Political repression of cyber-dissidents

Political repression of cyber-dissidents is the oppression or persecution of people for expressing their political views on the Internet.

Along with development of the Internet, state authorities in many parts of the world are moving forward to install mass surveillance of the electronic communications, establish Internet censorship to limit the flow of information, and persecute individuals and groups who express "inconvenient" political views in the Internet. Many cyber-dissidents have found themselves persecuted for attempts to bypass state controlled news media.  Reporters Without Borders has released a Handbook For Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents and maintains a roster of currently imprisoned cyber-dissidents.

Iran
Mohamad Reza Nasab Abdolahi was imprisoned for publishing an open letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His pregnant wife and other bloggers who commented on the arrest were also imprisoned.Connor, A. (2005), Not just critics, BBC News, 20 June 2005.  Retrieved on 29 November 2006.

Saudi Arabia
Raif Badawi, Saudi Arabian writer and activist and the creator of the website Free Saudi Liberals, has been convicted of crimes including "setting up a website that undermines general security" and "ridiculing Islamic religious figures." He was sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes in 2013, then resentenced to 1000 lashes and ten years in prison plus a fine of 1 million riyal (equal to about $267,000). His wife, Ensaf Haidar, asserted that Raif will not be able to survive the flogging.

Egypt
Several bloggers in Egypt are arrested for allegedly defaming the president Hosni Mubarak or expressing critical views about Islam.Egypt arrests another blog critic, BBC News, 20 November 2006.  Retrieved on 29 November 2006. Blogger Kareem Amer has been convicted to four years of prison.

China

Chinese Communist Party general secretary Hu Jintao ordered to "maintain the initiative in opinion on the Internet and raise the level of guidance online," referring to censorship and ensuring online messages in China toe the party line. China's Hu vows to "purify" Internet, Reuters, 24 January 2007 China is reported to have "an internet police force – reportedly numbering 30,000 – trawl[ing] websites and chat rooms, erasing anti-Communist comments and posting pro-government messages."War of the words by Guardian Unlimited, 20 February 2006 However, the number of Internet police personnel was challenged by Chinese authorities.Ｗho are China's Top Internet Cops?  Amnesty International blamed several companies, including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, of collusion with the Chinese authorities to restrict access to information over the Internet and identify cyber-dissidents by hiring "big mamas".Amnesty International joins multi stakeholder initiative on internet and human rights

It was reported that departments of provincial and municipal governments in mainland China began creating "teams of internet commentators, whose job is to guide discussion on public bulletin boards away from politically sensitive topics by posting opinions anonymously or under false names" in 2005. Applicants for the job were drawn mostly from the propaganda and police departments. Successful candidates have been offered classes in Marxism, propaganda techniques, and the Internet. "They are actually hiring staff to curse online," said Liu Di, a Chinese student who was arrested for posting her comments in blogs.China's secret internet police target critics with web of propaganda, by Jonathan Watts in Beijing, 14 June 2005, Guardian Unlimited

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ma Zhaoxu objected to a question from foreign journalists regarding a cyber-dissident, stating that "there are no dissidents in China". Ai Weiwei believes that, by this statement, the government is effectively stating that: all dissidents are criminals, only criminals have dissenting views, anyone who believes China has dissidents is a criminal, and ultimately China does not have any dissidents because they are criminals.

Russia

In 2006 journalist Vladimir Rakhmankov published an article on the Internet where he named Vladimir Putin "the nation's phallic symbol". A regional court found Rakhmankov guilty of offending Vladimir Putin and fined him to a sum of 20,000 roubles (~US$680).Media freedom watchdog condemns conviction of journalist in Russia

In June 2013 a criminal case was opened on opposition blogger Stanislav Kalinichenko for retweeting a photograph of a leaflet reading "Enough demonstrating—it's time to act!" signed by a group calling itself the First Resistance Detachment and calling for the destruction of corrupt officials' property. Kalinichenko was charged with Criminal Code 280 ("calling publicly for extremist acts"), carrying a 4 years prison sentence. The human rights organization Memorial has characterized the charges as politically motivated.

In March 2014, on orders from the Attorney General, the government blocked the blog of opposition leader Alexey Navalny on the grounds that it disseminated extremism. In December 2015 Facebook complied with an order from the Attorney General to block Russian users' access to an event page by organizers of an unsanctioned rally in support of the Navalny brothers. All reposts of the event disappeared from users' walls. In addition, the supervisory body Roskomnadzor ordered a Ukrainian news website to delete a story about the protest.

In March 2014 historian Konstantin Zharinov was charged with advocating extremism, after using the "share with friends" VKontakte feature on a public appeal by the Ukrainian militant group Right Sector. Zharinov was placed under surveillance, and his participation in anti-war demonstrations and pickets in support of Alexey Navalny featured prominently in the investigation.

On 11 March 2022, Belarusian political police GUBOPiK arrested and detained editor of Russian Wikipedia from Minsk Mark Bernstein, who was editing the Wikipedia article about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, accusing him of the "spread of anti-Russian materials" and of violating Russian "fake news" law.https://www.yahoo.com/now/mark-bernstein-russian-wikipedia-pages-detained-in-belarus-104102452.html

Tunisia
Lawyer and human rights defender Mohammed Abbou was imprisoned for criticizing torture on a web site.Two years behind Tunisian bars for speaking out  Statement by Amnesty International

Bangladesh
Asif Mohiuddin, a winner of The Bobs-Best of Online Activism award, was imprisoned by the Bangladesh government for posting "offensive comments about Islam and Mohammed". Deutsche Welle state "Asif's blog was one of the most read web pages in Bangladesh and is known for its strong criticism of religious fundamentalism and Bangladesh's 'anti-people politics

International organisations, including Human Rights Watch,"the government is abandoning any serious claim that it is committed to free speech", said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch." Amnesty International, Reporters without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists have condemned the imprisonment of bloggers and the climate of fear for journalists.

The head of Reporters without Borders Asia-Pacific commented on the murder of writer Avijit Roy noting "It is unacceptable for [police] to spend so much time searching news outlets, arresting journalists, censoring news and investigating bloggers, when the many attacks on bloggers are still unpunished."

Vietnam
Nguyen Vu Binh was imprisoned for writing about violations of human rights, and Truong Quoc Huy was arrested for discussing political reforms in an Internet chat room.Free Vietnamese Internet dissidents!, Statement by Amnesty International  Nguyen Vu Binh was released in June 2007.

Pakistan

In January 2017, four bloggers known for their anti-religious and pro-democracy activism went missing. Altogether, their disappearances alarmed secular liberals involved in social activism in Pakistan.

United States
Australian whistleblower, activist and founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange became a dissident after publishing secret documents that proved American war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

See also

 Cyber-dissident
 Internet censorship
Sociology of the Internet
 SORM, Russia's electronic surveillance program

References

External links
The Internet and Human Rights by Amnesty International
Today, our chance to fight a new hi-tech tyranny by Guardian Unlimited

Category:Internet-based activism
Category:Internet censorship
Category:Cyberwarfare

Along with development of the Internet , state authorities in many parts of the world are moving forward to install mass surveillance of the electronic communications , establish Internet censorship to limit the flow of information , and persecute individuals and groups who express " inconvenient " political views in the Internet .

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To go further
“War reporters” - RSF’s new video campaign Khadija Ismayilova’s release is just the start!

Question: what are state authorities trying to do to limit the flow of information

Answer: Internet censorship

what are state authorities trying to do to limit the flow of information

Question: state authorities in many parts of the world are moving forward to install mass surveillance of electronic

Answer: censorship

Question: what are state authorities moving forward to install in electronic communications

Answer: mass surveillance

what are state authorities moving forward to install in electronic communications

Question: what are state authorities moving forward to install

Answer: mass surveillance of the electronic communications

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Question: who is moving forward to install mass surveillance of electronic communications

Answer: state authorities

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Question: what are state authorities moving forward to do to limit the flow of information

Answer: establish Internet censorship

what are state authorities moving forward to do to limit the flow of information

Question: state authorities in many parts of the world are moving forward to install mass surveillance of what

Answer: electronic communications

Question: what is the purpose of internet censorship

Answer: to limit the flow of information

what is the purpose of internet censorship

Iran Mohamad Reza Nasab Abdolahi was imprisoned for publishing an open letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei .

