Campaign gives voice to censored bloggers
Alarmed by the repression of bloggers in China, Iran, Egypt and other nations, human-rights group Amnesty International hopes to seed the Web with their censored thoughts.
Visitors to Amnesty’s new Irrepressible.info can copy a bit of code that enables them to display censored content on their blogs. Snippets of suppressed text appear in ad-like info boxes on participating sites under the headline, “Someone doesn’t want people to read this.” The result is a ghostly grapevine of obliterated opinions and neutered news.
Reloading the blog Max Randor Speaks several times Friday morning yielded the following snippets: “Mr. Abdul Rahman Shaghouri was arrested for surfing sites with special interests to Syrian current affairs” … “These wars have especially impacted women and children” … “They also need to allow independent medical experts into the camp” … “reports that Iran’s Telecom company has ordered all ISPs to filter blogrolling.com” … “You can challenge governments and those who hold power.”
That last line echoes the campaign’s main theme. As Irrepress- ible.info puts it, “The more people take part the more we show that freedom of expression cannot be repressed.”
While grassroots bloggers publicize the plight of their censored colleagues, Congress is attempting to shame high-tech firms including Microsoft, Google and Yahoo into resisting the impulse to help China and other repressive governments crack down on dissidents.
At a February hearing of a U.S. House human-rights subcommittee, congressmen on both sides of the aisle took turns blasting representatives of those companies for helping China censor Web searches, silence activist bloggers and gather information that led to the jailing of a journalist.
The companies contend that working with China and other repressive regimes will ultimately open up their societies. They also stress their obligations to observe the laws of the nations where they do business.
But members of the House panel weren’t receptive to those arguments. A typical comment came from subcommittee Chairman Chris Smith, R-N.J.: “If the secret police asked half a century ago where Anne Frank was hiding, would the correct answer be to hand over the information to comply with the local laws?”
And the sides are still at logger- heads. Just last week, Yahoo CEO Terry Semel told an audience at a digital technology conference in California he was angry that China had used information provided by his company to crack down on dissidents. Semel said Yahoo limits its cooperation in such matters as much as possible, Marketwatch reported.
“What’s the alternative?” he asked. “To walk away?”
With Egypt indefinitely detaining six bloggers so far this year, China locking up more than 60 online activists last year and Iran recently sentencing a blogger to 30 lashes with a whip, the answer to Semel’s question might ultimately be “yes.”
Drilling Down
The Spokesman-Review’s most popular blogger, Dave Oliveria, hasn’t been jailed or flayed recently — as far as we know. But Idaho’s Kootenai County Commission recently banned courthouse employees from accessing Oliveria’s Huckleberries Online blog from their work computers.
The ban lasted from May 25-June 1, when the commissioners rescinded it in the face of public ridicule. It was a silly abuse of power, and it appears to have backfired by actually boosting Oliveria’s readership.
In the seven days before the ban, Huckleberries Online drew 19,386 unique visitors — a robust figure bolstered by Oliveria’s frequent posts during Idaho’s May 23 elections. But during the weeklong ban — which included a slow-traffic Memorial Day — Huckleberries boasted 20,404 unique visitors.
“I wish I had a buck for every fellow journo who has congratulated me for having government leaders so thick that they’d issue a ban,” Oliveria chortled in a recent post. “A journalist lives to be banned.”
Just leave the bullwhips to Indiana Jones.