Showing all posts tagged censorship
Wikileaks and Assange remain rightly defiant
In a new interview with Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings, Julian Assange outlines what is at stake in America’s determination to prosecute him for daring to expose its dirty little secrets: In diplomatic cables, the investigation into WikiLeaks by the U.S. government has been called “unprecedented both in its scale and nature.” How much do you…
What the internet can (and cannot) do to hasten revolutions
My book The Blogging Revolution was recently released in India in an updated edition.… Here’s a pretty good review of it by J Jagannath in a leading Indian newspaper, Business Standard: The little spark that the Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi ignited in December 2010 to torch himself in retaliation against corruption has engulfed the…
Big Brother shouldn’t be listening but he does 24/7
When this kind of information circulates around the world… Freedom of speech might allow journalists to get away with a lot in America, but the Department of Homeland Security is on the ready to make sure that the government is keeping dibs on who is saying what. Under the National Operations Center (NOC)’s Media Monitoring…
Iran takes a path towards internet isolation
Sigh (via the Guardian): Iran… is clamping down heavily on web users before parliamentary elections in March with draconian rules on cybercafes and preparations to launch a national… internet. Tests for a countrywide network aimed at substituting services run through the world wide web have been carried out by Iran’s ministry of information and communication technology, according…
#Occupy, Arab Spring and uprisings are here to stay
2011 was a year unlike many others. Change was in the air. Revolutions, protests and demands for equality. In the West. In the East. In the Arab world. It’s something I examine in the updated edition of my book The Blogging Revolution (recently released in India). A new book by Paul Mason, Why It’s Kicking…
First they came for the Tweeters
There are growing signs of collusion between the Zionist lobby, fundamentalists who want the government to tell us what to hear and see and politicians such as Joe Lieberman who never saw a war against Muslims they didn’t like. Now this. It must be resisted: Twitter has been threatened with legal action by an Israeli…
Just what the world doesn’t need; US politicians telling us what to read online
This is the inevitable push by the “war on terror” crowd who have no problems with war propaganda from our side – the glorious fighting machines of Israel, America, Britain or the West – but the evil enemy must be silenced: American congressmen are calling on Twitter to block Taliban propagandists from the micro-blogging site.…
Name and shame Western firms helping autocrats monitor own citizens
When I wrote The Blogging Revolution in 2007 and 2008, I couldn’t imagine the ever-increasing focus on Western “security” firms working alongside repressive states to censor and spy on their people. I investigated this in the book (and the latest 2011 edition, just published in India, examines the reality during the Arab revolutions). Bloomberg has…
Inside the Syrian uprisings and why regime change should be challenged
Events in Syria are notoriously murky and these days reliable information is scarce. I’m often asked about my views on the uprisings against President Assad and what kind of Syria I would like to see. My book The Blogging Revolution – just released in an updated format in India – examines the role of the…