Weblog Watch started in response to criticisms of weblogs as vapid, self-obsessed hot air.
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WEBLOG WATCH
The Magazine's review of weblogs
By Alan Connor
But there are parts of the world where blogging risks a fate far worse than some snarky comments by columnists.
Take Mohamad Reza Nasab Abdolahi, for example. "Insulting the country's leaders and making anti-government propaganda" is just another part of the day in some parts of the blogosphere, but in Iran, it's a serious criminal charge.
Abdolahi had published an open letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on his blog, Webnegar, and found himself facing six months in jail and a fine of one million rials. When his pregnant wife wrote about this on her own weblog, she too had her computer seized and was taken to prison.
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Webnegar
And then as other bloggers commented on these arrests, they were in turn imprisoned, with Arash Sigarchi getting a 14-year sentence on charges of spying and aiding foreign counter-revolutionaries. This has not gone unnoticed in the blogosphere: earlier this year, the Committee To Protect Bloggers announced Free Mojtaba and Arash Day, for two of the more recent arrests, and reported 10,000 visitors.
This scrutiny is one way in which bloggers are trying to stick together, and the feeling is that even mentioning incidents where blogging has been restricted helps in a small way: banners and links to keep the issue alive.
Not so long ago, many blogs were not unlike LiveJournal diaries: all personality quizzes and LOLs, but the form is versatile, it's developed, and some bloggers are getting serious. Very serious.
And outside of the West, that change has been fast. A good example is given by Dinesh Wagle, who set up Nepal's United We Blog! resource. He writes about how things have changed since King Gyanendra sacked the government (click here for the BBC's Q&A on the crisis):
Bloggers at United We Blog! who were blogging about their dating, family gatherings and fascination with Google desktop search suddenly found themselves one morning without internet connection in the whole country. When the Internet service resumed 8 days after the February 1 royal takeover, they sensed the urgency of blogging about things other than dating: how newspapers have been severely wounded by the censorship, how pro-democracy demonstrations are taking place in different parts of the country.
Since then, posts at United We Blog! have been more forthright and greater in scope: one entry, in fact, concerns the Iranian bloggers mentioned above and begins:
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A Nepalese journalist arrested after demonstrations against media restrictions
Iran is a country being ruled by Islamic fundamentalists. Nepal is a country being ruled by royalist fundamentalists. Our situation is not different.
Just as blogs provided a different kind of reportage on life in Iraq since 2003 (examples include Baghdad Burning and Where Is Raed?), so has it been possible to follow developments in Nepal, such as the army arriving at the TV stations, shootings at protests and the King's Peace Bond financial experiment.
Many Nepalese bloggers choose to remain anonymous, such as "Kathmandu" of Radio Free Nepal, while Wagle now wonders about his role as "the Salam Pax of Kathmandu", and takes umbrage at mainstream media describing Nepal as "one of the world's poorest and most backward nations", retorting:
I fully agree with that line and want to add that we are poor by economic standard, yes, but not so poor when it comes to thinking and implementing ideas. Imagination has no boundaries and it has to do nothing with money. A beggar could very well imagine himself being another Bill Gates.
Is it worth the risks? The bloggers think so, and are clear that their audience is not just the wired Nepalese, estimated as 300,000 of a 23 million population: they too want to forge links with blogs abroad and "raise issues in cyberspace where powerful and influential people of the international community do visit".
They'd also like some tech support. Blogs are immensely useful for independent journalists, since they require little technical savvy, are often hosted abroad, and link together in ways which help to spread the world. The main con against these pros is that the available blogging tools are, unsurprisingly, not written in Nepalese.
As well as reducing the ease of entry, this also means that the tools play havoc with some characters from the alphabet used in Nepal, but things may be about to change.
In Iran, Hossein Derakhshan who blogs at Editor: Myself, tweaked blogging software to make it work in Farsi, leading to a rich world of Persian weblogs, including Mansour Nasiri's Photoblog, The Lonely Rave and How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Write The Blog.
The NGO Reporters Sans Frontiers is trying to work on this, as well as highlighting other censorious states in their Freedom Blogs Awards. This being the blogosphere, it's not just the Iranian and Persian regimes that are disgruntled by RSF's efforts: Bloggledygook gives a sense of those who are questioning the organisation's funding and tarring them "neo-con crusaders" for criticising the same countries that the White House is thought to have issues with.
On the ground, though, this is likely to make little difference. As the tools become more usable, they're open to all: supporters of Ayatollah Khamenei and King Gyanendra can blog too. And with Google News, which doesn't generally carry weblogs, including reports from United We Blog!, the stakes are a lot higher. In places like Nepal and Iran, the big questions about weblogs are questions about the future of a free press. It's enough to make you forget about "Comments Spam" for a moment.
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites.
If there's a blog you would like to suggest for inclusion, please let us know about it here.
The BBC may edit your comments and not all emails will be published. Your comments may be published on any BBC media worldwide.

Question: who was mohamad reza nasab abdolahi imprisoned for publishing

Answer: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

who was mohamad reza nasab abdolahi imprisoned for publishing

Question: who was mohamad reza nasab abdolahi imprisoned for

Answer: Ali Khamenei

who was mohamad reza nasab abdolahi imprisoned for

Question: what was mohamad reza nasab abdolahi imprisoned for publishing

Answer: an open letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

what was mohamad reza nasab abdolahi imprisoned for publishing

Question: what was abdolahi imprisoned for publishing

Answer: an open letter

what was abdolahi imprisoned for publishing

Question: what country was mohamad reza nasab abdolahi imprisoned

Answer: Iran

what country was mohamad reza nasab abdolahi imprisoned

Question: what happened to abdolahi

Answer: imprisoned

He was sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes in 2013 , then resentenced to 1000 lashes and ten years in prison plus a fine of 1 million riyal ( equal to about $ 267,000 ) .

His wife , Ensaf Haidar , asserted that Raif will not be able to survive the flogging .

“I suppose you thought to punish me for not writing”, said Private Frederick John White in a letter to his brother on 25 June 1846. The soldier, a 27 year-old south Londoner enlisted in the 7th Queen’s Own Hussars, apologised for not being in touch with his family due to “a great deal of trouble” he had been through. He did not mention the flogging. A few days earlier, White, under the effects of alcohol, had had an argument with his sergeant and, during the fight he had stroked the sergeant’s chest with a metal bar. As a result, the Martial Court had sentenced White to 150 lashes.
When John White was found dead in his dorm, two weeks after writing the letter of apology to his relatives, the skin on his back had healed. After performing an autopsy within Hounslow Barracks, the medical army officers declared that his death was in no way connected with the flogging he had received almost a whole month earlier. White’s body was just about to be buried when the coroner for Middlesex decided to hold a judicial inquiry. The coroner was Thomas Wakley, a surgeon, medical journalist, and also the Lancet’s founder – and an ardent anti-flogging campaigner. The inquest into the Hounslow case sparked a national outcry. The post mortem examination of the soldier’s corpse, extensively reported by the Victorian press, provoked a burning political and medical debate on the effects of flogging on the health of a human being.
General of the British Empire, Sir James Charles Napier, in his Remarks of Military Law wrote that sentences of thousands lashes were common at the end of the eighteenth century. These were divided into instalments: when the skin had started to heal it was time to whip again. Flogging in the military, navy, schools and private homes was a common disciplinary measure in the nineteenth century. In order to discipline the mind it was considered necessary to discipline the body. Then, the skin was intended as a body’s shield.
Thomas Wakley. A photograph of a portrait by W H Egleton, after K Meadows. Image: WikiCommons
As one of the witnesses told the coroner during the inquiry, blood had appeared between White’s shoulders after twenty lashes had been given. A regimental farrier kept on flogging until the fiftieth; he then handed over to his colleague so that he could have a rest. After fifty more had been given he took the whip again and inflicted the final fifty lashes. The farriers used the cat o’ nine tails, a tool made up of nine knotted thongs of cotton that could be found in veterinary shops. The punishment lasted half an hour: one lash every twelve seconds. The colonel and the regiment’s doctor stood with their arms folded. Neither of them checked the soldier’s pulse. A reader of the Times wrote to the editor that had the regimental doctor put his fingers on White’s wrist he would have found that at each lash his pulse faltered.
The coroner asked many questions to find out how many lashes a human being can endure. This was not because he thought that this number could be established but only to show the jury and the reporters that the number could not be quantified. It was unpredictable, and depended on variables such as the type of whips, the number of knots that the whips may form and, the external temperature. According to the press, 1846 recorded an unusually hot summer and this might have impaired the ability of White to recover. Then you have the experience of the floggers. They often undertook a sort of training to learn how to flog, using a tree trunk as a body. They were not supposed to break the skin and, as the Lancet reported, experienced hands knew that the lash should have fallen in the small area between the shoulders only. But as a Victorian pamphlet recited: “performers and skin materially differ, accidents sometimes happen”.
Dermatologist Erasmus Wilson was called by Wakley to perform a third autopsy on the body of White. Wilson, by analysing the cutaneous layer and the organs underneath, argued, in times prior to the discovery of the effects of bacteria in the bloodstream, that there was a connection between the external lacerations caused by the lashes and the internal state of the organs. According to Wilson, the injuries resulting from flogging were confined to the skin but the flogging was followed by inflammation of the internal organs and pulpy softening of muscles. The jury’s verdict, given on 4 August 1846, was that Frederick John White died from the mortal effects of the flogging that he had received at Cavalry Barracks in Hounslow.
On returning the verdict the jury called upon the public to send petitions to the British Legislature for the abolition of this form of military punishment. Less than a week after the end of the inquest, the Duke of Wellington established a limit of fifty lashes to be given for military corporal punishment. When flogging in the army was legally abolished in 1881, a few people knew it was still in law. John White was not the only person who had died after a flogging but this was the occasion on which the explanation for a dynamic relationship between superficial marks and injuries left on the body and internal organs of the punished was used as a political argument against corporal punishment. The back of the soldier furnished the script for marking an advancement in the history of the anti-flogging campaign in Britain.

Question: who is raif's wife

Answer: Ensaf Haidar

Question: how long was raif sentenced to in prison

Answer: seven years

how long was raif sentenced to in prison

Question: how many lashes did raif receive in 2013

Answer: 600 lashes

how many lashes did raif receive in 2013

Question: what is the fine of 1 million riyal

Answer: $267,000

Question: what was the fine for raif

Answer: 1 million riyal

Question: how many lashes was raif sentenced to in 2013

Answer: 1000

how many lashes was raif sentenced to in 2013

Question: how much did raif have to pay in fines

Answer: 1 million

Egypt arrests another blog critic, BBC News, 20 November 2006.

Egypt Several bloggers in Egypt are arrested for allegedly defaming the president Hosni Mubarak or expressing critical views about Islam .

Egypt arrests another blog critic , BBC News , 20 November 2006 .

Police in Cairo have detained a blogger whose posts have been critical of the Egyptian government.
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Ayyoub's blog has posted criticism of the government
Rami Siyam, who blogs under the name of Ayyoub, was detained along with three friends after leaving the house of a fellow blogger late at night.
No reasons have been given for Mr Siyam's detention. The other friends were released after being questioned.
Human rights groups have accused Egypt of eroding freedom of speech by arresting several bloggers recently.
BBC Arab Affairs analyst Magdi Abdelhadi says blogging in Egypt is closely associated with political activism in a culture where democratic freedoms are severely restricted.
In recent weeks, bloggers have been exposing what they say was the sexual harassment of women at night in downtown Cairo in full view of police who did not intervene.
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Bloggers are at the centre of Egyptian political activism
Mr Siyam's host on Saturday night, Muhammad Sharqawi, was detained for several weeks earlier this year.
The most recently detained blogger, Abdel Kareem Nabil, was detained in Alexandria on 6 November and was charged with disrupting public order, inciting religious hatred and defaming the president.
Amnesty International says Mr Amer appeared to have been detained for expressing critical views about Islam and Egypt's al-Azhar religious authorities.

