in

• Issue 2
• Politics and Society

Amnesty International's Irrepressible Info campaign, started in 2006 by The Observer, has been relaunched due to censorship crackdowns in many parts of the world.  An advocate for free expression, it supports bloggers and others who have been persecuted - and often prosecuted - for publishing opinions online that are contrary to government policy.

The campaign also calls on web users to take action against governments who block or censor sites.

At an event to celebrate the launch, Amnesty warned that the online freedom of expression  was changing from a dream to a nightmare for many people, particularly those living under instable governments or in the developing world.

"The virus of Internet repression is spreading," said campaign director Tim Hancock.

"The 'Chinese model' of an Internet that allows economic growth but not free speech or privacy is growing in popularity, from a handful of countries five years ago to dozens of governments today who block sites and arrest bloggers," he said.

Amnesty also said that internet filtering - where governments block selected sites based on keyword filters - was increasing around the world.  The Open Net Initiative (ONI) has named more than two dozen countries with state-mandated filtering including Azerbaijan, India, South Korea, and Thailand.

Social networking sites like Facebook and Flickr are currently blocked in Iran and Pakistan. China filters Google search results.  And Israel, Bahrain and Morocco allegedly manipulated Google Earth maps.

Amnesty condemned internet companies including Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! for helping to suppress online freedoms in China by censoring their web content, releasing personal data that could - and did - lead to arrests and providing filtering hardware.

Individuals are also in the firing line. Earlier this year, 22-year-old Egyptian blogger Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman was sentenced to four years in prison for "contempt of religion" and "defaming the President of Egypt". His case sent a clear message to Egypt's burgeoning blogging community: stay quiet.

Sami Ben Gharbia had his blog ‘fikra' censored by the Tunisian government in 2003, causing him to seek political asylum in the Netherlands.  He has lived there ever since.

"The Internet is a bad thing for two groups: governments who are realising they are losing control of information and are trying to restrict its use and the victims of those governments, individuals who are imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information," he said.

Internet repression isn't limited to the developing world, though.  US blogger Josh Wolf was jailed last year for refusing to hand over videos he shot of a G8 demonstration in 2005.

 

Listen to exiled Iranian blogger Sina Motalebi discuss internet censorship in Iran.