in Iraq, netizens are finding cunning ways around these blockages. FireChat, a smartphone app that doesn’t require an internet connection, has seen an unprecedented surge in downloads and consumption since June 14. Iraq, Bloomberg reports, ranks just behind the United States in terms of daily smartphone usage, making FireChat a widely-used form of communication in the country.  A Citizen Lab report released earlier this month also concluded that ISIS filters placed upon websites in Iraq have been largely ineffective, while the use of Psiphon and Tor has increased significantly in the wake of the internet shutdown.

Russia
This week, Russia’s Interior Ministry drafted a ten-year strategy to fight extremism – a strategy that could lead to online surveillance of netizens. Extremism is broadly defined under Russian federal law, ranging from hate crimes to armed revolution. The strategy aims to counter politically radical movements from the bottom up, targeting information sources and netizens spreading extremist rhetoric online. News of this plan emerges during a week when Colin Cromwell, Twitter’s head of global public policy, visited Russia and agreed to block “extremist accounts” under the demands of Russia’s Alexander Zharov, the chief of Russian federal communications agency Roskomnadzor.

Thailand
Since last month’s coup, Thailand’s junta has increasingly clamped down on pro-democracy movements online. For weeks, the “liking” of Facebook pages dedicated to anti-coup groups has been outlawed, while numerous pro-democracy websites have been blocked. IFEX reported that the junta is now deceiving netizens into unveiling their personal details through a deceptive Facebook phishing app, through which users are encouraged to “log in” with their personal information that is stored in their Facebook profiles. This faulty, fake app is in violation of Facebook’s own policies, and it was suspended twice by Facebook as a result. Access also reports that the junta has recently set up five media monitoring panels that intend to surveil social media for any dissenting opinions.

#imweekly is a weekly round-up of news about Internet content controls and activity around the world. To subscribe via RSS, click here.

This is Zone Nine: The Continued Imprisonment of Six Ethiopian Bloggers

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There’s a prison, hidden in the suburbs of Addis Ababa, named Kality. Home to many of Ethiopia’s political prisoners, the prison is divided into eight zones. The last of these zones, Zone Eight, is home to detained journalists, human rights activists, and dissidents.

Free Zone 9 bloggers campaign image. Created by Hugh D’Andrade, remixed by Hisham Almiraat; via Global Voices Advocacy.

To some Ethiopian netizens, there is a Ninth Zone – a Zone dedicated to the “proverbial prison in which all Ethiopians live”. In 2012, a group of passionate Ethiopian bloggers launched Zone Nine, a blogging collective that, in its own words, “blogs because it cares”. Zone Nine prides itself on providing a counter to the opinions, voices, and attitudes that dominate Ethiopia’s press.

The six arrested Zone Nine bloggers; via Global Voices Advocacy.

In April 2014, six of Zone Nine’s bloggers – along with three print journalists suspected of associating with the group – were arrested on the grounds that they were covertly receiving money from foreign human rights organizations to incite violence through social media.

63 days have passed since their detention. The bloggers have appeared in court continually over the past few months while being detained in Addis Ababa’s Maekelawi detention center. No formal charges have been leveled against them as of yet. That said, activists fear that these bloggers and journalists will suffer the same fate that befell Eskinder Nega and Reeyot Alemu, two journalists imprisoned and charged with terrorism (a crime that carries heavy fines and a lengthy prison term) in 2011.

The collective has blogged about numerous political issues affecting the Ethiopian populace, hoping to bolster civic discourse in service of social change. In the wake of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s death, for example, Zone Nine penned scathing critiques of Zenawi’s proclaimed economic development achievements, casting doubt on his legacies. They also partnered with Global Voices to launch Global Voices in Amharic in 2012, hoping to make international news accessible to local readers.

Since its inception, Zone Nine has amassed a passionate readership within the country. According to its own bloggers, Zone Nine’s stories have occasionally been picked up by wider-known publications within the country, signaling wider support for the messages it has broadcasted. Outside of Ethiopia, the detention of the Zone Nine bloggers has ignited public furor. Global Voices launched a #FreeZone9Bloggers hashtagging campaign and organized a FreeZone9Bloggers Tweetathon on May 14, while UN High Commissioner Navi Pillay criticized Ethiopia’s increasing frequency of charges against journalists on the grounds of terrorism.

 

 

The arrests arrive in the context of what some activists fear is a growingly repressive media milieu in Ethiopia. For years, journalists – on and offline – have been susceptible to governmental terrorism charges. The Committee to Protect Journalists has claimed that more journalists have fled Ethiopia since May 2013 than in anywhere else in the world. An ambiguously-worded anti-terrorism law, mobilized in 2009, gave the Ethiopian government the power to act against any form of political dissent so long as it is deemed “supportive of armed opposition activity”. The passage of this law has led to the arrest and detention of scores of journalists.

Recently, this fight against journalists has moved online, with Ethiopian governmental officials moving to counteract online criticism of their efforts by training blogging recruits to attack any online criticism of the administration (a practice known as astroturfing). The government has trained over 230 bloggers since May, teaching them how to post comments that sing the praises of the regime on social media—a particularly interesting move, given that less than 2% of Ethiopia’s population has Internet access.