Question: what was the name of the blog that was arrested in 2006 in egypt

Answer: BBC News

what was the name of the blog that was arrested in 2006 in egypt

Question: what religion did several egyptian bloggers criticize in 2006

Answer: Islam

what religion did several egyptian bloggers criticize in 2006

Question: which egyptian president was arrested in 2006 for allegedly defaming

Answer: Hosni Mubarak

which egyptian president was arrested in 2006 for allegedly defaming

Question: when was bbc news arrested in egypt

Answer: 20 November 2006

Question: what were several egyptian bloggers arrested for in 2006

Answer: defaming the president Hosni Mubarak

what were several egyptian bloggers arrested for in 2006

Question: which egyptian leader was arrested in 2006 for allegedly defaming

Answer: president Hosni Mubarak

which egyptian leader was arrested in 2006 for allegedly defaming

Question: in which country were several blogger arrested in 2006 for allegedly defaming the president

Answer: Egypt

Question: for what reason were several egyptian bloggers arrested in 2006

Answer: expressing critical views about Islam

for what reason were several egyptian bloggers arrested in 2006

China Chinese Communist Party general secretary Hu Jintao ordered to " maintain the initiative in opinion on the Internet and raise the level of guidance online , " referring to censorship and ensuring online messages in China toe the party line .

According to Mao Zedong, power comes through the barrel of a gun. These days, however, it is more likely to come through the barrel of a pen - or the sensors on a keyboard.
China is in the midst of a guerrilla war, a conflict against the world's biggest censor that is very much in keeping with the information age. In the 1940s, Mao's communist rebels used hit-and-run tactics to sap the morale - and eventually defeat - the numerically superior but morally bankrupt nationalist forces. This time, it is journalists, bloggers and dissidents who are probing the defences of a more powerful but equally despised enemy: the propaganda department of the Communist party.
Media battles are nothing new in China, where the best journalists have been quietly pushing at the boundaries of free speech for more than 20 years. But the past week has seen a very public and international escalation of hostilities.
After the sacking of three leading editors and the closure of Freezing Point - a respected publication - some of the country's most influential liberals have joined forces and fought back, using new technology and a rediscovered boldness not seen since the late 1980s.
The fired editor, Li Datong of Freezing Point, was the first to talk of a "guerrilla war" with the propaganda department. Another, Chen Jieren, editor of the Public Interest Times, launched a web campaign to rebut the authorities' claim that he lost his job because of personal problems.
Fighting back rather than accepting punishment is unusual, but not unprecedented. What has been astonishing - and what should alarm the authorities the most - is where their support has come from.
In a joint letter, 13 retired officials, academics and lawyers - including Li Rui, the former secretary of Mao Zedong - called for the easing of censorship, new laws to protect press freedom and the reopening of Freezing Point. "History demonstrates that only a totalitarian system needs news censorship, out of the delusion that it can keep the public locked in ignorance," they wrote. "Depriving the public of freedom of expression so nobody dares speak out will sow the seeds of disaster for political and social transition."
The signatories were a Who's Who of liberal elders, many of whom dictated media policy during the flowering of free expression in the 80s. They included Zhu Houze, a former chief of the propaganda department; Hu Jiwei, the former editor-in-chief of People's Daily - the mouthpiece of the Communist party; Li Pu, former vice-president of Xinhua News Agency.
This old guard declared the closure of Freezing Point a "major historic incident", a claim that was sharpened by the background - widespread discontent with the Communist party; and the timing - the same week that the US Congress took Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to task for collaborating with the censors in Beijing.
But the real force for change is technology rather than politics, as the censors are the first to admit. "The internet is now the main influence on public opinion," a government official responsible for internet surveillance tells the Guardian. "The people who get their information from the web are the most active sector of society - 80% of web users are under 35. So our government pays more and more attention to the internet because it is so important."
That attention does not appear to be paying off. "On the bulletin boards, most of the comment about the party is negative," admits the official. "We need to work on that. We cannot ignore public opinion, especially when it is allied to technological change."
At first sight, China's 111 million online population seems studiously apolitical. Most just chat, play games, download music and watch porn, like everywhere in the world. Very few would consider themselves interested in politics, which has become something of an old-fashioned word, let alone democratic activism.
Yet there is lively debate on the internet that is largely critical of the Communist party, blamed for corruption, injustice and restrictions on the web. Print journalists are among the most active and the most influential voices on the web, which they use to publish what the censors block from newspapers and magazines. Many were furious about the closure of Freezing Point, but their frustrations - and ambitions for change - stretch back far further. "There is a big change in attitude among journalists," says one former editor, who asks to remain nameless. "The Communist party always claimed to be on the side of the public, but most journalists and editors no longer believe this. They want to write reports that reform society, that hold the authorities to account. This is now mainstream thinking. It wasn't 10 years ago."
Another editor, who - like many of the reformers - was a student during the 1989 Tiananmen protests, agrees. "I think our generation may be a revolutionary one. Not in the old sense, but in the way we embrace change, very rapid change. We want more democracy."
Many had hoped for a loosening of controls when Hu Jintao became president three years ago. The early signs were good. During that year's Sars crisis, journalists enjoyed wide freedoms to expose cover-ups and contributed to the sacking of the health minister and the Beijing mayor. It did not last. MediaGuardian has learned that former president Jiang Zemin wrote a letter to the politburo that summer warning that the media were running out of control. Since then, China has gone through a prolonged tightening. Prominent journalists have been arrested, publications closed, websites blocked, blogs shut down. Internet cafes are supposed to register all users and monitor which sites they visit. New filtering software has been introduced to limit access to "spiritually impure" information, which includes positive references to the Dalai Lama, Taiwanese independence or the Falun Gong spiritual movement.
An internet police force - reportedly numbering 30,000 - trawls websites and chatrooms, erasing anti-Communist comments and posting pro-government messages. Even foreign internet giants have been press-ganged into the biggest censorship operation in history. In order to do business in China, Microsoft does not allow the word "democracy" to be used in a subject heading for its MSN Spaces blog service; Google last month restricted search results for the Tiananmen Square massacre; and Yahoo handed over private email information that reportedly led to the conviction of two internet dissidents.
Yet even with the sophisticated filtering software, the collaboration of internet giants and the increasingly heavy-handed crackdowns on dissidents and journalists, the propaganda department appears to be losing the battle for hearts and minds. It is partly because there are so many ways around the restrictions, including the use of proxy servers to reach blocked websites and the use of slang terms to discuss sensitive subjects in chatrooms. It is partly because the volume of information available online is so huge that even an army of internet police can not cover all billion-plus webpages, 111 million users, more than 5m blogs, countless bulletin boards, numerous languages and a vast smorgasbord of images. English results turn up far more sensitive information than those in Mandarin. Pictures of demonstrations - which cannot easily be filtered by keyword - are widely available.
But the main reason why the propaganda department is losing credibility is that its message has become even more out of date than its technology. China is getting richer, but its 1.3 billion people are becoming more divided. Demonstrations - usually sparked when corrupt officials seize land for development - are now commonplace. Even the central government appears to be struggling to rein in avaricious local leaders, who treat their territories like personal fiefdoms. For the past three years, many journalists feel they have been encouraged by Beijing to go out into the provinces and expose bribery, pollution and lax industrial safety because central government officials cannot otherwise get reliable information let alone implement the law.
But every scandal tarnishes the ruling party. The media may still be state controlled, but that does not mean the journalists are on their side. The Communist party is in trouble - there are guerrillas in its midst - and the crackdown suggests its leaders know it. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders, 32 journalists and 81 internet dissidents are in jail.
For the moment, the authorities still have the upper hand. But the past week has brought closer together some of the most powerful opinion-formers from China's future and its past: the angry young online and the retired old guard. The propaganda authorities are now wedged uncomfortably between the two.
Pressure is also building overseas, particularly in the US. At a congressional hearing this week, Yahoo, Microsoft, Cisco and Google were accused of sacrificing principles for profits in colluding with Beijing's censors.
Many influential Chinese bloggers believe the media furore surrounding them miss the point. "These are regarded as simply western exercises in self-absorption, self-indulgence and self-flagellation, and completely alien to the Chinese situation," says Roland Soong, in his EastSouthWestNorth blog.
Others strike a distinctly nationalist tone, saying Washington should mind its own business. "The freedom and rights of the Chinese people can only be won by the Chinese people themselves," says Zhao Jing, who blogs under the pen name An Ti. "The only true way of solving the internet blockage in China is this: every Chinese youth with conscience must practise and expand their freedom and oppose any blockage and suppression every day. This is the country that we love. Nobody wants her to be free more than we do."
Whether because of young bloggers, old cadres or US congressmen, the Chinese authorities are - at least temporarily - on the defensive. As well as retired cadres joining forces, another previously unheard of event took place last week: a press conference by the normally secretive Internet Affairs Bureau of the State Council. "No one in China has been arrested simply because he or she said something on the internet," insisted Liu Zhengrong, the deputy chief in a message clearly aimed at Washington.
The propaganda office also announced that it will re-open Freezing Point, though with a new editor. A condition for the resumption is that the first edition must include self-criticism of the "mistakes" that led to the closure.
The Guardian could not reach Mr Li, the sacked editor, for comment. But he told Reuters that the re-opening was a sham. "This exterminates the soul of Freezing Point, leaving an empty shell." He went on to say he was "extremely disappointed", but before he could explain, his telephone was abruptly cut off.

Question: who was the chinese communist party general secretary

Answer: Hu Jintao

who was the chinese communist party general secretary

Question: what did hu jintao refer to as

Answer: censorship

Question: what did hu jintao order online messages to do

Answer: toe the party line

what did hu jintao order online messages to do

Question: what did hu jintao order to do

Answer: raise the level of guidance online

Question: what was hu jintao ordered to do

Answer: maintain the initiative in opinion on the Internet

Question: what did hu jintao order to raise the level of

Answer: guidance online

what did hu jintao order to raise the level of

Question: what do online messages in china toe

Answer: party line

Applicants for the job were drawn mostly from the propaganda and police departments .

Successful candidates have been offered classes in Marxism , propaganda techniques , and the Internet .

