Las dictaduras contra los bloggers

Reporters sans frontières denuncia abusos:

Control
Espionaje
Censura
Encarcelamientos
Torturas

Traditional “predators of press freedom” - Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Libya, the Maldives, Nepal, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam - all censor the Internet now. In 2003, only China, Vietnam and the Maldives had imprisoned cyber-dissidents. Now more countries do. A score of bloggers and online journalists have been thrown in jail in Iran since September 2004 and one of them, Mojtaba Saminejad, has been there since February 2005 for posting material deemed offensive to Islam. In Libya, former bookseller Abdel Razak al-Mansouri was sentenced to 18 months in prison for making fun of President Muammer Gaddafi online. Two Internet users have been jailed and tortured in Syria, one for posting photos online of a pro-Kurdish demonstration in Damascus and the other for simply passing on an e-mailed newsletter the regime considers illegal. A lawyer has been in jail in Tunisia since March 2005 for criticising official corruption in an online newsletter. While a UN conference was held in Tunis in November 2005 to discuss the future of the Internet, this human rights activist was in a prison cell several hundred kilometres from his family. A grim message to the world’s Internet users. Censorship of the Web is also growing and is now done on every continent. In Cuba, where you need permission from the ruling party to buy a computer, all websites not approved by the regime are filtered. The situation has worsened in the Middle East and North Africa. In November 2005, Morocco began censoring all political websites advocating Western Sahara’s independence. Iran expands its list of banned sites each year and it now includes all publications mentioning women’s rights. China can now automatically censor blog messages, blanking out words such as “democracy” and “human rights.” Some Asian countries seem about to go further than their Chinese “big brother.” Burma has acquired sophisticated technology to filter the Internet and the country’s cybercafés spy on customers by automatically recording what is on the screen every five minutes.

Y hay quienes desde la comodidad de sus blogs se desgarran las vestiduras por la moderación de comentarios. Me dan mucha pena. No tienen idea de lo privilegiados que son de poder participar libremente del mercado de las ideas.