Egyptian bloggers and activists fight oppressive regime
March 20, 2008
image: jailed Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer
Article: BBC, Crossing Continents
Crossing Continents travels to Egypt meeting remarkable women fighting for their rights in a male dominated society. Egyptian women are fighting against female circumcision, the suppression and imprisonment of internet bloggers, poor pay and for workers rights.
Dalia Ziada is a 26 year old activist and blogger who speaks out against the practice of female circumcision, having been circumcised herself. In Egypt it is estimated that over 90 % of the female population are circumcised. Dalia says the key to change is “to change the mentality of Arab women”.
But bloggers who question accepted religious practices are often threatened and Dalia has been accused of being a spy for the CIA. Dalia is also campaigning for the release of Ayman Noor and fellow blogger Kareem Amer sentenced to four years in jail – three years for insulting Islam and one for insulting the president.
The road to real democracy, Dalia believes, lies through women’s rights. “Validate women and you validate the whole society.”
That is brave talk in a country and a region where, as the 2005 UNDP Arab Human Development Report states “In all cases, real decisions in the Arab world are, at all levels, in the hands of men”.
Listen to their story here; BBC radio (one minute of news first, then listen to Crossing Continents).
Kareem Amer – jailed blogger
The case of Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman, or “Kareem Amer,” as he’s known in the blogosphere, has shed a spotlight on a growing community of bloggers in Egypt, and on the country’s laws concerning online speech.
To give you an idea of what he did to get arrested, here is a translation from his final blog post last October:
The mere existence of legal provisions that criminalize freedom of thought, and threaten with imprisonment anyone who criticizes religion in any way, is a grave defect in the law.
Two days after he posted those words, he was interrogated by Egyptian police. Eventually, he was convicted of violating the same legal provisions he criticized on his personal blog.
A court convicted him of contempt of religion, specifically Islam, and defaming President Mubarak. Though this is the first time a blogger in Egypt has been convicted by a court for blogging, Egyptian bloggers say free speech and political activists are often arrested and detained.
Is Facebook sharing your info with the CIA?
January 15, 2008
…. the CIA would like you to get one (?)
A very interesting Guardian article by Tom Hodgkinson has come out this week showing possible links between Facebook and the CIA.
Jim Breyer is a board member of Facebook. On the board of such US giants as Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment, he is also a former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).
Facebook’s most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock’s senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What’s In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA.
After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which “identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions”.
The US defence department and the CIA love technology because it makes spying easier. “We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries,” defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2003. “We need to make the leap into the information age, which is the critical foundation of our transformation efforts.” In-Q-Tel’s first chairman was Gilman Louie, who served on the board of the NVCA with Breyer.
Are you one of the millions that have Facebook? Do you have many friends? Well you might have at least one more … the CIA.
US police visit blogger’s home.
October 12, 2007
Secret Cuba
October 12, 2007
When Yoani Sanchez, 32, wants to update her blog about daily life in Cuba, she dresses like a tourist and strides confidently into a Havana hotel, greeting the staff in German. That is because Cubans like Sanchez are not authorized to use hotel Internet connections, which are reserved for foreigners.
In a recent “Generación Y” posting (www.desdecuba.com/generaciony/ ), Sanchez wrote about the abundance of police patrolling the streets of Havana, checking documents and searching bags for black-market merchandise.
She and a handful of other independent bloggers are opening up a crack in the government’s tight control over media and information to give the rest of the world a glimpse of life in a one-party, Communist state.
“We are taking advantage of an unregulated area. They can’t control cyberspace out there,” she said.
Luis Sexto, a columnist for the Communist Youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde, recently posted a blistering attack on state bureaucracy at http://luisexto.blogia.com . “Without public criticism, mistakes will continue to hurt our country,” Sexto wrote last month.
A blogger who goes by the name of “Tension Lia” posts mostly photographs of the ruinous state of Havana’s architectural treasures on a blog called Havanascity (http://havanascity.blogspot.com).
The creator of “My island at midday” told Reuters by e-mail message that the anonymity of the blog has allowed him to say some things that nobody has dared write about.
“Dissent has always been frowned upon,” the author wrote. “Intolerance is still the rule in Cuba, even though Cuban society is starting to adapt to diversity of opinions.”
Source: IHT.