China's communist authorities have intensified their campaign against the party's biggest potential enemy - the internet - with the recruitment of a growing army of secret web commentators, sophisticated new monitoring software and a warning that all bloggers and bulletin board operators must register with the government or be closed down and fined.
The escalation of the government's effort to neutralise critical online opinion comes after a series of large anti-Japanese, anti-pollution and anti-corruption protests, many of which were organised or publicised using instant messaging services, chatrooms and text messages.
With the number of users forecast to rise above 100 million this year, access to the web is spreading beyond China's well-rewarded middle class and into the more disgruntled factory and farming communities, where young migrant workers are teaching their families about internet cafes.
In response, the propaganda departments of provincial and municipal governments have recently been instructed to build teams of internet commentators, whose job is to guide discussion on public bulletin boards away from politically sensitive topics by posting opinions anonymously or under false names.
Although advertisements are supposed to have been placed in-house, many details about the part-time political pacifiers have emerged in the domestic media. According to the Southern Weekend newspaper, a team of about 20 commentators has been operating in the city of Suqian, in Jiangsu province, since April.
"In the information age and the internet age, the most important and critical mission in front of us is how to seize the initiative on internet opinion and how to seize the high point of internet opinion," the paper quoted the deputy director of the local propaganda department, Zhang Fenglin, as saying.
Applicants for the job - mostly drawn from the propaganda and police departments - were told they had to understand government policies, know political theory, be politically reliable and understand internet technology. Successful candidates have been offered classes in Marxist theory, propaganda techniques and updates on the development of the internet around the world.
A summary of objectives declared that commentators should "be proactive in developing discussion, increase control, accentuate the good, avoid the bad, and use internet debate to our advantage."
Reports that at least two other localities have recruited similar teams suggest the strategy is being encouraged by the central government. Few will admit to the practice, but Nanjing officials said the city was hiring 20 online commentators from the ranks of its existing employees.
"They don't need to give up their current jobs because it is not full time. All they need to do is spend some time every day monitoring internet discussion," said a member of the propaganda department. "There are commentators like this all over the country. Until now we haven't had detailed instructions about how it works. So nothing is clear yet."
Although the existence of an internet police force - estimated at more than 30,000 - has been known for some time, attention has previously focused on their work as censors and monitors. Countless critical comments appear on bulletin boards of major portals such as Sohu and Sina only to be erased minutes, or sometimes just seconds, later. In the most recent case, all postings that blamed corrupt local officials or slow-moving police for the deaths of 88 children in floods last Friday were removed almost as soon as they appeared.
But the task of covertly guiding opinion - as in Suqian - has proved controversial for different reasons. "I think Suqian's practice is not proper," said Zhan Jiang, dean of journalism at China Youth University for Political Sciences. "If officials want to guide public opinion they should publish an editorial in the People's Daily under their own names. It is very wrong to anonymously spread government propaganda. Online commentary is a kind of abuse of power."
China's leading bloggers were equally scathing. "The government's tactics are too funny. They are actually hiring staff to curse online," said Liu Di, who was arrested last year for comments she posted under her internet moniker Iron Mouse. "But it also shows that the government can find no better way to deal with netizens' discussion. Compared to other media in China, the internet is still the most free. It is powerful among young people no matter whether they are chatting online or playing games. It will be difficult for the government to control."

Question: where did most applicants for the job come from

Answer: propaganda and police departments

where did most applicants for the job come from

Question: what type of classes have successful candidates been offered

Answer: Marxism

what type of classes have successful candidates been offered

Question: what have successful candidates been offered classes in

Answer: Marxism, propaganda techniques, and the Internet

what have successful candidates been offered classes in

Question: along with marxism, propaganda techniques and propaganda techniques, what resource has been offered

Answer: Internet

Question: along with police departments, what type of training was offered to candidates for the job

Answer: propaganda

Question: along with marxism, propaganda techniques and propaganda techniques, where have candidates been offered

Answer: the Internet

Russia In 2006 journalist Vladimir Rakhmankov published an article on the Internet where he named Vladimir Putin " the nation 's phallic symbol " .

|· Digest · Books · Monitoring · Law · Education · Regions · C.I.S · Archive ·|
GLASNOST DEFENSE FOUNDATION'S DIGEST No. 298 (September 25, 2006)
GLASNOST DEFENSE FOUNDATION'S DIGEST
Editor-in-chief: Alexei Simonov.
Editorial board: Boris Timoshenko - Monitoring Service chief, Pyotr Polonitsky - Regional Network coordinator, Vsevolod Shelkhovskoy - translator, Alexander Efremov - website administrator in charge of Digest distribution.
We appreciate the support of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Digest released once a week, on Mondays, since
August 11, 2000.
TOPIC OF THE WEEK
EVENT OF THE WEEK
RUSSIA
GLASNOST DEFENSE FOUNDATION
OUR PUBLICATIONS
OUR PARTNERS
TOPIC OF THE WEEK
Russia deemed dangerous to journalists.
The international Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has published the results of a survey putting Russia third on the list of countries with the largest numbers of journalists killed over the past 15 years. On the CPJ list, Russia is preceded by Iraq with 78 and Algeria with 60 reporters killed, and followed by Columbia (37), the Philippines (29), India (22), Bosnia (19), Turkey (18), and Rwanda, Sierra-Leone and Tajikistan with 16 journalists murdered in each of the three latter countries. Between January 1, 1992 and August 15, 2006, a total of 580 reporters died a violent death worldwide. In 85 percent of the cases, the killers have never been found and go unpunished.
Nina Ognyanova, coordinator of the CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program who contributed the statistics on Russia, has told the newspaper Gazeta that in the course of investigation it was established that murder facts had systematically been hushed up: "We have found out that 12 murders of journalists in Russia have remained undisclosed since 2000, with the authorities giving zero comments on those. Suspects have been detained and released with the victims' families never getting any information. First linked with reporters' professional performance, the killings were later identified as robbery cases." According to Ms. Ognyanova, the Office of the RF Prosecutor General often finds it hard to admit that a killing was a preordered one: "They would have in that event to officially pledge to find the person who ordered the murder, which is extremely difficult to do in Russia."
The Glasnost Defense Foundation's statistics on the number of killed reporters are different from those announced by the CPJ (see http://www.gdf.ru/arh/mort/index.shtml). For details about progress in the investigation of violent assaults on journalists, see the "Excerpts from GDF Correspondence with RF Prosecutor General's Office" series posted on the GDF News Line at http://www.gdf.ru/.
EVENT OF THE WEEK
Public Chamber grants awarded.
The Public Chamber Council has announced a list of non-profit public organizations selected for receipt of Chamber-awarded grants. When approved by President Putin, the list will open up a new source of funding for NPOs, which is very encouraging.
However, the process of summing up the results of this competition for the right to be financed from the federal budget threw into bold relief some very exciting details. It turned out that the total amount of RUR 250,000,000 vied for by more than 2,000 non-profit organizations will be distributed among the 516 lucky ones selected by the Public Chamber Council. Of these, there are 17 organizations involving the Chamber's own members, as Elena Zelinskaya of the Media Union. Besides, support will be offered to organizations known to be loyal to the United Russia Party, among them Mediakratia (an affiliate of the same Media Union), the Public Projects Institute, and others.
The amounts the contest winners are to receive have not been specified because Jury Chairman Sergey Katyrin believes that disclosing this kind of information would be "unethical". Actually, the question is how much the Chosen Seventeen will get, because the rest will only have to do collectively with what is left.
Speaking about ethics. The practice of awarding grants to members of one's own team looks odd indeed. Lev Ponomaryov, executive director of the All-Russia Human Rights Movement, has noted in this connection that "it would be hard to imagine heads of a western foundation awarding grants to themselves". As far as the Public Chamber's money distributors are concerned, they do not seem to regard it as a problem.
Moreover, the criteria for identifying the winners remain unclear. According
to Kommersant, though, contenders had to prove they have "a record
of fruitful cooperation with government agencies" - something actually
unthinkable for Open Russia in contrast to, say, the Union of Orthodox
Believers.
1. Ivanovo. Court hearings of "phallic symbol" case continue. (Continued from Digest 281, see http://www.gdf.ru/digest/digest/digest281.shtml#tema).
