The 13 countries are: Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Myanmar, China, North Korea, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Uzbekistan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan and Vietnam. Three countries were removed from RSF's 2005 list -- Libya, the Maldives and Nepal.
March 14 2007 FT.com story titled Web censorship spreading globally.
The warning comes a week after a Turkish court ordered the blocking of YouTube to silence offensive comments about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, marking the most visible attack yet on a website that has been widely adopted around the world.
A recent six-month investigation into whether 40 countries use censorship shows the practice is spreading, with new countries learning from experienced practitioners such as China and benefiting from technological improvements.
Ronald Deibert, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, said 10 countries had become “pervasive blockers”, regularly preventing their citizens seeing a range of online material. These included China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Burma and Uzbekistan.
New censorship techniques include the periodic barring of complete applications, such as China’s block on Wikipedia or Pakistan’s ban on Google’s blogging service, and the use of more advanced technologies such as “keyword filtering”, which is used to track down material by identifying sensitive words.From the interactive map in the FT.com story that explains what each country is doing, here a few of the countries :
- Cuba
- Internet users: 190,000
- Internet penetration: 2%
- Internet cafés and hotels, among the few places where citizens can go online, contain software that warns users when they use ‘subversive’ words.
- Saudi Arabia
- Internet users: 2.5m
- Internet penetration: 11%
- Authorities openly filter pornography, opposition websites, Israeli publications and sites dealing with homosexuality.
- Egypt
- Internet users: 5m
- Internet penetration: 7%
- Reformist bloggers have been arrested and harassed.
- Iran
- Internet users: 7.5m
- Internet penetration: 11%
- Claims to filter 10 million ‘immoral’ websites including the photo-sharing site flickr.com and YouTube. Women’s rights websites are particularly heavily censored.
- Belarus
- Internet users: 3.4m
- Internet penetration: 35%
- Opposition sites and those critical of the country’s leadership are often blocked.
- China
- Internet users: 137m
- Internet penetration: 10%
- Filters websites related to human rights, the country’s political opposition, Taiwanese and Tibetan independence, the Falun Gong spiritual movement and some international news media. 50 people reportedly in prison for what they have written on the web.
BBC story
Excerpts from a June 6, 2007 article titled Censorship 'changes face of net'
The "virus of internet repression" has spread from a handful of countries to dozens of governments, said the group. Amnesty accused companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo of being complicit in the problem.
More and more governments are realising the utility of controlling what people see online and major internet companies, in an attempt to expand their markets, are colluding in these attempts," he said.
According to the latest Open Net Initiative report on internet filtering, at least 25 countries now apply state-mandated net filtering including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burma, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.
The Amnesty conference - Some People Think the Internet is a Bad Thing: The Struggle for Freedom of Expression in Cyberspace - will have some well-known speakers including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. It marks the first anniversary of Amnesty's website irrepressible.info, which is being relaunched to become an information hub for anyone interested in the future of internet freedom.