Damn Abbas and get silenced in Palestine

So this is the US and Israeli-backed Palestinian government the occupied should be loving? Dictatorship Inc. Shameful. Good reporting by George Hale in Maan:

The Palestinian Authority has quietly instructed Internet providers to block access to news websites whose reporting is critical of President Mahmoud Abbas, according to senior government officials and data analyzed by network security experts.

As many as eight news outlets have been rendered unavailable to many Internet users in the West Bank, after technicians at the Palestinian Telecommunications Company, or PalTel, tweaked an open source software called Squid to return error pages, a… detailed technical analysis… indicates. Several small companies are using a similar setup.… 

The decision this year to begin blocking websites marks a major expansion of the government’s online powers. Experts say it is the biggest shift toward routine Internet censorship in the Palestinian Authority’s history. Aside from… one incident in 2008, Palestinians have generally been free to read whatever they wanted.

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