#IMWeekly: June 20, 2014

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Hong Kong
On the eve of a referendum about voting rights this week, Hong Kong’s digital voting platform was hit by a massive DDoS attack. Today is the first of three days of voting for Hong Kong citizens, who will decide whether to offer universal suffrage, seen as a move that would weaken the influence of Beijing-sponsored candidates. Now in its fourth day, the DDoS attack is being called “one of the largest and most persistent DDoS attacks in the history of the Internet” by the company CloudFlare, which has been contracted to defend the voting platform and said that the attack reached a scale of 300Gb per second today. The attack is widely suspected to be the work of pro-Beijing groups, who oppose the referendum. The vote is unofficial, meaning that its results will have “no legal effect,” according to a statement by the Hong Kong government. More than 200,000 ballots have already been cast. For more information, see our earlier post on the attacks.

Iraq
The spiraling violence as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) sweeps across Iraq prompted the Maliki government to cut Internet access in the country. Last Friday, sites including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were blocked across the nation. Two days later, the government issued orders to ISPs to shut down all Internet access in five of the country’s 19 provinces. The Atlantic reported this week that ISIS is particularly effective at using “gaming Twitter” to push its message and recruit new followers. More information can be found in our blog post about the shutdown.

Pakistan
Twitter announced that it would no longer censor tweets deemed “blasphemous” by the government. In a statement, the company said that it had “re-examined the requests and, in the absence of additional clarifying information from Pakistani authorities, [had] determined that restoration of the previously withheld content is warranted.” Though hailed as a victory for freedom of expression in Pakistan, the decision drew attention to Twitter’s murky takedown policy, which it has declined to make public.

Tajikistan
Reporters Without Borders reported that YouTube has been blocked and Google is only partly accessible in Tajikistan since June 12. Blocking has surged in the country over the last two years, usually around times of political tension like last November’s presidential election. On Monday, a Global Voices contributor and the publication’s former Central Asia Editor, Tajik-born Alex Sodiqov, was detained while conducting academic research in the eastern part of the country. The government has allegedly shown him on national television “in an apparent attempt to discredit both him and an opposition politician.” More information can be found in our earlier blog post on Sodiqov’s detainment.

United Kingdom
Revelations emerged this week that the British government has been using a legal loophole to scrutinize its citizens’ social media communications. Charles Farr, director general of the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism, revealed that posts and other communications made on platforms like Facebook and Twitter are considered “external communications” because they’re routed through foreign companies. This means that even missives traded by British nationals in the UK, who are usually afforded significant privacy protections, are fair game for government interception—without a warrant—because the data leaves British shores before reentering.

#imweekly is a weekly round-up of news about Internet content controls and activity around the world. To subscribe via RSS, click here.

A Scholar, not a Spy: The Detainment of Alexander Sodiqov

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Khorog is a remote and mountainous Tajik town. It’s situated in the country’s volatile Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province (GBAO), geographical and political worlds away from Dushanbe, the country’s capital and political epicenter. Khorog has, in recent years, been regarded as as a hotspot for the festering of anti-Dushanbe sentiment. Since July 2012, it has been a site of deadly clashes between the government and opposition forces. Alexander Sodiqov, a Tajik-born PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto, traveled to Khorog to conduct fieldwork for a project on the role of international actors, states, and civil society in Central Asian conflict management. While there, he met with Alim Sherzamonov, an opposition leader based in GBAO, for the purposes of this research. His research would meet an abrupt end on June 16, when Tajikistan’s State Committee for National Security (GKNB) detained Sodiqov, who is also the former Central Asia Editor for Global Voices.

Sodiqov and his family, via Global Voices Advocacy.

Though the reasons for his detainment were initially vague, the GKNB soon claimed that Sodiqov was acting on “subversion and espionage.” Sodiqov’s arrest comes amid claims by GKNB officials that foreign spies are enacting “a big geopolitical-ideological game” to destablize the country. Two days after his detainment, Sodiqov appeared on Khorog local state television reading a forced statement subtly disparaging Sherzamanov. Viewers described him as pale and confused-looking in the video. Sodiqov’s arrest coincides with the partial blockage of both YouTube and Twitter in Tajikistan since June 12, a move many activists fear is a reaction to public discourse that is critical of President Emomalii Rahmon. The past few years have seen blockages of this nature in spades, from such widely-used social networks as YouTube, Twitter, and VKontakte to independent news agencies and websites. Months ago, in the run-up to the presidential elections, YouTube was blocked after a video of Rakhmon drunkenly dancing at his son’s wedding surfaced online.

Many activist organizations have mobilized to advocate for Alex’s release. Some media freedom advocates have launched the #FreeAlexSodiqov Twitter campaign to raise awareness of his arrest, while such organizations as Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, and Avaaz have begun petitions and released official statements condemning the detainment. Fellow academics have banded together to form Scholars for Sodiqov, insisting that his academic work was anything but politically-motivated espionage. A website has also been launched to advocate for his release.