New York, February 9, 2012--The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns death threats and a publishing ban against columnist Hamza Kashgari for comments he posted on Twitter addressing the prophet Mohammed.
Committee to Protect Journalists
Saudi Arabia
Across Middle East, enormous challenges
CPJ documents more than 520 attacks on journalists covering political unrest across the Middle East. Thirteen journalists are killed in the region, while dozens are detained and assaulted. At right, Bahraini forces arrest Wall Street Journal reporter Alex Delmar-Morgan.
Coverage by country: Syria
• Bahrain • Yemen
• Iraq • Libya
• Saudi Arabia • Egypt • Tunisia
In Arabic: العربية
New York, May 4, 2011--The Committee to Protect Journalists called on Morocco today to release editor Rachid Nini and sought the release of journalist Dorothy Parvaz as well as other journalists in Syria. Press freedom violations continued throughout the region, with abuses in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Yemen.
New York, March 15, 2011--Armed assailants stormed the Manama printing facility of the Bahraini independent daily Al-Wasat early this morning, damaging the press and hindering production of today's edition. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the attack, which comes just as military contingents from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been enlisted to help contain political unrest in the kingdom.
Dear Minister al-Khuja: The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply concerned about new regulations for online media you issued on January 1. The rules contain several provisions that can be used to restrict coverage. The provisions are vaguely worded, contain numerous loopholes, and grant the Ministry of Culture and Information blanket powers without providing online media protection against abuse. Most alarmingly, the new regulations would also subject online media to the kingdom's already existing highly repressive press law.
New York, December 10, 2010--The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns harassment of the Lebanese news website Al-Akhbar after it published U.S. diplomatic cables that were first disclosed by WikiLeaks. The website was hacked this week by unknown attackers, while the Tunisian government blocked domestic access to the site. Saudi officials blocked access to the independent website Elaph, which also published some of the cables.
New York, December 8, 2010--The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Saudi authorities to immediately release Mohamed al-Abdulkarim, an Islamic law professor, human rights activist, and the editor-in-chief of an online magazine. He was arrested on Sunday, two weeks after an article he wrote was published online.
Reports
| Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Burma, Burundi, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Yemen
Relying heavily on vague antistate charges, authorities jail 145 journalists worldwide. Eritrea, Burma, and Uzbekistan are also among the worst jailers of the press. A CPJ special report
- Egyptian blogger Karim Amer is finally free after four years in prison.
- Iran launches yet another police force to deal with the Internet, headquartered with the Revolutionary Guard. Its commander says the state plans to quadruple its Internet control budget.
- Google lobbies U.S. policymakers to consider online censorship a free trade issue.
- Is breaking into Yahoo e-mail too easy? The Sarah Palin hack revealed flaws in the webmail system's security that can still be exploited.
- Yet more malicious attacks on computers connected to the Nobel Peace Prize. As with CPJ and other groups, the Nobel Institute's director, Geir Lundestad, received a personalized, but fake e-mail containing malware.
- Saudi Arabia blocks Facebook over "moral concerns"--then immediately unblocks it, claiming an "error."
The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab has announced a research project to analyze the global infrastructure of Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry. It's looking for BlackBerry users from any country to take part--especially those in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, India, Indonesia, Russia and China.
All of these countries have at some point demanded that RIM make their BlackBerry network more surveillance-friendly. Some have threatened to ban BlackBerry services outright if their demands are not met. Other reports suggest that RIM has made concessions to some of these countries' demands.
One possible concession RIM might make is to move its Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) servers to locations within those countries' jurisdictions. BIS servers are the bridges between the internal BlackBerry network and the wider Internet. A locally-hosted BIS server would make it easier for domestic security services to monitor BlackBerry users' general Web traffic.
RIM has kept quiet about what agreements, if any, it has made with any government. Nevertheless, it is theoretically possible to work out the location of these BIS servers externally. If you're a journalist who uses a BlackBerry, all you have to do to help with this project is to visit the RimCheck website using your BlackBerry device and fill out a short form. The site will record the IP address of the machine your request comes from, and will attempt to determine where in the world that server could be located.
The conclusions that the RIM Check project draws from this study will be published when the group has collected enough data. Concrete statistics like this will mean
we'll finally be able to see if BlackBerry's send their data
exclusively through Canadian servers
as some believe or whether RIM has distributed these servers
globally--potentially allowing users' unencrypted Net traffic to be as
monitorable as that sent through a local Internet service
provider.
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