Category Archives: Egypt

#IMWeekly: June 27, 2014

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Australia
A potentially invasive surveillance bill due to be introduced to Australia’s parliament in July is inspiring resistance within the country. The bill aims to target potential jihadists and other terrorists who may be spreading violent rhetoric in their online networks. Prime Minister Tony Abbott claimed that jihadists who have been radicalized by their experiences with al-Qaeda and its offshoots may threaten national security, spreading their hateful rhetoric online. As such, this bill would give the Australian government power to store public metadata.

Egypt
In a climate of political uncertainty, the Egyptian government has sought to extend its hold over its citizenry by creating a media monitoring software that will understand multiple forms of written Arabic. The system, built to read both colloquial and Romanized Arabic, would allow the government to access the digital footprints of various citizens who may be harboring oppositional thoughts online. Human Rights Watch’ Cynthia Wong warns that such a move would restrict Egyptian’s netizens from expressing themselves fully and totally online, noting that the Internet has played a significant role in empowering independent voices of reform in Egypt.

Iraq
As the reality of stifled internet connectivity intensifies in Iraq, netizens are finding cunning ways around these blockages. FireChat, a smartphone app that doesn’t require an internet connection, has seen an unprecedented surge in downloads and consumption since June 14. Iraq, Bloomberg reports, ranks just behind the United States in terms of daily smartphone usage, making FireChat a widely-used form of communication in the country.  A Citizen Lab report released earlier this month also concluded that ISIS filters placed upon websites in Iraq have been largely ineffective, while the use of Psiphon and Tor has increased significantly in the wake of the internet shutdown.

Russia
This week, Russia’s Interior Ministry drafted a ten-year strategy to fight extremism – a strategy that could lead to online surveillance of netizens. Extremism is broadly defined under Russian federal law, ranging from hate crimes to armed revolution. The strategy aims to counter politically radical movements from the bottom up, targeting information sources and netizens spreading extremist rhetoric online. News of this plan emerges during a week when Colin Cromwell, Twitter’s head of global public policy, visited Russia and agreed to block “extremist accounts” under the demands of Russia’s Alexander Zharov, the chief of Russian federal communications agency Roskomnadzor.

Thailand
Since last month’s coup, Thailand’s junta has increasingly clamped down on pro-democracy movements online. For weeks, the “liking” of Facebook pages dedicated to anti-coup groups has been outlawed, while numerous pro-democracy websites have been blocked. IFEX reported that the junta is now deceiving netizens into unveiling their personal details through a deceptive Facebook phishing app, through which users are encouraged to “log in” with their personal information that is stored in their Facebook profiles. This faulty, fake app is in violation of Facebook’s own policies, and it was suspended twice by Facebook as a result. Access also reports that the junta has recently set up five media monitoring panels that intend to surveil social media for any dissenting opinions.

#imweekly is a weekly round-up of news about Internet content controls and activity around the world. To subscribe via RSS, click here.

#IMWeekly: January 31, 2014

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China & Iran
Iran’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology announced this month that it is in talks with China’s Information Council about best practices for implementing a closed internal “National Information Network.”

Egypt
A new anti-terrorism law in Egypt, which will come into effect next month, enables the government to censor websites that “instigate terrorism.” Critics of the law worry that this framing could be applied to popular social media sites, including Facebook.

Netherlands
After The Hague ruled that blocking access to peer-to-peer file sharing websites such as The Pirate Bay had no measurable effect on piracy, the government of the Netherlands has decided to unblock these sites.

Russia
Mashable reports that the Russian government has ramped up surveillance in anticipation of the 2014 Winter Olympics, which begin in Sochi next Friday. The country’s System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM) allows the Federal Security Service to access servers directly, and according to independent reports from within Russia, the government recently has been experimenting with Deep Packet Inspection as well.

Is Facebook the third most popular news source in the Middle East? It depends on where you are.

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How do Internet users use Facebook to gather news and information? It varies widely depending on the country.

After Northwestern University published an eight-nation study surveying media use in the Middle East, publications grabbed hold of the headline that Facebook is the third most popular site for news in the Middle East. That’s not wrong, but the story is more nuanced than that. News gathering habits vary widely in different countries in the region and around the world.

For instance, although Facebook was mentioned as a top three media outlet by 52% of survey respondents in Tunisia, the social network didn’t see steady levels of popularity across the region. In many of the countries surveyed, Facebook didn’t rank in the top three outlets at all.

While Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya and Facebook were the most popular outlets on average in the region overall, below is a breakdown of what usage of each outlet looked like broken down by individual country.

