After the questionable elections and subsequent protests in Iran a while back, it seemed clear tyranny was fighting a 
losing battle against the tide of free speech riding the Internet. It was inspiring to see protestors with cell phones high in the air snapping pictures the way another generation raised their fists in protest against their government in 1960s America and who could forget Neda and her horrible death in front of the new media that rivaled those horrible pictures from Kent State?
Sadly, the struggle continues for many people in other countries where freedom of expression is far from an unquestioned right.
Bahraini authorities have arrested blogger Ali Abdulemam again. The National Security Agency arrested the family man after he was called to their headquarters. He is a campaigner for peace and an activist for democratic speech in the Arabic and Muslim worlds. Tunisian blogger Sami Ben Gharbia described his colleague as someone who uses the Internet to work for peaceful reform.
Here’s another report that’s sad but not really a surprise and it comes from…..you guessed it, Cuba. Luis Felipe Rojas is a brave Cuban blogger who was arrested and detained by the authorities there. He’d done some human rights writing on his blog and was subsequently arrested and detained for the better part of a day recently.
“One day, I will not return home so quickly, I know it. Now, I write while I can,” he writes.
Oman is another country that makes this infamous list. They’ve taken steps there to ban virtual private networks that would allow people to use VOIP phone systems. In a related story, Egypt has just released a Christian blogger that spent two years in jail for posting a link that the authorities there didn’t like.
I’ve tried to save the best for last here and that means the worst offender when it comes to jack booting freedom of expression. It should be really no surprise that China tops the list for all of their apparent duplicity when it comes to encouraging Western economic growth on one hand and squashing freedom of speech on the other.
Here’s a few new smudged medals they can pin on their tunics:
- You can buy a mobile phone in China but you need to supply your personal ID. Sounds innocent enough you might say. One could argue that these rules that are in effect in many European, North American and Asian countries already, and they combat the use of unregistered cell phones in the commission of crimes, but most of those countries allow their citizens to read 1984. In China, the government uses the famous George Orwell book as a manual to watch and control people.
- Sites that offer micro blogging services in that same country will now need to hire censors. The Chinese are calling these people ‘self-disciplined commissioners’ in a the same strange way that people doing the same work in the old Soviet Union were called Comrades.
Let’s all hold out hope that all these places are just holding their fingers in the information dyke and that very soon now the wave of technology and human spirit will wash up and over the dams they’re trying to keep in place. I grew up in an era where we help up signs, grew our hair long and tried to change the world. Now it looks like the placards to really accomplish that goal are the computer screens we have in our homes.
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