The Leninsky District Court in Ivanovo has opened hearings of the case of Vladimir Rakhmankov, editor of the web magazine Kursiv, accused under Article 319 of the RF Penal Code of insulting the Russian president by publishing a May 18 article entitled "Putin as Russia's Phallic Symbol".
The article contained ironical comments on one of the points of the president's
address to the Federal Assembly - about the need to boost the birth rate
in Russia. Specifically, the author cited a gubernatorial press service
report about the recent rise in the local Zoo of the reproduction rate
of ponies, lynxes and other animals, and drew the conclusion that the
animals "were quick to respond to the presidential call". Seeing
that as an insult to President Putin, the regional prosecutor's office
rushed to initiate criminal proceedings.
The question arises as to what the Orthodox Church has to do with it at all. Russia's judiciary is known to be strictly secular. Or has something changed of late?
But then, Mr. Rakhmankov would have felt even worse if the lady "expert" had chosen to study the controversial publication's content in the light of, say, Islamic Fundamentalism…
In the town of Berezniki on September 21, security guards from the private security services company "Sheriff" stopped a truck carrying 70,000 copies of the newspaper Vechernyaya Perm slated for distribution in the territory's north. Without explaining the reasons for the newspaper's arrest, they called a police patrol which escorted the truck to the nearest police station. The town police chief has given no comment on the incident, either.
According to Vyacheslav Vakhrin, a member of the regional Legislative Assembly, the newspaper may have been arrested because that day's issue contained materials criticizing the Perm governor, Oleg Chirkunov.
This confiscation is not the first one since this year began. Last March, law enforcers arrested Vechernyaya Perm on orders from the town's Election Committee (for details, see http://www.gdf.ru/digest/digest/digest270.html#rus2). The conflict culminated at the time in the regional prosecutor Alexander Kondalov's making a representation that called on the regional police chief Yuri Gorlov to put an end to "impermissible law violations testifying to your failure to duly fulfill your professional functions, and smearing the law enforcement agencies in the eyes of the public".
Court hearings are over in Gorno-Altaisk of the case of A. Kubashev, former head of the republican government's Information Policy Committee, who was accused under Article 144.2 of the RF Penal Code of abusing his official position to interfere with lawful journalistic activities.
Legal proceedings against Mr. Kubashev were instituted in April 2005 after the editors of two Altai newspapers, Zvezda Altaya and Altaidyn Cholmony, complained that he had urged them to publish only positive reports about the republic's government and president, while hushing up the poor performance of a group of local lawmakers. In May 2006, Kubashev was fully acquitted in court in view of no corpus delicti, but the republican prosecutor's office appealed to a higher-standing judicial authority.
Finally, the Gorno-Altaisk Town Court canceled the primary court's acquitting sentence and found Mr. Kubashev guilty of interfering with lawful journalistic activities, sentencing him to a suspended 10-month term of imprisonment with a 1-year probation period and a ban on Kubashev's employment as a government serviceman for the next 12 months.
By Anatoly Tsygankov,
Two weeks ago, investigator Sergey Sorokin of the Lahdenpoh district prosecutor's office with a group of policemen attempted to storm into the district administration headquarters. They succeeded in breaking into some of the offices, among them the accounting office whose staffers were ordered out.
Naturally, the news about the "seizure of the administration building" went around instantly. After the previous events in Kondopoga no one was really shocked, and some suggested a repetition of the Kondopoga "law enforcement" operation might be taking place. Natalya Vladimirskaya, editor of the district newspaper Prizyv, working in a business-as-usual manner, was taking photo pictures of what was going on when investigator Sorokin clamped down on her, trying to tear away her camera. He did so in spite of the frantic resistance the lady offered, leaving her with a trauma. As a result, the camera was broken and Ms. Sorokina was compelled to request medical assistance.
It is still unclear why the visitors decided to take the mayor's office by storm instead of entering it easily and without excessive noise. Some believe it may be part of preparations for the district leader's election scheduled to be held in Lahdenpoh in October, with the incumbent mayor, M. Maximov, running against a United Russia Party nominee. The incident will be investigated by higher-standing authorities. Meanwhile, the Karelian Journalists' Union will be urging the law enforcers to launch a separate investigation into the assault on Natalya Vladimirskaya whom a local prosecutor's office serviceman attempted to forcibly prevent from doing her professional work.
According to the police, Channel 41 correspondent Vyacheslav Plotnikov, reported missing since last June, has been found dead in a forest near Otrozhki Lake in the Zheleznodorozhny District of Voronezh.
With no knife or bullet wounds, nor traces of stifling found on the TV reporter's body, forensic experts are now busy trying to identify the cause of Mr. Plotnikov's death. So far, there are no reasons to believe he was murdered.
The journalist's body was found far from the place of his residence. The police have established that a week before his death he was taken to a hospital near Otrozhki from which he escaped without the doctors' permission a few days later. The report about his disappearance was filed at about the same time he died. Still, colleagues believe Mr. Plotnikov may have been killed; they want the law enforcement agencies to investigate the circumstances of his death with utmost care.
[Newsru.com report of September 25]
GLASNOST DEFENSE FOUNDATION
GDF seminar held in Krasnodar Territory.
By Pyotr Polonitsky,
Another GDF seminar in the series "The Press & Government: Opportunities for Cooperation in the Media Area", held at Sputnik Hotel in Sochi on September 15-16, brought together journalists and government officials from the Kuban River area, Stavropol, Rostov-on-Don, Volgograd, Daghestan, Chechen Republic and some other regions united within Russia's Southern Federal District.
The seminar was organized and co-sponsored by European Commission representatives in Moscow and the Krasnodar Territory administration.
The first-day events included reports by Dr. V. Monakhov, professor of the UNESCO Copyright Department; Dr. A. Ostashevsky, Ph.D. (Philology) , professor of Kuban State University; Dr. I. Dzyaloshinsky, Ph.D. (Philology), director of the Institute of Communicavistics; A. Melnikov, advisor to the Governor of Krasnodar; E. Logvinova, member of the Territorial Election Committee, and other speakers.
Heated debates flared up over how to develop an efficient information policy for the Kuban River area by the concerted efforts of executive and representative branches; participants identified the most controversial (as seen by the opponents) methods of promoting government cooperation with the media.
On the following day, GDF President Alexei Simonov described the specifics of government-media interaction in other Russian regions, illustrating his speech by the results of GDF analysis of media and journalists' rights violations monitoring throughout the Russian Federation.
A general discussion yielded a set of recommendations on how to optimize the media's relations with government authorities with due regard for the geographical and historical specifics, as well as traditions, of the Krasnodar Territory.
OUR PUBLICATIONS
Printed word: lighter than an Internet phrase?
By Roman Zakharov,
The Oktyabrsky Federal Court in St. Petersburg sentenced Yuri Belyayev on August 29 to a suspended 18-month term of imprisonment with a probation period of equal duration - only for posting his xenophobic calls on a number of websites not registered as media outlets - and disregarded his analogous publications on the pages of NNN. The nationalist groups accepted that as a small victory, concluding that the print media must be "immune" to legal prosecution for "telling the truth about non-Russians".
Even in St. Petersburg, which has turned over the past few years into a major center of "patriotic" (i.e., nationalist) activity, the official version - that the legal proceedings were terminated because of the statute of limitation - is considered untrustworthy: the law enforcement agencies officially identified some NNN publications as xenophobic as recently as in 2004.
Until last August, the city prosecutor's office had repeatedly declined to initiate legal proceedings against the editors or authors of nationalist publications in spite of insistent calls by human rights defenders and activists of liberal public associations and parties. But it readily convicted a man who had posted some threatening web statements addressed to Governor Valentina Matviyenko in person - although everybody, including the judges, acknowledged that those statements were akin to curse and posed no real danger. It turns out that the power system, including its judicial branch, sees Internet-based threats to individual government officials as a bigger problem than the "patriotic" print media's incessant calls to "do away" with non-Russians.
OUR PARTNERS
Committee to Protect Journalists demands an end to Vladimir Rakhmankov's prosecution.
The international Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is urging the Russian authorities to stop the criminal and judicial prosecution of Vladimir Rakhmankov, editor-in-chief of the web newspaper Kursiv based in the city of Ivanovo, the Moscow Echo radio station has reported with reference to the CPJ.
"Prosecutors must not use criminal law to protect public figures from the media's attention," CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said, adding that satire is deemed a necessary and significant element of any democracy.
We would appreciate reference to
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being used.
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Question: who called vladimir putin the nation's phallic symbol

