On July 4th 2009, Emin Milli — blogger and one of the Alumni Network founders —spoke at “a Heinrich Böll Foundation roundtable dedicated to a democratization process in Azerbaijan, where he criticized the Azerbaijani government strongly.” Four days later, on July 8th 2009, he and Adnan Hajizada — blogger and co-founder of the OL! Azerbaijan Youth Movement — were attacked at a Baku Café by unknown ‘sportsmen.’ The bloggers were arrested and the following days they spent in detention — which turned into months — became a blow-to-free-speech headline in cyber history.
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Tag: press freedom
Chad Hurley, co-founder of the video-sharing website YouTube, has recently stepped down from his position as CEO. And the Turkish court has stepped down from the Web 2.0 video-sharing website — all together.
Happy National Cyber Security Awareness Month too all you tech-savvy, Internet loving folk out there!
Let’s Celebrate — by examining The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University’s October “2010 Circumvention Tool Usage Report” (CTU Report) — that examines the usage of web tools for circumventing Internet filtering.
In September 2010, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report titled “Looser Rein, Uncertain Gain,” A Human Rights Assessment of Five Years of King Abdullah’s Reforms in Saudi Arabia. In this report — in the “Greater Margin for Freedom of Expression” section — HRW discusses the paradox between King Abdullah creating a greater space for free expression, but still an ongoing repression of freedom to express critical opinions. HRW notes how the Saudi government censors free speech, with the help of legislation such as the 2007 Law to Combat Information Crimes, and how a new cyber law is brewing that would restrict expression via electronic media.