Countries Least Tolerant of Internet Freedoms

DenzBenz

DenzBenz

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Reporters Without Borders issued its annual report on countries least tolerant of Internet freedoms:

Enemies of the Internet: China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

Countries Under Surveillance: Australia, Bahrain, Belarus, Eritrea, Malaysia, Russia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates.

Source: Reporters Without Borders

THE HILL's Technology Blog, Hilicon Valley, reported that many of the states on the list are authoritarian in structure, meaning free expression restrictions pervade all media. But Reporters Without Borders expressed special concern about the fact it had to include Australia and South Korea in its report -- two states with democratically elected lawmakers. Both states have recently ramped up their Web censorship regimes. In particular, Australia has examined ways to put in place an online content filtering system, which would block access to sites with "offensive material." While some local lawmakers support the legislation's aims, the proposed regulation would give the Australian government vast, ambiguous leverage to define what, exactly, qualifies as "offensive."
 
More governments are censoring the Internet

According to Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF or Reporters Without Borders), an increasing number of governments are trying to control the Internet.

As well as having a total Internet blackout, for example in North Korea, Burma and Turkmenistan, governments are also choosing to implement stringent censorship measures, blocking things like Twitter, the short messaging service, and severely depriving their citizens of the many benefits of being on the net and technologically aware. And the number of countries choosing to do that may be a lot higher than you expect.

"In 2009, some sixty countries experienced a form of Web censorship, which is twice as many as in 2008. The World Wide Web is being progressively devoured by the implementation of national Intranets whose content is "approved" by the authorities," reads the report. "It does not matter to those governments if more and more Internet users are going to become victims of a digital segregation. Web 2.0 is colliding with Control 2.0."

Where the Internet is locked down, and dissidence is actively discouraged, the threat of punishment is often followed by the real thing, and in fact, the RSF said that there were over one hundred bloggers currently in detention for expressing their views.

"For the first time since the creation of the Internet, a record number of close to 120 bloggers, Internet users and cyberdissidents are behind bars for having expressed themselves freely online.The world's largest netizen prison is in China,which is far out ahead of other countries with 72 detainees, followed by Vietnam and then by Iran, which have all launched waves of brutal attacks on websites in recent months."

Source: The Inquirer
 
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