Answer: Vladimir Rakhmankov

who called vladimir putin the nation's phallic symbol

Question: in what year did vladimir rakhmankov publish an article calling vlad

Answer: 2006

in what year did vladimir rakhmankov publish an article calling vlad

Question: who is the nation's phallic symbol

Answer: Vladimir Putin

Question: where did vladimir rakhmankov post his article

Answer: the Internet

where did vladimir rakhmankov post his article

Question: what did rakhmankov call vladimir putin

Answer: the nation's phallic symbol

Question: what country is vladimir putin the phallic symbol of

Answer: Russia In 2006

what country is vladimir putin the phallic symbol of

Question: what is vladimir rakhmankov's profession

Answer: journalist

what is vladimir rakhmankov's profession

In June 2013 a criminal case was opened on opposition blogger Stanislav Kalinichenko for retweeting a photograph of a leaflet reading " Enough demonstrating — it 's time to act ! "

signed by a group calling itself the First Resistance Detachment and calling for the destruction of corrupt officials ' property .

‘There’s no such thing as an accidental repost’ How Russia punishes people for likes, retweets, and selfies
Over the past few years, more than 20 people in Russia have been officially convicted or punished for their actions on Internet social networks. Individuals have been fired for selfies, fined for retweets, had their homes searched because of “likes,” and arrested and later released on bail with travel restrictions for a retweet. Esquire special correspondent Egor Mostovshchikov collects for Meduza the most notorious stories in Russia about people persecuted for their actions online.
Likes
In 2012, three state investigators paid a visit to Kazan resident Vitold Filippov, handing him a summons to appear for questioning at 8 a.m. the next day. The sudden attention from police came as no shock to Filippov, who at the time served as regional deputy head of the Russian All-People's Union, a nationalist political party that had just registered itself officially and often drew attention to itself.
“Because of my occupation, I’ve had to reckon with Tatarstan’s criminal justice system more than once. At the time [in 2012], we’d just carried out a few dozen large demonstrations throughout the region, each time drawing more people,” Filippov remembers today. “An organization like ours, with an oppositionist core, profoundly worried Tatarstan’s ethnocratic local elite, in particular the republic’s president.”
The only thing that surprised Filippov was what came next, at his questioning the following morning.
The officers interrogating Filippov showed him several screenshots from his VKontakte social media page taken in 2011, explaining that “an investigation was underway to determine if the images constituted the dissemination of extremist materials, materials inciting ethnic hatred, or materials promoting fascism or Nazism.” All charges were based on photographs from a scene in the well-known film American History X, where the actor Edward Norton stands smiling with his arms outstretched, his head shaved, and a swastika tattooed to his chest.
“I understood perfectly the absurdity and legal ridiculousness of the charges,” Filippov says. The movie, of course, is actually an acclaimed anti-fascist film; it’s not banned in Russia; it’s been aired on television; and Edward Norton was even nominated for an Oscar for his performance. Not only that, but Filippov never even posted the photo—he’d only clicked that he “liked” the image. (In 2011, VKontakte automatically populated photo albums on users’ walls with content they’d “liked” elsewhere on the site.) Filippov even summoned a computer programmer to his trial, to explain these technicalities to the court, but the judge refused to listen.
At first, prosecutors planned to charge Filippov with extremism, a criminal offense in Russia, but two months later they reduced it to “promoting Nazi symbols,” which is only a civil offense. “For criminal offenses, it’s necessary to establish the crime and the criminal’s motive; they found the former, but proving any motive turned out to be a problem, so they fell back on accusing me of [Nazi] propaganda,” Filippov explains. “From the prosecutors’ standpoint, this propaganda consisted of a single act: clicking the ‘like’ button. In doing so, I wished negative consequences on Russian society and cultivated hostility and hatred. Prosecutors insisted that I wouldn’t have “liked” the photo, if I’d not wished to incite these very things.”
The trial concluded in August 2012, resulting in Filippov being fined 1,000 rubles (about $30 at the time). Today, Filippov is no longer a member of the Russian All-People's Union, though he continues to be active in politics. Tatarstan’s local police and attorney general, he says, remind the public at every opportunity of his supposed past involvement in Nazi propaganda.
When the court announced its verdict, news headlines read “A Russian Citizen Has Been Convicted of a ‘Like’ for the First Time in History.”
Selfies
In November 2014, Olesya Kaida, an operating room nurse in Moscow, posted a photograph on Instagram of an anesthetized man lying nude on a hospital gurney, a few minutes before surgery on his pancreas. Kaida had posted lots of photos from work, but it was this image that soon attracted a swarm of angry comments. The man in the photo died the next day, but another patient at the hospital complained about Kaida’s Instagramming. The hospital conducted an internal investigation, the acting head doctor says, and Kaida was fired.
“It wasn’t the best decision of my life,” Kaida confesses, saying she can’t explain why she posted the photo. But she doesn’t agree with her punishment, given there’s “no labor code against posting a photo on Instagram,” and she didn’t violate the hospital’s confidentiality, as far as she can tell; she published no identifying information, and the patient’s face wasn’t even visible. Today, Kaida works at another Moscow hospital.
At roughly the same time, there was another scandal involving a different nurse in Nizhny Tagil. This nurse, Marina Sharina, posted selfies from an operating room, standing over a patient with an open stomach. In the photo, the operating table is strewn with blood and guts. As a doctor reaches into the patient’s body cavity, Sharina leans into the photo’s frame and makes a devil-horns hand gesture at the camera.
The pictures spread on social media, making their way to officials and tabloids. Sharina was identified as the woman in the photos and the hospital promptly sent her packing. The clinic’s chief physician decided to fire Sharina along with the young surgeon who appeared in some of her photos, but the hospital staff protested his dismissal. Forty-two hospital employees signed a public letter to the hospital’s management in the surgeon’s defense.
The letter complained that the chief physician, who’d only recently arrived at the hospital, had forced several other experienced employees to quit. The hospital’s staff now threatened mass resignations, if this continued.
In the end, Sharina publicly apologized for her selfies at a local medical conference, and she was reinstated at her job.
Yelena Kornyushonkova, a music school teacher in Tver, suffered for selfies of a different explicit nature. Someone from Kornyushonkova’s school found photos she’d posted on social media from the previous summer of herself both nude and in a swimsuit. Here she is doing the splits in the sand; there she is in high heels, wearing no underwear; and finally here she is again, posing naked in front of a mirror.
Kornyushonkova was fired. Shortly thereafter, she was arrested for a drunken debauch at a cafe. Some time later, she returned to the school and smashed a sliding glass door with a rock. Next, she made her way to a local recreation center, where she broke a window. Then she went to a police station and reported her purse stolen, proceeding to kick a police officer in the chest. After spending a week in jail, she went on daytime television to talk about it, wearing a bright red dress, laughing, and begging her enemies to come on stage.
Reposts
In March 2014, on orders from the Attorney General, the government blocked the blog of opposition leader Alexey Navalny on the grounds that it disseminated extremism. Meanwhile, Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media oversight state agency, determined that any blog authored in Navalny’s name was a violation of his house arrest, which prohibited him from speaking to anyone outside his family and legal defense.
Next, Navalny’s anti-corruption organization received a document from a local Internet provider, titled “Warnings Against Violating the Law,” signed by Moscow’s deputy district attorney, admonishing Navalny’s staff for systematically publishing texts, photos, videos, and audio in his name, encouraging his readers to participate in unsanctioned mass demonstrations, despite the ban on Navalny using the Internet.
The district attorney warned ISPs that providing services for the transfer and dissemination of such information facilitates the “violation of a court injunction,” as well as “violations of the law.” The state’s position was clear: it considered any promotion of Navalny’s blog to be illegal. The document was also sent to Afisha-Rambler-SUP, which owns LiveJournal, one of the most popular blogging platforms in Russia.
Last December, Facebook complied with an order from the Attorney General to block Russian users’ access to an event page created by organizers of an unsanctioned rally outside the Kremlin, scheduled for January 15, 2015, in support of the Navalny brothers, whose criminal sentences were expected to be announced on that day. All reposts of this event disappeared from users’ walls, following Facebook’s action. The Navalny event became so contentious that Roskomnadzor even ordered a Ukrainian news website to delete a story about the protest.
Another repost (a re-publication, really) ended in a family fleeing the country before the matter ever went to trial. On April 17, 2014, in the city of Barnaul, four masked men arrested civic activist Andrey Teslenko at the entrance of his apartment building. Agents from Russia’s Interior Ministry searched his home, turning it upside down, confiscating his computers, telephone, flash drives, and his copy of Rostislav Antonov’s 2011 book about the Primorsky Partisans, a self-declared guerrilla group responsible for a series of attacks on police officers in 2010.
Teslenko was taken in for questioning and told he was a suspect in a criminal investigation into “inciting hatred,” facing up to five years in prison—all for an online post, which he copied and reposted to his own VKontakte page.
Teslenko, a liberal activist and a former candidate for city council, was no stranger to the police. In the fall of 2013, he’d already been fined a thousand rubles for “mass dissemination of extremist materials” for reposting on VKontakte a video by Alexey Navalny, titled “Remind the Crooks and Thieves About Their 2002 Platform!” The message was directed at United Russia, the country’s ruling political party.
This time, however, Teslenko feared he wouldn’t escape with a simple fine. “They told me that my case was being handled by a full-fledged investigator from the Federal Security Service [FSB], and I decided they weren’t joking around anymore,” Teslenko recalls today. The day after police searched his home, he grabbed his wife and 18-month-old daughter and loaded everyone onto a bus headed for Novosibirsk. (One doesn’t need to show any identification to travel by bus between cities in Russia.) They went to a friend’s house, where Teslenko promptly got a haircut and shaved his beard, to make it harder to recognize him. Then he began to think of what to do next.
Police later filed a criminal case against Teslenko for a “Russophobic post” on his VKontakte page. The post, signed by Anonymous, said “roosha is sh*t-people, a vermin-people, and a cancer” that hates the whole world and believes fascists control Ukraine. The authors of the post said they wished nothing good on the people of such a nation. One of Teslenko’s VKontakte friends, a university student in Altai and a member of the same political party, asked him to delete the post, saying it offended him. When Teslenko refused, the friend wrote a formal complaint to the Attorney General.
The SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, a Russian nonprofit organization, says Teslenko’s “Russophobic” post has a “clearly anti-Russian bent (in an ethnic sense),” but comes with several mitigating factors: first, it had a small audience; second, it was only a “re-publication”; and third, the legality of the charges are dubious, insofar as “it remains unclear if calls to discrimination should be prosecuted when they’re made in Russia but addressed to the authorities of a foreign country, and when Russian citizens aren’t being targeted.”
Before police ever issued an arrest warrant for Teslenko, he and his family flew to Kiev, where they managed to find accommodations at a homeless shelter. Afterwards, they went as far west in Ukraine as possible, to the city of Uzhhorod. In November 2014, they were granted refugee status. Now they’re waiting for passports that can take them further west, beyond Ukraine, living in Mezhyhirya, at former President Yanukovych’s old residence, part of which now functions as public housing. Teslenko says they can’t find work in Kiev and are planning to move to the United States, after winning a green-card lottery.
According to historian Konstantin Zharinov, against whom federal agents in Chelyabinsk launched an entire special op, the case against him is the work of "an absurdly bloated police force desperate to justify its own existence." Zharinov is a member of a small opposition party and the author of two books about the history of terrorist and extremist organizations.
In March 2014, Zharinov clicked the "share with friends" VKontakte button under a public appeal released by Pravyi Sektor (Right Sector), a Ukrainian organization banned in Russia for extremism. The group's message said Russia's fate would be decided in Ukraine, told Russians they, too, can fight against "Putin's Chekist regime," and called for mass demonstrations and the creation of guerrilla bands to shut down highways and dismantle Russia’s military infrastructure. Zharinov says his interest in Pravyi Sektor is purely academic, and denies any sinister aims in reposting the message, though he considers it a "poor decision" in hindsight.
The day after reposting Pravyi Sektor, Zharinov joined an anti-war picket, carrying a sign reading “No to war.” On March 4, two police officers from a special anti-extremism unit escorted him to the district attorney’s office, where he was issued an official warning. Two months later, agents from the FSB called him in for questioning. Two months after that, police said Zharinov had “publicly advocated extremist activity,” charging him with violating Article 280 of Russia’s criminal code, which carries a maximum prison sentence of four years.
Someone named Petrov, a man Zharinov has never met, triggered the FSB’s investigation when he filed a complaint with the police. Mr. Petrov saw in Zharinov’s actions a “crime against the constitutional order and security of the state.” Zharinov’s indictment says he “willfully and intentionally” sought out online materials of “an oppositionist nature,” which he then posted on his VKontakte page.
According to the investigation’s conclusions, Pravyi Sektor’s public appeal paints as its enemy “the Russian state generally and Vladimir Putin specifically, likening their images to Adolf Hitler and fascist Germany.” FSB agents, it turns out, tapped Zharinov’s telephone, and his case includes a whole stack of psycho-linguistic reports based on what the agents overheard. The Chelyabinsk Justice Ministry’s chief specialist testified that “there’s no such thing as an accidental repost, insofar as posting any materials requires clicking through a series of options.”
A detective from the anti-extremism police unit filed a report noting that his office had “tracked” Zharinov’s participation in several opposition rallies since 2012, and a few pickets in support of Alexey Navalny. (The report misspells the word “opposition.”) One of the state’s key witnesses is a 21-year-old student named Anton Miroshnikov, who complained to the FSB about Zharinov’s VKontakte repost after he saw a news report about it, saying it offended him. In his testimony, Miroshnikov, “as a patriot of his country,” thanks “the authorities” for “suppressing such acts.” Ever vigilant, he also asks police to investigate a second Internet user for “signs of extremism,” providing a link to the suspect’s VKontakte page.
Konstantin Zharinov isn’t the only person to face criminal charges for reposting Pravyi Sektor materials; the honor also belongs to 19-year-old Ivanovo resident Liza Lisitsina, whom FSB agents arrested in the middle of a university lecture on ontology and epistemology. Lisitsina’s case has yet to go to trial.
Retweets
In June 2013, police searched the home of Kemerovo oppositionist blogger Stanislav Kalinichenko, whom they accuse of extremism. They seized his hard disks, his voice recorder, and his telephone. Kalinichenko, who’d originally been a witness in the case, was later summoned for questioning at the local FSB office. He refused to come. On November 6, 2013, three plainclothes officers, including a police major, arrested Kalinichenko, locking him up in a pretrial detention center.
Kalinichenko now stands accused of violating Criminal Code 280 (“calling publicly for extremist acts”) because he retweeted a photograph. The picture, taken on May 6, 2013, at Patriarch Ponds in Moscow, is of a leaflet reading “Enough demonstrating—it’s time to act!” signed by a group calling itself the First Resistance Detachment. The human rights organization Memorial has urged the authorities to drop its case against Kalinichenko immediately, saying the charges are “politically motivated.”
Though the leaflet's text, which calls for the destruction of corrupt officials’ property, formally violates Criminal Code 280, Memorial maintains that prosecuting Kalinichenko is illegal: “Stanislav isn’t the author of the leaflet, he isn’t the author of the photograph, and the charges against him are based solely on the fact that he retweeted the message contained in the photograph. He didn’t advocate any acts; he merely once disseminated a piece of information. As the leaflet was not officially recognized as extremist, in our view, there are no grounds for charging Kalinichenko with even a civil offense.”
Memorial also says Kalinichenko is being prosecuted selectively, given that none of the hundreds of others who retweeted the photograph have faced any charges: “The case is political insofar as it is an assault on the freedom to disseminate information that’s clearly associated with the opposition. This case fits a general ‘crackdown’ trend in Russia of restrictions on the freedom of speech online. Specifically in Kemerovo, there is constant pressure on the free press and on bloggers who criticize the local government.”
Kalinichenko is currently out on bail, not allowed to leave Kemerovo, and he’s trying to sue the police officers who arrested him. Throughout his legal battle, among other things, he’s gone 42 million rubles ($630,000) into debt. His trial opened on November 5, 2014, and it’s yet to produce a verdict. On LiveJournal, it’s possible to follow the events of his trial almost in real time, thanks to sympathetic live-bloggers.

