FREE SPEECH ROUNDUP: TURKEY, RUSSIA, PAKISTAN, INDIA
by Sami Ben Gharbia
Global Voices Online, MA –
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 @ 16:22 UTC
(1) YouTube blocked in Turkey again. (2) Russian LiveJournal user
faces prison over fictional story.
(3) Blogspot.com blocked again in Pakistan. (4) Mumbai police planning
to install keystroke loggers in cyber cafes.
Turkey Blocks YouTube. Again.
For the second time in a year, a Turkish court ordered, on Tuesday
September 18, to block access to YouTube.com over videos deemed
insulting to the country’s leaders.
The decision followed a complaint by a resident in the eastern city of
Sivas that the site hosted videos containing insults against Turkey’s
founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, President Abdullah Gul, Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the army.
It’s a tumultuous time for YouTube in Turkey. A wave of controversy
over an ultra nationalist video praising the assassination of Turkish
Armenian journalist Hrant Dink posted on the video-sharing site has
made its way into the pages of country’s most popular newspapers-and
to the courts. According to Turkish Daily News, Dink’s lawyers said
the video "incites people to commit hate crimes by abusing race and
religion and by praising a murderer." They lawyers are preparing to
file a complaint.
In March of this year, the country’s largest telecommunications
services provider, Turk Telekom, blocked access to YouTube for two
days, following a court decision deeming that videos appearing on the
site were insulting to the father of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk,
and to the Turkish people.
On August 17, 2007, the Turkish Fatih Second Civil Court of First
Instance blocked access to the entire wordpress.com domain after
lawyers for Turkish Islamic-creationist, Adnan Oktar, aka Harun Yahya
alleged that a blog hosted on wordpress.com contained material that
libeled their client.
Russian LiveJournal blogger could face three-year sentence
The 23-year old Russian blogger, Dmitry Shirinkin, who posted a
fictional story on his blog inspired by the Virginia Tech shooting,
could face up to three years in prison (read the whole story on
Global Voices).
Dmitry Shirinkin was running a LiveJournal blog under the name
"tetraox" and wrote about buying a gun and killing number of people
in one of the city’s colleges. He is being accused of "falsely warning
of a terror threat."
"The Prosecutor’s Office analysed Dmitry’s blog and concluded he had a
desire to shoot dead a dozen people," Russia Today reported. However,
Shirinkin’s defense is requesting a language analyst to give his expert
opinion on the controversial text. The trial has been adjourned to
September 20th.
In an interview with Russia Today (see the video above), Shirinkin
said "I didn’t expect that a short writing piece could provoke such
reaction from the security services. They interrogated me asking
where my gun was, but I’d never had one."
According to Russia Today, even before the trial Dmitry was already a
popular figure, as he had been awarded the title of the best blogger
in the region.
Russian bloggers are rightly concerned that Shirinkin’s case might
set a bad precedent for the country’s Internet users.
Another Russian Livejournal blogger is facing a two-year prison
sentence or a fine of 100,000 rubles (US$4,000) for "inciting hate"
against police.
According to the Komi regional prosecutor, the allegedly offensive
message-which has been deleted from the site-by the 21-year old
Savva Terentyev contains "a direct call aimed at inciting hatred or
hostility, as well as harming the dignity of … a particular social
group: policemen."
Pakistan: blogspot.com blocked again
Don’t Block The Blog reported that access to the popular blogging
platform blogspot.com, which is owned by Google Inc, has been blocked
again in Pakistan:
For about four months (since May, 2007) Google fortunately had changed
the IP address of its Blogspot servers. The new IP addresses were
not demarcated as prohibited by the censorship filters located at
the Pakistan Internet Exchange. Today, for some odd reason, Google
has suddenly reverted back to its original IP address, which has been
on the block list since March of 2006. This move has resulted in the
blocking of all internet traffic to the blogspot.com domain. Millions
of blog readers in Pakistan now are unable to read or and interact
with any of these websites.
The "Don’t Block The Blog" (DBTB) campaign was launched in response
to the blanket ban on the Blogspot.com blogging platform instituted
by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) on March 3, 2006.
Read our earlier interview with Omer Alvie, the co-founder of (DBTB),
about the blanket ban and the Pakistani campaign to support online
freedom of speech.
Mumbai police to monitor cyber-cafes
In support of its war against terrorism, police in Mumbai, India,
are planning to install keystroke loggers in the city’s cyber
cafes. According to Vijay Mukhi, President of the Foundation for
Information Security and Technology:
The police needs to install programs that will capture every key
stroke at regular interval screen shots, which will be sent back to
a server that will log all the data. The police can then keep track
of all communication between terrorists no matter, which part of the
world they operate from.This is the only way to patrol the net and
this is how the police informer is going to look in the e-age.
This new monitoring software, CARMS (Cyber Access Remote Monitoring
System), that Mumbai’s police are requiring the city’s 500 Internet
cafes to install, "will capture every keystroke by users and turn
that information over to the government – nearly in realtime by the
sound of it," said the Indian journalist Amit Varma.