When Tunisian strongman Ben Ali was chased out of power last January, after a month's escalating protests, his documents begun to disappear. It was not all nefarious goings-on. In many of the situations, the simple fact that old government and personal sites weren't being kept up meant the documents they held disappeared in the blink of an eye. Brian Whitaker is taking steps to preserve them.
Whitaker's site Al-Bab (the door or gate in Arabic), was an important source of information during the revolution and during further expressions of the widespread Jasmine Revolutions. He discovered that he couldn't access some important documents and began gathering them together via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
On April 5th, two days after the arrest of artist and architect Ai Weiwei, 250,000 Facebook users disappeared, according to Shanghaist. Citing data from SocialBakers, a Facebook metrics site, they discovered not a tapering off, as of loss of interest, but a sudden, instantaneous drop-off.
Two things are contemporary with this unexplained decline: the arrest of Ai Weiwei amid an overall crackdown on dissidence and dissidents, and Facebook's negotiations to create a Chinese social network with search giant Baidu.
For the first time since Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak was chased from power, a blogger has been sentenced to a jail term. Maikel Nabil Sanad, a veterinarian, blogger and conscientious objector, has been sentenced to three years in prison for criticizing the military.
Sanad was arrested last month, amid violence directed by the military, or elements of the military, against those protesters who remained in Tahrir Square in Cairo.
Bahraini blogger Zakariya Rashid Hassan al-Ashiri died Saturday while in custody of the country's security services.
According to Al Jazeera, the official statement said that al-Ashiri was "held since the second of this month on charges of inciting hatred against the regime and the promotion of sectarian" and his death was a result of "sickle cell anemia."
There's increasing concern in China and worldwide about the detention of leading Chinese artist and activist, Ai Weiwei. Reports first surfaced on Sunday U.S. that Weiwei had been detained by China authorities, while at the Beijing Airport on his way to Hong Kong. Weiwei is a prolific Twitter user, but his account hasn't been updated since Sunday (it's also translated into english). CNN reported today that China's ruling Communist party "unleashed a blistering attack" on both Weiwei and the West for criticizing the apparent arrest.
Many of China's own citizens are voicing their concern on China's leading Twitter-like service, Sina Weibo. To do this, users must creatively route around active censorship on Weibo.
Ai Weiwei was arrested yesterday at the Beijing Airport on his way to Hong Kong, the New Yorker reported. Ai, China's best known artist, a global star and designer of the Beijing Olympics stadium, the Bird's Nest, had plans to possibly leave China to live in Germany, where he had set up a studio, according to Deutsche Welle.
We cover threats to free speech here, especially when those threats intersects the Web. Sometimes we know the people involved, as is the case with Ai. Our founder, Richard MacManus, took part in an historic conversation a year ago in New York with Ai.
Today, the OpenNet Inititative has released a report on the roles Western tech companies have played in enabling repressive Arabic regimes to filter and control the use of the Web by their citizens.
In the report, authors Helmi Noman and Jillian C. York "find that nine countries in the region utilize Western-made tools for the purpose of blocking social and political content, effectively blocking a total of over 20 million Internet users from accessing such websites."
"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." -- George Santayana
In a ringing blow to Iranians (one of the champions of online repression), the ruling party of Sudan has gone one step further and dressed its online dissident-crushing apparatus up in divine drag. Calling them "cyber-jihadists," they have promised to unleash them on anyone thinking of speaking their mind in the increasingly hermetic country.