Question: when was a criminal case opened against kalinichenko

Answer: June 2013

when was a criminal case opened against kalinichenko

Question: what opposition blogger was arrested in june 2013

Answer: Stanislav Kalinichenko

what opposition blogger was arrested in june 2013

Question: what was the name of the group that signed the leaflet

Answer: First Resistance Detachment

what was the name of the group that signed the leaflet

Question: in what year was a criminal case opened against kalinichenko

Answer: 2013

in what year was a criminal case opened against kalinichenko

Question: what is the name of the group that signed the leaflet

Answer: the First Resistance Detachment

what is the name of the group that signed the leaflet

Question: what is stanislav kalinichenko's occupation

Answer: blogger

what is stanislav kalinichenko's occupation

Question: who was stanislav kalinichenko

Answer: opposition blogger

Question: what did the first resistance detachment call for

Answer: destruction of corrupt officials' property

what did the first resistance detachment call for

Bangladesh Asif Mohiuddin , a winner of The Bobs - Best of Online Activism award , was imprisoned by the Bangladesh government for posting " offensive comments about Islam and Mohammed " .

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The government of Bangladesh has taken the radical step of banning the blog of Asif Mohiuddin, a 2012 DW Bobs blog award winner. Mohiuddin was brutally attacked by unknown assailants in Dhaka last January.
The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has asked community blog owners to ban a number of blogs which have been deemed "anti-state" and "anti-religious." Confirming the removal of Asif Mohiuddin's blog link, Syeda Gulshan Ferdous Jana, founder of Bangladesh's first Bangla language community blog site "Somewhere in Blog," told DW, "Last Thursday we received an official email from the BTRC. This is the first time in the over seven years of somewhereinblog.net that authorities have issued written instructions to discipline bloggers."
"The email named four bloggers, including Asif Mohiuddin's blog profile, and advised us to permanently remove all of these blogs immediately," said Jana.
Mohiuddin's brutal attack
Asif Mohiuddin's blog was one of the most read web pages in Bangladesh and is known for its strong criticism of religious fundamentalism and Bangladesh's "anti-people politics." The blogger was brutally attacked last January for spreading his ideas. He survived the attack with serious injuries and continues to receive threats from fundamentalists.
The title of Mohiuddin's blog alone was provocative - "God, Almighty only in name but impotent in reality" was the name he gave it. Islamists have organized a number of protests in the country in the past few weeks, in which they have called for the death of Asif Mohiuddin and other bloggers.
Scores of people protested against the attack on Asif Mohiuddin in January
Instead of providing adequate security to Mohiuddin, many police are now harassing him and urging him "not to write blogs against religious fundamentalism." Mohiuddin considers this to be a violation of his fundamental constitutional right to freedom of speech.
"They are trying to clamp down on this and prevent the exercise of one's right to the freedom of expression," Mohiuddin told DW.
Bloggers denounce government order
Meanwhile, another community blog by the name of Amarblog has confirmed receiving an email from the BTRC with instructions similar to those sent to Somewhere in Blog. In a blog post, Amarblog denounced the BTRC order to provide authorities with the confidential "IP address, location, email address, cell phone number and real name" of the bloggers behind certain specified links.
"Amarblog is committed to protecting free speech in Bangla on the web. Amarblog was, is and will always sustain this commitment," said Director of Amarblog, Sushanta Das Gupta.
While obeying the order to remove the blog links, Somewhere in Blog chief Jana made a "very strong request" to the BTRC that people whose blogs contribute to healthy debate through their writing should be allowed to blog without fear of being criminalized.
"We wish to see this happen immediately," Jana told DW.
BTRC enforces 'abusive powers'
The legal base of such an order from BTRC has been questioned by bloggers. The telecommunication authority initially refrained from commenting on the legal framework, but eventually in a press release referred to the Bangladesh ICT Act of 2006 as well as to a recent panel formed by the Government to monitor comments on Islam and Muhammad. The BTRC also threatened to impose fines and other punishments on the blog owners, if their orders were not followed.
There has been an ongoing crackdown on bloggers in Bangladesh
Reporters without Borders (RSF) condemned the BTRC decision to ban blogs. Head of the Asia-Pacific Desk of RSF Benjamin Ismail told DW, "By principle, a ban of any website should be the result of a judiciary decision. In that regard, we believe the BTRC enforces abusive powers. Furthermore, if we look at the targeted website and its author, we can understand the political motives behind this ban.
"Asif Mohiuddin has not only been targeted by Islamist militants, but he is also subject to harassment by the authorities. The many threats he has received from extremists constitute a danger to the freedom of expression and information. The authorities should protect Asif," Ismail said.
2013 Shahbag protest
Bloggers have been in the limelight in Bangladesh since the 2013 Shahbag protests, a movement demanding maximum punishment for war criminals as well as the banning of an Islamist political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, for its involvement in war crimes during Bangladesh's 1971 war of independence. Millions of Bangladeshis were killed and hundreds of thousands raped during that war but the perpetrators of the crimes had gone unpunished until a tribunal was recently set up to put them on trial.
The Shahbag movement is being organized by bloggers and is supported by thousands of people in Bangladesh. The protests began on February 5, 2013 and have continued since. One of the leading activists of the movement, a blogger by the name of Ahmed Rajib Haider, was hacked to death in the capital, Dhaka, on the tenth day of protests.
After Haider's murder, certain groups and individuals started propagating on the Internet that he had been writing a blog defaming Islam. While IT experts say the "controversial" write-ups in the WordPress blog might not really be his own, Islamists launched a massive attack against the bloggers who demand justice be brought to war criminals, labeling them "atheists" and "blasphemers."
"The Shahbag protest, in fact, is against Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, the root of all evil," confirms Asif Mohiuddin, who is also one of the organizers of the movement. He continues, "If we achieve victory in this battle, we will be one step closer to a secular Bangladesh."

Question: who was imprisoned for posting offensive comments about islam and mohammed

Answer: Bangladesh Asif Mohiuddin

who was imprisoned for posting offensive comments about islam and mohammed

Question: what award did asif mohiuddin win

Answer: Bobs-Best of Online Activism award

Question: who imprisoned asif mohiuddin

Answer: the Bangladesh government

Question: what was asif mohiuddin imprisoned for posting offensive comments about

Answer: Islam and Mohammed

what was asif mohiuddin imprisoned for posting offensive comments about

Question: in what country was asif mohiuddin imprisoned

Answer: Bangladesh

in what country was asif mohiuddin imprisoned

Question: what was asif mohiuddin imprisoned for

Answer: offensive comments about Islam and Mohammed

International organisations , including Human Rights Watch,"the government is abandoning any serious claim that it is committed to free speech " , said Brad Adams , Asia director at Human Rights Watch . "

Amnesty International , Reporters without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists have condemned the imprisonment of bloggers and the climate of fear for journalists .

