A senior lawmaker says Iran’s Majlis is considering a plan to cut off the country’s economic transactions with South Korea’s Samsung in reaction to the company’s anti-Iran teaser.

Filtering, denial of service attacks, withdrawal of content – censors use many different methods to silence news websites. In addition to drawing attention to these acts of censorship and providing the victims with legal, material and financial help, Reporters Without Borders has now decided to provide them with technical assistance as well.

So that independent news websites that are targeted by cyber-attacks and government blocking can continue posting information online, Reporters Without Borders is going to start mirroring sites. The first sites to be mirrored are those of the Chechen magazine Dosh and the Sri Lankan online newspaperLanka-e News. We urge Internet users all over the world to create more mirrors of these sites in an act of solidarity.

If a cyber-attack renders Doshdu.ru inaccessible again, as it was during last December’s parliamentary elections in Russia, Internet users will be able to access the exact copy created by Reporters Without Borders, http://dosh.rsf.org. The mirror will be regularly and automatically updated.

Mirror sites can also be used to circumvent blocking by governments. For example, the Lanka-e-News site, http://lankaenews.com, has been blocked in Sri Lanka since October 2011 (by blocking the site domain name or the hosting server’s IP address), but Internet users in Sri Lanka will be able to access the Reporters Without Borders mirror site, http://lankaenesw.rsf.org, which is hosted on another server with another domain name.

If the mirror is itself later also blocked, the creation of further mirror sites together with a regularly updated list of these mirrors will continue to render the blocking ineffective in a Streisand effect.

Reporters Without Borders will soon create other mirrors and urges Internet users who want to help combat censorship and have the ability to host a site on a web server to follow suit. A list of the mirror sites will be updated on this page. If you want to participate, send the URL of the mirror site you have created to wefightcensorship [at] rsf.org. We will add it to the list below. The next mirroring operations launched by Reporters Without Borders will be reported on the @RSF_RWB and @RSFNet Twitter accounts with the #RSFmirror hashtag.

I was asked, alongside a number of other people including John Pilger, Noam Chomsky and Greens Senator Scott Ludlam, to speak about what Wikileaks means for me, as part of a global series called Did You Have Any Idea?

DID YOU HAVE ANY IDEA? – with Antony LOEWNSTEIN (Part 2) from CaTV on Vimeo.

This week, the BBC issued its final ruling on a controversy which has been raging for nearly a year after the words “Free Palestine” were censored from a freestyle rap played on Radio 1Xtra.

Appearing on the popular Charlie Sloth Hip Hop M1X last February, the artist Mic Righteous performed a rap which included the lyrics: “I can scream Free Palestine for my pride/still pray for peace.”

BBC producers replaced the word ‘Palestine’ with the sound of breaking glass and this is the version that was aired and which can be seen on a video on the BBC website(the censorship occurs at 2:59).

The edited performance was repeated in April on the same show.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has spent the last eight months trying to find out why the decision to censor an artist who raised the issue of Palestine was made.

During the course of a long correspondence, the BBC’s head of editorial standards for audio and music, Paul Smith, wrote that the show’s producer “did not edit out the word ‘Palestine’ because it was offensive — referencing Palestine is fine, but implying that it is not free is the contentious issue.”

In that single sentence, a senior BBC executive revealed the BBC’s complete disdain for the Palestinians and their suffering, and its shameful disregard for international law when it is being broken by Israel.

In Egypt and Tunisia we have seen ordinary people come together to claim democracy and human rights in the face of oppressive regimes, with twitter and Facebook the other heroes of the revolution. Are social media and Al Jazeera instrumental in what happened, or are they just the latest communication tools? Can anyone with a mobile phone foment revolution or do the punitive regimes in Syria, Bahrain and Libya show that it takes a whole lot more?

Join our panel: Mona Eltahawy, columnist; Simon Sheikh, international public speaker and national director of the community advocacy group GetUp!; and Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

Salil Shetty appears with the support of Amnesty International.

Chaired by Antony Loewenstein

It’s festival season, the Fringe, Adelaide Festival, WOMAD – and we’re all picking out which events we’ll go to – but what about the neo-Nazi aligned Hammered festival?

It’s to be held in Queensland– unsurprisingly it will be heavy metal music.

The festival is organised by the Southern Cross Hammerskins and ‘white resistance’ group, Blood and Honour Australia, which states it’s mission is to “secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

The event be on April 21 – suspiciously close to Hitler’s birthday.

There have been calls to have it banned but the Labor government has refused to, saying it can’t stop ‘morons’ gathering but it will step in if anyone in attendance incites violence or commits racial vilification.

Tim Brunero spoke to Antony Loewenstein, a blogger, activist, author whose works include My Israel Question and online media contributor for New Matilda and Crikey about the controversy surrounding the event.

This much is known: In its hunt for information about three people it believes to be associated with the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks, the Justice Department has sought to extract details about them and their communications on Twitter. What is not yet known is where else the Justice Department went looking.

On Friday, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked a federal court in Virginia to reveal the names of the other Internet companies from whom the Justice Department solicited information about the three people: Jacob Appelbaum, an American citizen; Birgitta Jonsdottir of Iceland; and Rop Gonggrijp of the Netherlands.

Their case has become a testing ground for online privacy and speech, in part because the Justice Department sought the information without a search warrant in 2010. Instead, it relied on a 1994 law called the Stored Communications Act, and asked Twitter to release information about the three Twitter users. It sought, among other things, their Internet Protocol addresses, which identify and can give the location of a computer used to log onto the Internet. Twitter responded by informing the three about the government’s request – and they, in turn, went to court.