Top news outlets by country

Top news outlets by country, according to Northwestern study. Image credit: Media Use in the Middle East

The situation is equally complex for how citizens in the surveyed region use media sources more generally. In each country, television remained the most dominant source for information on news and current events by far—an average of 83% of respondents across the region identified TV as a top news source. When respondents were asked if they used the Internet to gather this type of information, the answers were much more scattered, with a low of 22% of respondents using the Internet for news in Egypt versus a high of 85% in Bahrain. In a different survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in the United States, 78% of respondents said they use the Internet to get news.

Do news consumers seek out international coverage? That varies widely across different nations, too. Survey takers in Egypt were least likely to follow international news, with just 17% of respondents listing international news as a news topic they follow closely or very closely. However, nearby Saudi Arabia took the regional lead in terms of international news consumption, with 63% of respondents following international news closely or very closely.

Despite various communities lamenting the loss of international news media coverage in American news outlets, 56% of US-based news consumers surveyed by Pew still said they closely follow international news most of the time. In both the US and the Middle East, survey takers responded that they follow local and national news more frequently than international news.

#imweekly: July 8, 2013

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Egypt
As of July 3, President Mohamed Morsi is out of office, but much of the Western world is still not sure about what happened in Egypt and why. Was it a coup d’état or not? Wikipedia is calling it the “2013 Egyptian coup d’état,” but whether the term fits is being contested. Foreign Policy blogger Marya Hannun breaks down the Wikipedia edit war surrounding Morsi’s ousting. So-called wiki-wars over acceptable phraseology and editing have been waged before.  Relatedly: viewing events in Egypt from a social media perspective offers valuable insight into how social media and networking sites, namely YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, factor into current political discourse and social change. For example, the opposition group, Tamarod, enlisted a range of media platforms to shape its campaign and gather more than 20 million signatures leading up to demonstration calling for Morsi’s removal.

Saudi Arabia
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is being criticized for harsh sentences recently handed down for seven cyber activists arrested in 2011 for Facebook posts. The men were accused of joining and using Facebook with the intention of starting protests. Political gatherings and public protests are prohibited in Saudi Arabia. The men were charged with crimes including illegal information gathering and “breaking allegiance with the king.” Abd al-Hamid al-Amer received 10 years in jail, the longest sentence. Other defendants—Ali Ali al-Hadlaq, Hussein Mohammed al-Bathir, Mostafa Hussein al-Mujahad, Mohammed Abd a-Hadi al-Khalifa, Hussein Yasin al-Sulayman, and Saleh Ali al-Shaya—received lesser sentences. The men also lost the right to travel freely within and outside the kingdom (rights that men are usually given freely in Saudi Arabia), and restrictions were placed on their future freedom of expression, including bans on public speaking and writing.

China
On July 1, the Chinese government instituted an online petitioning system intended to update its centuries-old petitioning custom. The website is intended to enable citizens to post petitions and air grievances concerning issues such as forced evictions, pollution, or corruption. However, as soon as the site was launched, it crashed. The response was great enough—beyond government expectations and the website’s capacity—to result in a shutdown that sparked excited debate about the cause. Some Weibo users suggested the crash was an act of censorship. WeiboSuite, a platform created by students at Hong Kong University interested in Internet censorship, reports the government has been monitoring and removing citizens’ posts from the petition site. The official government response is that it underestimated response rates and the website was simply overwhelmed.

Pakistan
A Lahore High Court has rejected an interim order to restore YouTube services across the country. Bytes for All, an NGO dedicated to ICTs for development, democracy, and social justice, filed the petition several months ago. In September 2012, the Pakistan People’s Party government banned the video-sharing site in response to widespread public outrage about the dissemination of a film deemed blasphemous for taking offensive positions against the Prophet. YouTube was banned after its parent company, Google, denied official requests to take down the film. Pakistan’s religious communities and members of the information technology sector remain deep in debate as to how the county will regulate the Internet so as to uphold Islamic values as well as citizen’s rights. Saad Rassol, a lawyer from Lahore, explains in a post for Pakistan Today, “It is not simply a question of whether YouTube should be unblocked because it serves an academic or social purpose. It is a question of whether we preserve individual freedoms, and discourse, even at the cost of being offended by the words of the speaker, from time to time. Or will we descend into becoming a society where subjective morality and religious sensitivities become a sword to silence tongues and stamp out all debate.”

#IMweekly is a weekly round-up of news about Internet content controls and activity around the world. To subscribe via RSS, click here.