(New York) – The Bangladesh authorities should immediately drop charges against and release four bloggers and a newspaper editor arrested this month, Human Rights Watch said today. All five are facing criminal charges solely related to the peaceful exercise of their right to free speech.
Human Rights Watch said the government should stop targeting individuals and media publishing stories the government deems objectionable and reaffirm its commitment to freedom of expression, a principle which the governing Awami League has long claimed to champion.
“By targeting peaceful critics in the media and blogosphere and promising more arrests, the government is abandoning any serious claim that it is committed to free speech,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Bangladeshis should have the right to peacefully express their views, and the state should address these demands through the rule of law instead of embarking on politically motivated arrests.”
Bangladesh has been gripped by large-scale protests, political unrest, and violence since the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), a court set up to prosecute those responsible for atrocities committed during the country’s 1971 war of independence, sentenced a Jamaat-e-Islami party leader, Abdul Qader Mollah, to life in prison instead of capital punishment on February 5, 2013.
Hundreds of thousands throughout Bangladesh took to the streets in peaceful protests to demand that Mollah be hanged. The situation took a more violent turn after the ICT, on February 28, sentenced vice-president of the Jamaat party Delwar Hossain Sayedee to death by hanging after finding him guilty of war crimes. Following this verdict, supporters of the Jamaat party took to the streets in protest, leading to clashes between them, the Shahbagh protesters, and security forces attempting to control the protests. At least 90 people have died, most of them in police firing according to media and human rights groups.
While the “Shahbagh Movement” is campaigning for the death penalty for the accused, supporters of the Jamaat party are protesting the trial process and the rulings of the tribunal, claiming political bias.
Increasingly, the protests appear to have sharpened along religious lines, with some Islamist clerics demanding a blasphemy law and with others in the Shahbagh movement publishing statements supporting atheist principles, largely through blogs and other electronic media. In response, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina reaffirmed that Bangladesh is a secular state.
Bloggers arrested
However, the criminal justice authorities also cracked down on government critics in the media, including social media. Following the arrests of the bloggers, the government made clear that the restrictions and arrests will continue. The Home Minister announced that he had a list of seven other “atheist bloggers” who would be arrested soon. The Law Minister announced that the government intended to increase its control over social media, blogs, and online news websites.
On April 2 and 3, police arrested four bloggers, Subrata Adhikari Shuvo, Mashiur Rahman Biplob, Rasel Parvez, and Asif Mohiuddin, who had posted articles either critical of the government’s attempts to appease the Islamist demands or that said that the government had failed to address the concerns of minority religions. Police described the four as “known atheists and naturalists” who wrote derogatory things about the Prophet, and said the four would face charges of “instigating negative elements against Islam to create anarchy.”
“These bloggers can only be called political prisoners, since they are in jail for peacefully expressing their views,” Adams said. “Freedom of religion also includes the freedom not to believe in a religion and to make those views known. For a government that has always presented itself as liberal and secular this is a huge retreat from the values it claims to uphold.”
News raids
In a further attack on free speech, on April 11 the police arrested Mahmdur Rahman, the editor of an opposition news outlet, Amar Desh. Rahman was subsequently charged with sedition and unlawful publication of a hacked conversation between the ICT judges and an external consultant. The conversations exposed political interference with the trials. The conversations were originally published by The Economist and later republished in Bangladesh by Amar Desh and other news organizations and websites. The Shahbagh protesters had earlier demanded Rahman’s arrest for critical reports about their movement.
The state minister for home affairs, speaking at a press conference, said that Rahman has “hurt Muslim religious sentiments.” Rahman had previously been arrested in 2010 on defamation charges but was later released and the charges were dropped. Rahman alleged torture and ill-treatment while in custody.
On April 14, the offices of another opposition newspaper, Daily Sangram, were raided by the police. The editor, Mohamed Abul Asad, has subsequently been charged for printing and publishing copies of Amar Desh after authorities had shut down Amar Desh after Rahman’s arrest.
Rahman’s mother, who is the Acting Chairman ofAmar Desh, has also been charged along with over a dozen others in the same case.
Earlier, on February 16, the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission had shut down the Sonar Bangla blog, known to be operated by Jamaat activists, for spreading “hate speech and causing communal tension.” This came after a pro-Shahbagh blogger, Ahmed Rajib Haider, was killed a day earlier by unknown assailants suspected to be pro-Jamaat.
“The arrest of a newspaper editor and shuttering his paper, which printed material that was terribly embarrassing to the government – so embarrassing that the chairman of the court resigned – suggests that the purpose of the arrests is to silence those who are critical of the way the war crimes trials have been carried out,” said Adams. “Rather than call for new trials that would have full credibility and ensure that any convictions are sound, the government has resorted to authoritarian tactics and a major crackdown on critics.”

Question: who is the asia director at human rights watch

Answer: Brad Adams

who is the asia director at human rights watch

Question: amnesty international, reporters without borders, and the committee to protect jpress have all

Answer: bloggers

Question: who is the asia director of

Answer: Human Rights Watch

Question: what did brad adams say about the government's stance on free speech

Answer: the government is abandoning any serious claim that it is committed to free speech

what did brad adams say about the government's stance on free speech

Question: along with amnesty international and the committee to protect jjournalists, what other group has

Answer: Reporters without Borders

Question: what has amnesty international, reporters without borders and the committee to protect jpress condemned

Answer: imprisonment of bloggers

Question: the government is abandoning any serious claim that it is committed to what

Answer: free speech

the government is abandoning any serious claim that it is committed to what

Question: which organizations have condemned the imprisonment of bloggers

Answer: Reporters without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists

which organizations have condemned the imprisonment of bloggers

Free Vietnamese Internet dissidents!,

Statement by Amnesty International Nguyen Vu Binh was released in June 2007.

Vietnam Nguyen Vu Binh was imprisoned for writing about violations of human rights , and Truong Quoc Huy was arrested for discussing political reforms in an Internet chat room .

Statement by Amnesty International Nguyen Vu Binh was released in June 2007 .

Free Vietnamese Internet dissidents!
“Everyone has the right to express his/her wishes and opinions on political, economic, social and cultural issues in the mass media.”
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Vietnamese students use computers in an internet cafe, Hanoi, Vietnam
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© AP GraphicsBank
This quote, from the Vietnamese government’s 2005 report "Achievements in the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights in Vietnam" suggests that the Vietnamese people enjoy the right to freedom of expression. The reality however, is very different.
Viet Nam has passed a string of laws in recent years attempting to limit the opportunity for freedom of expression on the Internet. As well as automated filtering and blocking technology, there is a dedicated police task-force monitoring and controlling Internet use. The authorities nurture self-censorship by creating fear with arbitrary law enforcement and harsh punishments.
Many Internet dissidents, including those who have already spent years in prison for exercising their right to freedom of expression, are under close surveillance, harassed and threatened, and have had their computers confiscated.
Take action!
Call on the government of Viet Nam to immediately release Nguyen Vu Binh and Truong Quoc Huy, and stop the harassment and threats against other Internet dissidents.
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You can copy and paste this sample letter into an e-mail or a document to print out. If you are planning to write your own appeal please read our letter writing guide.
Please send appeals to:
Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung
Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung
Office of the Prime Minister
Hoang Hoa Tham
Ha Noi
Socialist Republic of Viet Nam
Fax: + 844 823 1872
(c/o Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
E-mail: banbientap@mofa.gov.vn
Salutation: Dear Prime Minister
Please let us know if you have taken this action
22 October 2006 - ASA 41/009/2006 - WA 33/06
Back to Top

Question: when was the statement released by amnesty international

Answer: June 2007

when was the statement released by amnesty international

Question: what organization released a statement about free vietnamese internet dissidents

Answer: Amnesty International

what organization released a statement about free vietnamese internet dissidents

Question: who was arrested for discussing political reforms in an internet chat room

Answer: Truong Quoc Huy

who was arrested for discussing political reforms in an internet chat room

Question: why was nguyen vu binh imprisoned

Answer: violations of human rights

Question: in what year was the statement released by amnesty international

Answer: 2007

in what year was the statement released by amnesty international

Question: where was trong quoc huy arrested

Answer: Internet chat room

In January 2017 , four bloggers known for their anti - religious and pro - democracy activism went missing .

ISLAMABAD: At least four activists known on social media for their secular leftist views have gone missing this week, relatives and NGO workers said on Sunday.
Waqas Goraya and Asim Saeed disappeared on Jan 4, according to a cyber security NGO, while Salman Haider vanished on Friday and Ahmed Raza Naseer on Saturday, relatives said.
The interior ministry has said it will investigate the disappearance of Mr Haider for his outspoken views on enforced disappearances in Balochistan, but made no reference to the others.
“The state has controlled TV and now they’re focusing on digital spaces,” said Raza Rumi, a writer and analyst who left Pakistan in 2014 after he was attacked by armed men who shot his driver dead.
A security source denied intelligence services were involved in the disappearances.
Naseer, who suffers from polio, was taken from his family’s shop at Sheikhupura in Punjab, his brother Tahir said on Sunday.
Hours after Haider was due home on Friday evening, his wife received a text message from his phone, saying he was leaving his car on the Islamabad expressway, his brother Faizan said. The brother said his brother had not received any specific threats.
Ahmad Waqas Goraya was picked up on Jan 4 from Lahore, as was his cousin Aasim Saeed, said Shahzad Ahmed, head of cyber security NGO Bytes for All.
“None of these activists have been brought to any court of law or levelled with any charges. Their status disappearance is very worrying not only for the families, but also for netizens and larger social media users in the country ,” Mr Ahmed said.
Meanwhile, Pakistan Peoples Party chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari expressed concern over the disappearance of Mr Haider. In a statement in Islamabad, he called upon the law enforcement agencies and the government to ensure his safe and early recovery.
The coordination committee of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement in a statement urged Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan to spare no efforts for safe return home of Mr Haider.—AFP
Imran Gabol adds from Lahore: Waqas Goraya, an anthropologist, and cousin Aasim Saeed, owner of a Facebook page known for its liberal posts and critical of establishment and religious extremists, went missing in Wapada Town on Jan 4. A kidnap case was lodged with the Sattukatla Police Station, Dawn learnt on Sunday.
Goraya, a resident of Johar Town, was settled in the Netherlands while Saeed was living in Singapore. Both had gone to Wapada Town but did not return to their home.
Mr Goraya returned to Pakistan in November and he was looking to buy a house to settle in Wapda Town, his brother Ahmad Gul Liaquat told Dawn by phone from Denmark. He said his family members in Lahore searched for his brother and cousin in hospitals, police stations and other places but in vain.
A senior police official, on condition of anonymity, said that police had nothing to do with them while adding it’s not their subject.
Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Operation Dr Haider Ashraf said they had registered the kidnapping case with Sattukatla police station on Jan 5 and were investigating it.
He said they did not know yet where the both men were gone and would soon unearth the people involved in the kidnapping.
Published in Dawn, January 9th, 2017

Question: how many activists went missing in january 2017

Answer: four

how many activists went missing in january 2017

Question: when did 4 activists go missing

Answer: January 2017

Question: what type of activism were the four missing bloggers

Answer: anti-religious and pro-democracy

what type of activism were the four missing bloggers

Question: what were the reasons for the missing blogger

Answer: anti-religious and pro-democracy activism

what were the reasons for the missing blogger

Question: in what year did four internet activists go missing

Answer: 2017

in what year did four internet activists go missing

Question: what type of activism were the four missing blogger

Answer: pro-democracy

what type of activism were the four missing blogger

Question: what type of activism were the four missing bloggers known for

Answer: anti-religious

what type of activism were the four missing bloggers known for